In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the king and queen believe that bulldozing forward with their conniving actions will somehow free them of festering demons, but the play reveals the foolishness of such thinking. In truth, memories can make a monster free.
The whole thing is about ambition and hallucination.
So let's cut past the ideology and untruthfulness surrounding the Iraq War: What do we do about it now?
President Bush and the so-called "neo-cons" were way off, that's a given. Saddam was contained by no-fly zones throughout the 1990's (Bush One and Clinton) and thus became a paper tiger who had zilch to do with 9/11. International inspectors were rightly saying there were no WMD, the Bush team spun a false tale of Saddam's mushroom clouds while the free press accommodated, and bin Laden was in Tora Bora but we had too few troops looking for him because Afghanistan was just a training session for the real goal of Iraq.
The vast majority of Americans and the world know all of this today.
And we don't even need to mention being greeted by chocolates and flowers, or that Iraqi oil would pay the freight of our effort.
We're now there in the fifth year, longer than either World War, and it's mucked up, big time.
Should I stay or should I go.....or do a hybrid and keep some loiterers?
Saying we should go, that Americans have clearly spoken in the polls, is easy. But Americans say lots of things in polls. According to USA Today, 60 percent of Americans can't name five of the 10 Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married. A majority can't name the century in which our own Civil War happened, and it was only 150 years ago. And America won that war, preserving the Union, while the side that lost still carries a torch today for its Confederate symbol.
Are we to assume our fellow citizens understand geopolitical realities on the other side of the world, or that they have some sense of the "Sunni Triangle?" Do we act on the advice of such intellectual giants as reflected in polls? Ever talk to the person sitting next to you at a bar about such matters?
Perhaps not, but we must listen to what the people say collectively in this matter of war and peace. Bush, Cheney, et al have been wrong on all of it from the get-go, so they have no clout to say their newest plan is a winner. They just want to kick the ball down the field and hand it off to the next president and say that at least it wasn't lost on their watch.
The people must now drive the actions of our democracy.
The fact is that Iraq isn't and never was ours to win, it's theirs. Our men and women in the military have performed admirably, but Bush should never have led them and us into such an untenable situation. No president should. Fighting the tactic of terror is too serious a business, too important for all nations, to have been both consumed and subsumed -- which it has been -- by an attempted military occupation of Iraq. Such foolishness.
As conservative commentator George Will -- yes, he was slow to come around -- pointed out in The Washington Post almost a year ago, "F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center)."
Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, anyone with half a brain knows the score by now.
There's that scene in Monty Python's movie Holy Grail, where the guy gets his arms and legs chopped off. He's lost to his rival, he's bleeding everywhere, yet he foolishly says "Come back and fight like a man, it's only a flesh wound."
It's like that. The damage is done, and it's beyond winning or losing at this point. It's about extricating ourselves from a flawed and failed strategy.
Going in was a mistake; getting out of this damn'd spot is overdue.