Friday, January 12, 2007

No Do-Overs

Jonah Goldberg the other day wrote this about opposition to the surge. From the LA Times:

Here we have a president forthrightly trying to win a war, and the opposition — which not long ago was in favor of increasing troops, when Bush was against that — won't say what it wants. This is flatly immoral. If you believe the war can't be won and there's nothing to be gained by staying, then, to paraphrase Sen. John Kerry, you're asking more men to die for a mistake. You should demand withdrawal. But that might cost votes, so the Dems don't. And, of course, Kerry, Pelosi and other Democrats were in favor of more troops before they were against it.

Yes, its true that some Democrats were in favor of more troops...before the war. Not listening to them is one of the reasons we are currently mired in this fiasco. At this point, however, we are through the looking glass and they have rightly changed their position to being in favor of ending the war.

Let me see if I can simplify this for those like Goldberg that can't seem to grasp that concept.

Let's say you decide to jump off a cliff. You have a few tools to choose from to aid your decent, but you only get to pick one. They include a helmet and knee pads, a beanbag chair to break your fall, some makeshift wings made out of chicken feathers, a Hefty bag made into a parachute, and a hang glider. All of these will get you to the bottom, though with varying degrees of success.

The point is that after you jump, there are no do-overs. You've passed the point of no return. That's where we are in Iraq. We've jumped off the cliff, and we didn't pick the hang glider so no matter what we do the end result is going to be a rather messy splat. The only question now is how many people are we going to land upon killing them also.

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