When a prof at the Naval War College says the war is lost, should we listen?

if a professor at the naval war college falls in the woods and there is nobody there to hear him, does he make a sound...?

Christopher J. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

[A]s any sports fan can tell you, the only thing that feels worse than a loss is an upset. An upset demands explanation and requires that responsible parties be punished.

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. It will be a wedge that politicians will exploit for their benefit. The Vietnam syndrome divided this country for decades; the Iraq syndrome will be no different.

[...]

Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recrimination that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neoconservatism's parting gift to America.

i stew daily over our continuing, essentially unaddressed, constitutional crisis, but it's impossible to ignore our other unfolding u.s. disaster - iraq... why, why, why, can't we just get the hell out...? oh, yes, i know, the intent has NEVER been to leave... we are there for the oil, for the power, for the permanent bases we are building there to assert our hegemony in the middle east... still in all, we need to get out... we need to stop sending people to be killed for nothing but the greed of the power and money-hungry elites... we urgently need to figure out how to put a stop to letting those people rule our lives...

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