Surrender Date

DB went away for the weekend to meet the newest member of the family (she is adorable). On the way to the airport, the cab driver had NPR on the radio, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talking to Robert Siegel:

MCCONNELL: Well, obviously the veto is going to be sustained. And then, we'll have to get serious about providing funding for the troops. The surrender date needs to come out. The pork needs to come out and we need to send the president a bill he can sign. And I'm optimistic that that'll be done relatively soon. I've had good preliminary conversations with Sen. Reid about the next round and I'm hoping that we can reach an agreement that's satisfactory to all the parties.

[...]

I think there is a possibility for bipartisan agreement on some kind of benchmarks. What is unacceptable is any kind of surrender date. Any kind of date that indicates to the terrorists on the other side if you can just hang on until this particular date, you get to win

SIEGEL: "Surrender date" we should say is your characterization of the withdrawal...

MCCONNELL: Yeah, a withdrawal date is the same as surrender. I mean, it's saying if you can hang on until this particular day, that's when we're going to give up.

That's the term of the week, apparently... Surrender date. The White House responded quickly to the Senate and House votes on the Iraq emergency funding bill:

PERINO: Eighty days after President Bush submitted his troop funding bill, the Senate has now joined the House in passing defeatist legislation that insists on a date for surrender, micro-manages our commanders and generals in combat zones from 6,000 miles away, and adds billions of dollars in unrelated spending to the fighting on the ground.

[...]

PERINO: His principle is that he is not going to put our troops into the position of having a date -- a surrender date without providing the Iraqis the chance that they need in order to get the political reconciliation that they need.

The conservative parrots at the Washington Times penned an op-ed entitled Surrender Date and everybody's favorite former Democrat, Joe Lieberman, followed with his own op-ed in the NY Post, "IRAQ: NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER."

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said "the Democrats need to stop pleading for surrender."

Add to the Democrats-surrendering list House Minority Leader John Boehner, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), Sen. Jim Inhofe, (R-OK) and a number of conservative editorials. [Update: Add GOP No. 3 Rep. Adam Putnum (R-FL) to the mix.]

I began this post by mentioning that I went to the airport. As it happens, I took with me a copy of the May 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, which contains several outstanding articles, one of which is "The Kissinger Presidency" by historian Robert Dallek. I found this paragraph interesting:

Vietnam. Using language that has a painfully contemporary echo, Kissinger and Nixon very quickly came to private conclusions about Vietnam that they never revealed publicly and denied entertaining. "In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory," Nixon told Kissinger, according to the transcript of a 1969 phone conversation. "But you and I know it won't happen—it is impossible." Even so, according to Haldeman's unpublished diaries, Nixon later urged that Democratic critics making this same point should be labeled "the party of surrender." When someone told Kissinger that Nixon could not be re-elected, because of Vietnam, he disputed it and added, according to a memo of a conversation, that "anytime we want to get out of Vietnam we can," and that "we will get out of Vietnam before the [1972] election." Nixon wanted to plan the removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 1971, but Kissinger cautioned that, if North Vietnam then de-stabilized Saigon during the following year, events could have an adverse effect on the president's campaign. According to Haldeman's diaries, Kissinger advocated a pullout in the fall of 1972, "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election." He apparently had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost by deliberately prolonging the war. Just before a peace treaty was signed, Kissinger in a phone conversation advised Nixon against stating that this was a "lasting peace or guaranteed peace because this thing is almost certain to blow up sooner or later."

Dallek also reminds us:

Nixon is dead, but Henry Kissinger remains very much a man in public life. In recent years, President George W. Bush has consulted him for advice on the Iraq war, which Kissinger has supported. Since 2001, Kissinger has, according to Bob Woodward's State of Denial, met with the president every other month, and with Vice President Dick Cheney every month, and he has advised President Bush that "victory ... is the only meaningful exit strategy" for Iraq.

I've always believed the "history repeats itself" cliche was easily disproved, but if Kissinger is going to keep writing new chapters, we're going to be treated to the same tragedy over and over.

Bones

DB's first reaction to George W. Bush's comments in Vietnam last week was disbelief.

Standing in Hanoi, explaining that the lesson of the Vietnam war was not to quit... Really, could there be a dumber thing for a president to say while over there?

It appeared to this blogger in 1991 that the only lesson our country seemed to have learned from Vietnam was how to sell war to the public. Yellow ribbon bumper stickers, support our troops T-shirts, platitudes, Dulce et Decorum est...

They believe, Henry Kissinger believes, that the way you change the world is by keeping the American public clapping while you flex whatever muscles you have around the world and hope to get the job done before everybody at home figures out how horrible war really is.

This time around, it's been especially true. They've been saying it explicitly. Here's Dick Cheney on Ned Lamont's primary win:

The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.

And Ken "Cakewalk" Adelman in 2004:

"Iraqis can't defeat us. Only USA Today editorials and similar worrywarts can defeat us."

And now here's Bush picking the least opportune moment possible -- on a diplomatic mission to Hanoi -- to say the same thing. The lesson to learn from Vietnam is that we should've clapped louder and continued the killing.

As long as the American people are into it, there's no end to the possibilities! It doesn't matter how many lives are lost. It doesn't matter how much debt we rack up. It doesn't matter how many of our principles we abandon. It doesn't matter how much moral authority we piss away. All they care about is selling it long enough to get what they want.

Keith Olbermann effectively schooled Bush tonight in his special comment on Countdown. Olbermann went through a list of lessons Bush could have learned, any of which would have had the virtue of being an appropriate skull session.

Watch the whole thing because it is as excellent a special comment as Olbermann can deliver.

But there is one lesson to which Olbermann alluded, but didn't really deliver: The Domino Theory Is Bullshit

Atrios often asks why are we in Iraq. Of course, that's rhetorical. But the obvious answer is that a bunch of morons sat around in the 90's hatching schemes. And the biggest one they came up with was to set off a domino effect of democracy throughout the Middle East. They got the opportunity with 9/11 and they took it. But the domino effect didn't turn the world Red in the 70's and it isn't making the world safe for democracy today. It's a simplistic and bankrupt theory that should have been put to rest decades ago.

Maybe there's an even better reason to call dominoes "bones."

UPDATE: To be fairer to Olbermann, he said this:

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: don't pretend it's something it's not. For decades we were warned that if we didn't stop "communist aggression" in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this "Domino Theory."

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror."

So he did, in fact, call the Domino Theory a bunch of nonsense. He just did not point out that the Domino Theory is alive and well in the small neocon brain. It's just that Bush thought he could tip the first bone.

How do you say idiot in Vietnamese?

The President of the United States stood in front of a microphone IN HANOI ON A DIPLOMATIC MISSION and basically said that the lesson he learned from the Vietnam War was that we should have continued to bomb them.

Two more years of this? Unbelievable.