Joshua Holland on Alternet [portion below]; whole thing here:
http://www.alternet.org/story/61506/
"CBS Evening News' anchor Katie Couric said this week of Iraq: "We hear so much about things going bad, but real progress has been made there in terms of security and stability." The contrast between Couric's bubbly credulity and Walter Cronkite's famous 1968 broadcast in which he concluded of the Vietnam war that the US was "mired in stalemate" couldn't be more pronounced.
"At the end of the day, Washington's strategic class is frozen, unable to concede defeat because to admit that the U.S. project in Iraq has failed is to admit that in the 21st century, the most powerful country in the history of humanity can be humbled by a small dysfunctional state whose armed forces it destroyed more than a decade earlier, a country that it spent 12 years slowly and leisurely strangling under some of the harshest sanctions in history before shocking and awing it a second time, dismantling its government and hanging its erstwhile dictator in the process.
"To admit that is to beg the question of whether maintaining all that costly hard power is really worth it in the first place. Leaving Iraq means begging the question of whether America is comfortable with its neocolonial policies, and that's a debate that Bush -- like every imperial-minded U.S. president since Thomas Jefferson -- wants desperately to avoid.
"Ultimately, while Congress is sidelining itself on the most important issue of our time, it will be the Iraqis -- Iraqis from across the country's political spectrum -- who will eventually force a U.S. withdrawal, either by negotiation or by violence, just as they kicked out the Brits before us and the Turkmen, Ottomans and Safavids before them. The tragedy is that a little bit of courage on the part of our own law-makers could go a long way towards making that inevitable withdrawal a lot less painful than it is likely to be.
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