Aye, there’s the rub
Exactly my point:
If under those terms Don Rumsfeld or any other administration official ever came before the Senate and acknowledged a miscalculation of any sort in this large enterprise, would Mr. Biden or the others accept the admission in good faith and build from it, or would they flog it as an admission of failure and proof of a Vietnam-like credibility gap?
One more time: We are in Iraq, like it or not. Whether or not you think the war was justified is a non-issue now. Your personal feelings and beliefs about Bush and his radical right wing agenda, don't mean jack where Iraq is concerned.
We have only two choices now: finish the job properly and leave Iraq stable enough to govern itself, or do a half-assed job and then bail like we did in Vietnam. If we opt for the second choice, Iraq will almost certainly disintegrate into chaos, like Vietnam did—and we will spend the next 50 years wiping the egg off our face. Here's a clue for you: no one thinks of Vietnam as Johnson's war or his fiasco. No one thinks of it as Nixon's war. In fact, no one seems to remember or care that the violence began between the Vietnamese and the French, or that the first deaths of U.S. servicemen occurred way back in 1959, under Eisenhower, six years before U.S. troops officially arrived. The U.S. was there initially to support our ally who was defending its sovereignty over one of its colonies. The U.S. will be judged by the outcome in Iraq, just like the U.S. has been and continues to be judged by the outcome of Vietnam.
I think the Bush administration does need help in Iraq. But the notion at this point in time that Mr. Biden or the Senate Democrats wish to make a good-faith effort to provide it strains, in a word, credibility.
The job needs to be finished timely and properly. Name calling and finger pointing isn't going to achieve that. Set aside your (*)@#$*@ personal differences, act like grown ups for once and work together to get the job done and get us out.