Ideas Have Consequences--When You Oppose Them

It's amazing to me, the "parade of horribles"--to quote the late John Mitchell--that's trotted out by war supporters, the few, the proud, when they consider the alternative to the surge, or at least their caricature of the alternative, an immediate pullout. What's remarkable is that war supporters, as a group, have basically owned the attitude of unshakable optimism for about the past four years, refusing, as Thomas Ricks documents in "Fiasco", ever to engage in worst-case scenario planning. Only when faced with even the ghost of an opposing plan do they start seeing a divided country, ethnic cleansing, neighbors being drawn into the conflict along sectarian fault lines. The irony, of course, is that these consequences which they see so clearly and describe so voluptuously are the very consequences clear-eyed observers in and out of government foresaw for the war policy itself all those years ago. Back then, to see this kind of outcome was defeatism if not siding with the "enemy", as if the forces unleashed by our bulling into the Iraqi china shop are as monolithic as we (erroneously) saw the Communists at the time of Vietnam. But now, these consequences are embraced for their political value, to blame those who don't buy into the surge for the results that were foreordained the day Saddam's statue fell.