‘Crow for Christmas’: Don Surber nails Kevin Drum on the Iraq war ‘surge’

Don Surber today digs up Kevin Drum’s prediction a year ago that the U.S. troop “surge” would fail, giving democracy a defeat in Iraq. Drum said the “surge” also would prove once and for all that there was no way to save South Vietnam from enslavement to Communism in 1975.

As Surber points out, Drum has been proven spectacularly wrong.

Drum was eager to see the fascists win. On Dec. 23, 2006, he declared the “surge” plan folly. He wrote:

Still, honesty compels me to say that I’m glad this is going to happen. I know this makes me a bad person with no concern for human life etc. etc. (feel free to expand on this sentiment in comments), but at some point we have to come to a conclusion on this stuff. Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we’d only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they’re going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don’t get to play the game their way, they’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.

Well, screw that. There’s nothing we can do to stop them anyway, so give ‘em the resources they want. Let ’em fight the war the way they want. If it works — and after all, stranger things have happened — then I’ll eat some crow. But if it doesn’t, there’s a chance that the country will actually learn something from this.

Learning something? Kevin Drum shows what’s wrong with the Democratic Party today. They are so eager for a Republican president to fail that they delude themselves into believing that their wishes are good, or at least inevitable. They are neither good nor inevitable.

There’s a chance that Drum “will actually learn something from this.” Maybe now he and all his pseudo-liberal, selfishly racist friends can apologize to the Vietnamese and Iraqis they were willing to abandon forever.

But let’s see him eat that crow first.

Frank Warner

Comments

[jj mollo]

So what is it that he believes the US will "learn" from this? That we are incapable of accomplishing anything? Maybe that's become more true than it used to be, but we have certainly been capable in the past. Maybe we're supposed to learn about the native dignity of proud peoples. So, that's saying that the proud and decent VC truly represented the people of South Vietnam and that the honorable North Vietnam Communists represented the true interests of the VC and transitively represented the South Vietnamese people. So the Boat People were just a smattering of malcontents and the re-education camps were about education. And our support for South Vietnam was always a cynical play for the oil hidden beneath the Mekong Delta.

By analogy, the people of Iraq are best represented by Baathists or Al Qaeda fundamentalists. Is that the lesson? Or maybe Americans are once again exploiting an admirable indigenous culture that was corrupted by exposure to the evil ideas of the Capitalist Warmongers of the West. No doubt if we were to leave, all the factions of Iraq would suddenly turn into the peaceable kingdom.

Maybe the lesson is that we are doomed anyway. All resistance is futile and counter-productive. We should just try to mollify those who hate us, for just cause, I might add. Maybe we're supposed to recognize our hubris and be shamed. We need to have faith in the righteousness of transnational peacekeeping. No progress is possible anywhere until we terminate our immoral support of Israel and restore to each Palestinean the original olive tree that was stolen by the brutal children of the non-Holocaust.

One of the best things about America is our capacity for self-criticism. The President is the only leader in the world who is humilitated with impunity and expected to smile while people castigate his morals and his motives. I think we can take this attitude a little too far though. When we see ourselves as the source and stain of all evil in the World, we are demonstrating nothing but the remarkable plasticity of an educated mind.

[Frank Warner]

Right. Real liberals face facts, defend the defenseless and free the oppressed. Pseudo-liberals live a close-eyed fantasy, in which delusions of self-solving problems ignore half a world tortured by tyranny.

[What?]

Thanks for this flashback. Drum's Comments section is worth the read too.

[Neo]

Now we know who lost Viet Nam

[Nicholas]

Neo: I think the answer is "The Cambodians".