Progressive World Review

        Like an unsinkable rubber duck, John McCain continues to insist that things are going just swell in Iraq, that real progress is being made and success is just around the corner.  Ignoring the recent “surge” in violence where a reported 900 plus Iraq civilians were killed, ignoring that the American death toll topped 4000 this week, McCain insists that the surge has brought Iraq “something approaching normal,” and “[w]e are no longer staring into the abyss of defeat, and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success.”

        After nearly eight years of listening to Bush ignore the evidence flying in his face that invading Iraq was a hideous mistake, can we afford four more years of denial and wishful thinking? 

        McCain, the “maverick”, as his supporters like to think of him, has been a tireless cheerleader of this war.  The only criticism he’s ever offered was on how this war has been conducted rather than that this war was started in the first place.  Next, he insists that the surge is working and that victory is in our grasp in spite of the evidence that the surge had little or nothing to with the changing dynamic in Iraq and that despite the lower levels of violence, the underlying problems plaguing Iraq were as bad as ever.

        And now, after a week of intense fighting in Basra and other areas of Iraq, McCain continues to insist that we’re heading in the right direction, that success can be ours, proving yet again that McCain is just Bush reincarnated–remember “stay the course.”  This really should come as no surprise; this is just one more example of the classic authoritarianism inherent to conservatives in general and to neocons in particular.  One of the characteristics of an authoritarian is insisting on pursuing a course of action regardless of evidence suggesting otherwise.  Similar to the War on Drugs, where not only can we see it’s not working, but that Prohibition showed us it never had a chance of working, but we plowed on ahead anyway.  Similar to the war in Viet Nam where we should have learned that you can’t just bend people to your will simply because you desire it, that people have a way of deciding for themselves what they want for themselves.

        The recent violence in Basra was our Tet Offensive albeit on a smaller scale.  While Tet was a strategic failure for the Viet Cong, it demonstrated that after all of the happy talk of winning in Viet Nam that was being peddled back home, we were nowhere near defeating the North Vietnamese.  Just as now, with all of the happy talk of winning in Iraq, peddled by McCain and others, violence can erupt at the drop of a hat and neither the Iraq government nor the U.S. has the power to stop it.  The time has come to start basing our decisions on reality rather than wishful thinking.  The time has come to rid ourselves of the Bushes and the McCain’s.

–Paul Wilden

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