Amusing little thread going on over here, in which our resident right-wingers are crowing that as casualties are down in Iraq, this is proof we’ve won.

Have we won the war in Iraq now? Is this the claim right-wingers now make? If so, let’s re-read a portion of Lt. Rice had to say:

Well, the economy is getting better, communities are coming together, and, all in all, I’d say we are finally on the right path. I’m very optimistic right now, but I must also caution you that there is a long way to go. We have only begun to turn the tide and, with progress being so new, it isn’t hard to imagine it could worsen again.

So: Things appear to be improving, but there’s no guarantee that this is going to stick.

Yet this validates all The Leader has done these past four years?

Let’s get even more specific. Here we are, more than 4 1/2 years after our invasion of Iraq. We’ve seen it said many times that this is a longer period of time than it took to win World War II. But each war is its own thing, this was never going to be a tidy little war, but in fact the right-wingers who insisted upon this war in the first place very much did seem to believe this. Indeed, get a load of this - “The final word is hooray!” - in which we have the likes of Bill O’Reilly, prior to the invasion, saying this:

“I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?”

And here’s Mort Kondracke on - you guessed it - Fox News in April 2003:

“Well, the hot story of the week is victory…. The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths…. There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far…. The final word on this is, hooray.”

So - more than four years later, who was it that was humiliated? Was it the “naysayers?”

Or was it the likes of O’Reilly and Kondracke? And those who crow, now, that a light glimpsed at the end of the tunnel nearly five years into this war validates everything they ever said?

Nearly five years on, was this war worth it?

Now, these same people beat the drum for war with Iran. We are being treated, again, to the assertion that there is no choice but to go to war with Iran; but what shall this war cost? Ah, but not to worry, it’ll be quick and easy - right? Just like Iraq. It has to be quick and easy if the right is going to sell it to the public:

The way that those that favor military confrontation with Iran attempt to reconcile the current predicament involving our armed forces with the increased strain that would result from the opening of a third front is to promise, again, a quick and easy war.  This time, the best case scenario is supposed to play out something like this:  We unleash a massive campaign of airstrikes against Iranian targets and Iran (despite its significant retaliatory capacity) does not respond in any way that would require an escalation and use of ground forces on our part. 

This wishful thinking is premised on the notion that Iran will either be so helplessly crippled by our display of air power or sufficiently chastened such that it will reluctantly go along with our carefully laid out, and delicate, plans.  This makes little sense though.  For one, recall how we dismantled Iraq’s military structures, and yet Iraqis have continued to find myriad ways to exact a toll on our forces. Iran, right next door and with numerous connections, resources, contacts and allies in neighboring Iraq, could easily participate in such a role.  Further, the same war proponents that assure us that Iran won’t respond are busy trying to convince us that Iran’s leadership is consumed by the single-minded purpose of interfering with, and frustrating, our designs in the region and beyond.  But if we attack them through targeted airstrikes alone, they will suddenly play nice?   

In recent years, Iraq war supporters have taken to lecturing those that have criticized the disconnect between rosy war plans and actual execution by frequently turning to the military truism that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.  Yet many of those same Iraq war defenders would have us plunge headlong into another potentially devastating conflict under the assumption that our war plan will survive in near pristine condition after the fighting starts - and throughout.

It will not. It, like Iraq, will devolve, will present us with so many “unforeseen circumstances” that in fact were foreseen, but ignored.

Let us all be thankful that the number of casualties in Iraq has gone down; let us pray that trend continues. Let us hope that this war may soon be over. But let us not see the notion that the winding down of this war, whenever it may come - now, a year from now, three years from now, 10 years from now - somehow validates those who insisted upon it. They would have it that those who wished to avoid the Iraq mess in the first place did so out of cowardice (pro-war types being Republican Manly Men), but in fact the case for avoiding war with Iraq was specifically based upon the assertion that it would be more difficult, more time-consuming, and far more costly than its advocates claimed. That it would not be worth the sacrifice that either the troops, nor the country as a whole, would be required to make.

That, again, is the case against war with Iran. But the Manly Men will have none of it, paricularly now that they have been “proven” right.

Finally.