Doomed to Repeat

Glenn Greenwald did some research and discovered Howard Dean pretty much got it right when he recently said

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Greenwald adds

Many of Bush's statements and those from our Generals and war pundits are not just similar but almost verbatim to what was said in Vietnam in order to convince the public to support ongoing war and to attack those who favored an end to the war. Because all of this occurred almost 40 years ago, memories have faded and many, many people did not live through it.

For that reason, it is incomparably valuable to go back and review what was being said at the time. If nothing else, it enables one to assess the Bush Administration's claims about Iraq with some historical perspective.

And I'll note that, regardless of the titled "plan" for victory (.pdf) now pretty much tossed aside as last week's news, neither the administration nor any of their apologists have articulated ANY genuine course of action--their "plan" consists of saying they've got a plan, followed by a promise that their "plan" will work by...working. In other words, victory by tautology.

Not that they will, but I'd love to see some reporter call them on this--the next time they or a fellow traveling clown puffs up, someone should say "calling for victory is NOT a plan. Now, tell us, what IS the plan?"

It's the logical follow up to the question of why we're in Iraq in the first place...oh, and on that note, here's a lovely piece from American Pravda that explains exactly why torture doesn't work: you see, torturees LIE (duh) to make it stop. In this case, the torturee--Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi--got them to stop by...claiming an Iraqi/Al Qaeda link. Which was, of course, bullshit, but bullshit the administration wanted to hear. Yep, I'll bet a LOT of bullshit was collected by this administration...so much that they're now eyeball deep in it.

And they wonder why they reek...