Iraq & The Eight-Foot Invisible Rabbit

Albert Camus wrote "The innocent is the person who explains nothing." This rather opaque observation describes the left’s increasing stridency when alluding to their guiltlessness in undermining the morale of the American people for carrying on the War in Iraq. In fact, liberals are employing a strategy that attempts to obscure their stated desire that the United States lose the war while at the same time, deflecting attention from a 4 year effort to convince the American people that trying to bring democracy to Iraq was a hopeless exercise in wishful thinking and that the war has been a lost cause from the start.

They deny it, of course. In fact, they get downright nasty if you even try and point it out. They will whine that their criticisms of the war effort have been misconstrued. They were simply trying to help win the war by pointing out the incompetence and wrongheadedness of the Bush Administration. They really had the US interests at heart all along.

Yes, I have an eight foot invisible rabbit as a friend too.

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Rick Moran penned those words the other day at Rightwing Nuthouse, his excellent but inaptly named blog. Inapt because Moran is one of the least crazy bloggers out there of any persuasion. Besides which, anyone who knows what the hell Camus is talking about impresses me. If I have a peeve, it is his penchant for label commingling – as in lefties and liberals and righties and conservatives.

That duly noted, Moran is on to something that lefterals and liberists won't acknowledge.

There is the pungently unmistakable (unmistakably pungent?) odor of schadenfreunde lurking beneath the surface as they declaim against the war.

Well, I don’t think there’s a damned thing to gloat about: The crossroads of the Middle East in ruins. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and millions of homeless refugees. Several thousand dead Americans, our nation’s world standing at low ebb. Just because this is the fault of George Bush and his neocon puppet masters doesn’t change a freaking thing.

Once we were in Iraq, we were in Iraq, okay? And while I was mightily pissed off about being lied to regarding the reasons for going to war and didn't and don't think it is winnable in the traditional (military) sense, I figured that since we were in the neighborhood, a little nation building wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

As it is, the Bush administration blew this, too, but to argue that it wasn't a worthy effort is pig ignorant. (Insert mention here of the Iraqis being their own worst enemy.)

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Moran devotes much of his commentary to the origins of the "stab in the back" defense in anticipating that antiwar folks will be accused by right wing folks of using it against them when the orgy of national wound licking commences.

Moran engages in the inevitable discussion of the Mother of All Back Stabs -- the Yalta Conference near the end of World War II -- and does some nattering about Nazis that weakens his overall argument. But then as a longtime editor I would have trimmed out about a third of his piece and told Rick to go have a cold one at the local tappy if he was going to pout.

Look, I’m one of those folks who is really against the war but really supports the troops, so Moran's larger point is sustainable: Those lefterals and liberalists have seldom offered coherent arguments for being against the war that have any resonance, let alone separate the boots in Iraq from the boobs in Washington when fulminating about the whole misguided adventure.

Moran concludes that:

The left has predictably played their role as destroyer of the people’s will while the Bush Administration has obliged them by committing one mistake after another in trying to defeat them. The combination has been unbeatable – for the enemy.

That is a little tougher than I would have put it because he gives this crowd too much credit. They should be hard on the bad guys in three-piece suits with the PowerPoint presentations, but that doesn’t mean that they should be soft on the bad guys in the white bathrobes with the Kalashnikovs, and they have been.

In the end, simply being against the war has been enough for them. That’s too lazy for me by half, and dishonors our brothers and sisters who died fighting in what through no fault of their own was an unjust war.