Catastrophe Still Awaits
by Paul Craig Roberts
“The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
- John Maynard Keynes
A ray of realism appeared in the confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gates himself said that the U.S. was not winning in Iraq, a statement with which everyone agreed except the White House.
The U.S., however, is not out of the woods. The question remains: what will be the U.S. government’s response to the lost war and the terrible calamity that Bush has created in Iraq?
Many Americans are still fighting the Vietnam War. They see Iraq through the lens of the futile Vietnam misadventure and express their dismay that America will lose another war because “the Democrats will cut and run like they did in Vietnam.” These Americans have forgotten that it was a Republican administration that got the U.S. out of Vietnam and that it was the Democrats who committed the U.S. to that conflict. Moreover, Democrats are not showing a cut-and-run propensity. (more…)