Tragedy of Iraq is a Conceptual Failure to Define Goals and Terms

Interesting how, when a world-class mistake occurs, the guilty parties run for the exits when it comes time to ascribe blame. 

Giant tragedies like the 1914 Great War assign guilt all around, because there was an historic clash of contrary forces that left no choice but destruction, and many hundreds of leaders, social and ethnic forces resoundingly get the blame - Russian, Serbian, Austrian, French, British and German, among others.

But the tragedies of Viet Nam and Iraq, a sort of "gratuitous massacre" of a small, prickly country, seem to have no beneficiary (except perhaps those who supply the arms, or the gods of Folly), no admitted cause or even planners, and no goal, no upside, no potential for "victory", or even any definition of what "victory" might be.

Surely, the nincompoops that Bush put into power - the aggressively incompetent and sputtering Rummy, the drunken Cheney, and dozens of others - continue in ignomy and failure. But beyond mere mistakes, something else is going on, an assault on the very concepts of logical thought themselves.

To understand the tragedy in Iraq, look to the analogies with Viet Nam. A hint is given by Perle, the neocon chief architect of the war, when he complains, in pissant fashion, that he and his fellow neocons were not able to direct the war after they started it.

In the time of Viet Nam, we had futile, funny conceptual "wars": "...on Drugs", "...on Poverty", and "...on Communism". The terrors of the "Domino Theory" were touted as well as the goal of making Viet Nam into a "democracy" and rescuing it from "Communism".   Many voices which never reached the toady mainstream press cautioned at the time that the Vietnamese were our greatest fans, and only wanted to do business with us.

Our politicians, misled by the language, clung to the false concepts of the "War on Communism" and the "Domino Theory."