On On Confusing the Result and the Motivation

Quoting Don Imus?... Really?...

Anyway... David had a number of things to say in a recent post:

Have congressional Democrats proposed a credible argument for how our defeat in Iraq will earn us standing or respect?

I'm not exactly sure how bringing the troops home is defeat. We went there to defeat Saddam. Mission Accomplished. (No, really this time.) I was all for staying long enough to build a democracy there. Oh, what do you know! Mission Accomplished. I think the idea is that we've stirred the pot long enough. The world isn't going to love us again if we leave Iraq. But they'll dang sure not love us again if we don't.

Senator Reid knows as well as I do that war is a psychological conflict as well as a physical one, and that talking down our chances of success weakens us.

What is success? What is the requirement for a pull out that, in the minds of David and those like him, isn't failure? If he's looking for a nation where people don't get shot all the time, I guess somebody needs to invade Detroit.

Connecting the dots? ...if the war turns around now, 18 months before the election, it would weaken the key issue they believe helped them to win in 2006.

So, David is saying that those calling for a pull out of our troops from Iraq literally (not figuratively, but literally) want the terrorists to win. They are actually hoping that our troops will continue to die. That's just a sadly cynical viewpoint.

Also, they don't simply "believe" it helped them to win. It helped them to win. And, what with this being a freakin' democracy and all, it's remarkable how little the Bush Administration seems to care about public opinion.

Sure, our defeat and withdrawal from Iraq would likely make the current violence look like a day in the park, and leave few people alive for Senator Reid to engage with diplomatically or politically.

Okay, this takes the cake. Pulling our troops out of Iraq would cause an escalation of violence so great that the entire nation of Iraq would be destroyed. That's twenty-seven million people dead. Wow. Just... wow.