No one to lose to

For some time, I've been thinking that the end game in the Iraq war is substantially more difficult than it was in the Vietnam war. After all, in Vietnam we had someone to lose to. In Iraq we don't. My thinking hadn't fully crystalized (or coagulated) until I saw the title to Maureen Dowd's column in the NY Times [behind subscription wall] today -- "No one to lose to." She concludes:

As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bright Shining Lie,” told me: “In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with.”

The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?

At the moment, that would be no one.

Despite her snark, MoDo sometimes has something worth saying, and I think this is a really important point -- even if the original idea is really Neil Sheehan's. We were able to leave a functioning government in Vietnam -- it just was the enemy's functioning government. In Iraq, there is no one. The place is simply going to descent into hell fire.

Of course, the real point is that it's already in hell fire, so the best thing we can do is get the hell out of there. The fact that we caused this atrocity is unfortunate, but now that we've opened Pandora's box, there's nothing we can do but try to run from the furies we've loosed. There's simply nothing we can do that will make things any better.

It's probably even too late to release Saddam and put him back in charge, but if we could, we probably should. Doesn't that tell you something?

And, yet the neo-cons seem to want to try the same thing in Iran. When will they ever learn?