Months ago, your humble Smallholder became despondent. I was beginning to sniff a change in the wind. Conservatives - politicians, talking heads, and bloggers - were tacitly beginning to give up on the war. Not that they would admit it. But you began seeing an attempt to shift the blame for a failure onto the MSM, liberals, and a lilly-livered American public. They blame-shifters are now in full throttle and I am coming across the image below captioned with: “The only thing that will make Democrats happy.”

http://www.nevada.edu/~manis/blog/saigon.jpg

The Maximum Leader and the Foreign Minister will back up my claim that I saw this coming some time ago.

I call bullshit.

It may be psychologically pleasurable to denounce the folks on the other side of the aisle, but it is intellectually dishonest.

Lest you think that “look at all sides of an issue” Smallholder has lost his squishiness, I call bullshit on the Democrats too.

If they truly believe the war is lost, they ought to use the power of the purse to bring people home now. Congressional Democrats want to extricate America while avoiding the blame that Republicans are so desperately trying to toss their way. If the war is lost, it is immoral to ask boys to sacrifice their lives to preserve the viability of the 2008 Democratic nominee.

An intellectually honest debate wouldn’t play the blame game.

Question 1: Is the war winnable?

When we are discussing that question, we need to define what “winning” means. The stated goal of the administration has shifted many times. Creating a democratic government to infect the rest of the Middle East with the bacillus of democracy is no longer possible - the adminitration has abandoned that definition of victory and is now advocating leaving a stable government - we’ll stand down as they stand up (where have I heard that before?).

So the question we need to ask is: Is it possible to create a stable, self-sufficient government in Iraq?

At this stage, arguing about the consequences of failure is meaningless. We all know failure is bad. But arguing that we can win because losing is bad isn’t helpful and just distracts from the real issue. In April 1945, the Japanese high command unanimously thought that losing was very, very, very bad and came to the conclusion that national suicide was the best course of action. The bad consequences of losing didn’t change the fact that they were no longer capable of defeating the United States (as if they had ever been capable of toppling an awakened giant).

I have heard way to many people make this argument. Smart people ought to know better. Arguing that cancer is bad doesn’t mean you don’t have it. If you have cancer, the next question is how you deal with it.

We now reach a fork in the conversation we ought to be having.

If the war is winnable, we need to outline the strategy designed to achieve the goal of a stable government. When we are discussing this, we ought not to retreat into fantasy. Fantasizing about killing all the Iraqis and letting God sort them out is stupid. The American public won’t tolerate genocide. Our troops would refuse to do it. And hell, it wouldn’t even achieve our goal of a stable government.

We ought to set aside “if only we could fight to win…” Explain what you mean. What are we not doing that we ought to be doing? And remember that last paragraph. Machinegunning every male between the ages of 15 and 50 just isn’t possible. We should also be realistic. Complaining that the MSM isn’t relentlessly optimistic has nothing to do with stopping the actual suicide bombers. Issuing happy press releases about a new clinic for poor Iraqi children and supressing stories about the carnage doesn’t change the course of the war. If our strategy was working, there wouldn’t be any bad news for the MSM to report. Enough with the “it’s the MSM’s fault meme.” Wars are won on the ground, not in newsrooms.

If you have concluded that the war is not winnable, then the real question to discuss is how to minimize/contain the damage of the loss. If we have cancer, is the best treatment a lumpectomy or chemotherapy. Both suck. Which will suck less?

Glance up at the picture of the Saigon embassy airlift. If we have to get out, how do we minimize the damage?

When discussing how to get out the first thing to consider is the impact on our global strategy. We ought to also consider the lives of the troops. This is a hard call. It might be morally correct to sacrifice some kids in a rearguard action in order to get a few licks in on terrorists who want to follow us home, but I certainly don’t want to write a letter home saying “Dear Mrs. Snuffy, your boy died for his country and helped to minimize the damged caused by out last war.”

Thirdly, whether we win or lose, we need to discuss how to avoid this situation in the future. We can’ stick our heads in the sands and be isolationist. We also can’t keep turning “six week” conflicts into half-decade insurgencies.

Those are the important questions. Assessing blame in order to score political points shouldn’t be a priority. If the current administration was running for re-election, a discussion of past blunders would be appropriate so that the public could make an informed choice about whether to change horses in midstream. But since no one in this administration is likely to be around after January 2009, it just doesn’t matter. For now, the only way the current administration’s past handling of the war affects us is by giving us insight into how to sell a new strategy to the decider. ‘Cause we can all agree the current strategy ain’t workin’.