(Ted Rall is the author of “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next foreign policy challenge.)
Read more from Ted Rall HERE

THE CASE FOR DEFEATISM
Why Harry Reid Was Right

NEW YORK–”I believe…that this war is lost,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Obviously he’s right (and overdue). Amend that: he was right. Within 24 hours Democrats were backpedaling, stampeded by the usual onslaught of scorn and pseudo-patriotic outrage from Fox-fed GOP dead-enders.

“What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost…The war is not lost,” Democratic Senator Charles Schumer clarified, less than brilliantly.

A letter to the editor of a small paper in Maryland encapsulated the hawks’ strident anti-defeatism. “Reid should be asked to resign his position as majority leader and also as senator,” wrote one Al Eisner. “Such disgraceful and defeatist comments represent a total abandonment of our brave troops fighting the war against terror and will only embolden the enemy.” Don’t speak of ill of the dead, or of their doomed cause! The enemy, meanwhile, has already booked the banquet hall for next year’s victory celebration.

We haven’t just lost in Iraq. For a lot of the same reasons, the U.S. war against Afghanistan was doomed before it began.

“No one in the Administration has ever said what victory would actually look like [in Iraq],” neoconservative pundit Shelby Steele claimed on The Wall Street Journal’s hawkish editorial page. “Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.” On the other hand, a war without a purpose can’t be lost.

The trouble is, Bush did define what victory in Iraq would look like. By Bush’s standards, we lost.

“[Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons,” he told a crowd in Cincinnati four months before the war. “It is seeking nuclear weapons…If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today–and we do [sic]–does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?”

If the U.S. invasion force had found stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in Iraq, we could have claimed victory. Although critics would have remained disgusted with the sleazy origins of this roll-the-dice war, we would have been forced to concede that Bush had validated his policy of preemption.

If throngs of grateful Iraqis had greeted our troops as liberators (the staged psy-ops downing of the Saddam statue by U.S. marines and 150 of Ahmed Chalabi’s goons doesn’t count), the war would have ended in a victory, albeit not the one we were promised.

By late 2003 it had become clear that neither of Bush’s war aims would be achieved. Iraq was, by definition, lost. Only one option remained to slap a good face on a debacle that had already killed several hundred thousand Iraqis: take credit for getting rid of Saddam and get out.

“The United States has removed a tyrant it helped to install and maintained in power for decades,” Bush would have said, had I written his “Mission Accomplished” speech. “Now we will withdraw our forces and allow the sovereign and free people of Iraq to build their future without foreign interference. We ask nothing for ourselves, but we stand ready to help them–no matter what form of government they ultimately choose–if they ask. We offer our deepest apologies and our best wishes.”

The U.S.-run show trial of Saddam, his despicable tribal-led lynching, and Halliburton-led war profiteering destroyed our chances for even this consolation-prize finale.

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