The Whatchamacallit War in Iraq

From the Brave New World Dictionary:

civil war: n. whatever the Bush administration says a civil war is. Or isn't.

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When is a bribe not a bribe?

When you call it something else.

On Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition Sunday morning, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, discussed the proposed of "paying" cooperative Iraqi politicians. But we're not talking about offering "bribes" Khalilzad says. We're offering to, uh, you know, "level the playing field."

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When is a lie not a lie?

When you call it something else.

We now know that young Bush was preparing to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense even as he told America and the rest of the world that Rummy would be around for the rest of the administration's term.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, making the Sunday political gab show rounds, stuck to the company line that Bush wasn't lying; he just didn't want considerations over the war to affect the elections.

So what was all of Bush's campaign trail "Defeat-ocrats" talk about?

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When is a civil war not a civil war?

When you call it something else.

Within hours of NBC's announcement that the network now considers the situation in Iraq to be a civil war, Bush and his echo chamberlains hit the airways to blame all the violence in that country on al-Qaeda. Even though our own military admits that al-Qaeda in Iraq is responsible for only a small fraction of the attacks. Even though the Pentagon has all but abandoned efforts to retake the province of al-Anbar, al-Qaeda's only strong hold. Even though Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace wants to take U.S. troops out of al-Anbar where they're actually fighting terrorists and put them in Baghdad, where they'll be smack dab in the middle of the whatchamacallit.

The Whatchamacallit War

"All battles are won or lost before they are fought."

-- Sun Tzu

Mission accomplished. Dead enders. Henny Penny. Turning corners. Last throes. Purple fingers. Cut and run. We'll win unless we quit…

If you could win wars by spinning them, we would have won the war in Iraq before we even started it. Lamentably, the pre-war spin all but guaranteed defeat. The Iraq invasion was sold to the American public on fuzzy pretexts, designed on flawed assumptions about the post-combat political environment, and sustained on glittering Rovewellian generalities.

More than ever, the administration's eleventh hour war talk is sounding like after-midnight bar talk. Senator Jon Kyle (R-Arizona) told Blitzer on Sunday that we have to come up with a way to "win" in Iraq. There is no way to win in Iraq. There may be a way to make the best of a bad situation, but we won't find a way to do that as long as likes of Kyle keep pushing bunker mentality bunk-ola on the American public.

According to Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud of the Washington Post, Donald Rumsfeld submitted a memo to Bush two days before he resigned that said "In my view it is time for a major adjustment” and that “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Well no kidding. It sure was nice of Rummy to make a deathbed confession. He must be starting to sweat about what's waiting for him in the next life.

But to his credit, Rumsfeld's memo contained a number of pragmatic options, the best of which is to redeploy U.S. forces from "vulnerable positions" in Baghdad and elsewhere to Kuwait and safer areas of Iraq. Which is what Congressman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) called for more than a year ago.

What both Rumsfeld and Murtha have proposed is what we will inevitably do. How much more time will pass before whatchamacallhim decides to do it?

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.