Surrender Monkeys

In my spare time I've been reading Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. A few days ago I came across this passage:

In October [2002], the Atlantic Monthly, which would do an exemplary job in posing the right questions about Iraq both before and after the invasion, carried a clarion call by James Fallows titled "The Fifty-first State?" Fallows began by explicitly rejecting the analogy to the 1930s on which Wolfowitz so relied. "Nazi and Holocaust analogies have a trumping power in many arguments, and their effect in Washington was to make doubters seem weak – Neville Chamberlains, versus the Winston Churchills who were ready to face the truth," he wrote. But "I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it." Yes, Saddam was brutal. But Iraq was hardly a great power. It had few allies, no industrial base, and was split internally by religious and ethnic differences. Also, the U.S. military had been confronting it and containing it successfully for over a decade. So, Fallows said, a more apt parallel was an earlier war. "If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I." This wasn't just because Iraq was created by that conflict, but also because that war was "relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination," especially about the long-term consequences of an action. He then proceeded to analyze the likely problems a U.S. occupation would encounter, from manning an occupation force to standing up an Iraqi government to keeping Iraq in one piece. It was a powerful call to debate, a reminder of the urgent necessity of parsing the issues. What exactly was the job the United States was taking on? How long would it last? What were the chances of success? And what were the likely costs?

Today, while trolling through the flood of shit and filth that is online Conservatism, I came across this goddamn thing. It's the Neville Chamberlain crap all over again.

I can't even comment on this. It's too depressing.