Let Me Count The Ways

Good to see the New York Times calling for an end to the silliness of blaming Nouri al-Maliki for not being able to personally end the strife and struggle in Iraq.

Maybe it's just because it's Cynical Friday (it's true-check your calendars!) but I feel like we've been around this merry-go-round one or five times before. I don't really see how getting stuck in an argument about whether or not this specific person is the right one for the job of leading Iraq is really going to get us anywhere. I guess the point is that, since the war supporters are going to keep coming up with ridiculous things to say (Let the surge finish! See, less killings in Anbar! It's Sadr's fault! It's al Qaeda! Wait until September! It's al-Maliki!), you have no choice but to keep refuting them one-by-one.

But maybe that's not true. I lived through, but certainly don't remember, the TV debates between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. But my understanding is that one of Reagan's amazing strengths was, by look or word, making it sound like Carter was just spouting complete nonsense (specifically, the 'there you go again' tact.) There was an article in Time recently talking about the way that brand recognition, which is implemented via repetition, is more important than substance when people are deciding what they like. In this case, kids preferred chicken nuggets from a McDonalds bag to the identical chicken nuggets from a generic package.

Surely, there is something that the anti-war forces could come up with to say which was generic, applied to every bullshit formulation they came up with, and happened to have the advantage of being true. Then, every time you're confronted with one of these ridiculous tropes, you could just spout off the generic response. Soon enough it becomes part of the national lexicon and the rather absurd nature of all the pro-war rationales would become apparent.

I'm not a wordsmith, so I don't claim to have any idea of how to come up with such a phrase. But surely if, several times a day, some Dem or anti-war said something like "This is just another excuse to distract you from the fact that no political progress has been or will be made in Iraq. The US military, while extremely competent, cannot stop 700 years of burning hatred. Our presence in Iraq is, at best, postponing a catastrophe that will happen whenever we leave, whether it be tomorrow, next year, or next decade. Meanwhile we are expending our most precious resources, the blood of our finest, in pursuit of a goal which has been 'just 6 months away' for 5 years now. When is enough enough?"