Earlier this week, after the president vetoed Congress’ war-funding bill, Democratic leaders posed a challenge to the president and other war supporters: come up with a policy.
“If the president thinks by vetoing this bill he will stop us from working to change the direction of the war in Iraq, he is mistaken,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. He added, “Now he has an obligation to explain his plan to responsibly end this war.”
As it happens, war supporters do have a plan to end the war. As Glenn Greenwald noted, a group of Bush backers have even formed a new organization with former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to promote their policy. It’s called “We Win. They Lose.” In this case, that’s the group and the policy.
Here is the group’s founding declaration, as articulated in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Congress has passed and President Bush has vetoed H.R. 1591, the Iraq Surrender Act of 2007.
This legislation, which you worked to pass, sets a timetable for surrender. It pulls the rug out from under our troops. That is shameful and wrong.
Your actions have already emboldened the enemy. Violent jihadists now know that the elected leadership of Congress would undermine the troops by holding their funding hostage to demands for surrender.
This Congress would bring us back to the dark days of the 1970s, when the world doubted our staying power. Except only much worse. Withdraw in April 2008, and on May 1, Iraq becomes an unchecked den of terrorism at the heart of the Middle East — a new base for the same people that struck our homeland on September 11th.
I stand with our troops. I stand for victory. I support the President’s veto and will urge my representatives to vote to sustain it.
There can be one and only one outcome in Iraq: We win, they lose.
I regret to report that this isn’t a joke.
I visited the group’s website to take a closer look at exactly what the organization’s war policy includes. I quickly realized this is a waste of time — there is no policy. There are no details. Nothing is fleshed out. The policy is “we win; they lose.” Their letter to Pelosi is the entirety of their message.
In other words, while policy makers in Washington work on formulating some kind of effective strategy for the future, these guys — including several leading conservative bloggers and the former Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate — have come up with a bumper-sticker slogan, which they believe is all anyone needs to know.
Glenn had some of the same questions I did.
One might point out that Iraq is a somewhat complex country, with seemingly endless inter-sectarian and intra-sectarian tensions and centuries of conflicts, shifting allegiances and competing agendas. But all you need to know is “We Win. They Lose.” Among the incessantly unclear matters in that Brave Doctrine are (a) what “win” means, (b) who the “they” are, and (c) what it means when “they lose,” but let’s not have such petulant and defeatist nuances detain us.
I’d love to get a sense of the right’s reaction to these questions, but I’m afraid they’ve been reduced to soundbite-only discourse. Their preferred phrases — cut and run, defeatist, surrender, we win, they lose — are no longer than three syllables, but they have nothing to add to the discussion. Apparently, if it’s not a shallow platitude, it’s not worth saying.
It brings us back to where we were earlier this week with Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) comparing the crisis in Iraq to a Cubs/Cardinals baseball game, and his analysis that the only way to “win” is to stay on the field.
All of these people are hopelessly confused. The fact that they’ve come to dominate the Republican imagination is truly frightening.