Out of some desire to keep track of the wingnuts, I have an RSS subscription to Power Line*, which of course quoted approvingly John McCain's comment about the "definite date for surrender" act. I find this description problematic on many levels. For one thing, I have a sense that in order to surrender one must be surrendering something, allowing some tangible possession to be lost to the other party. So it seems to me that we could only be surrendering in Iraq if we are there as conquerors; if, as the Republicans usually insist, we're liberators, and are now only their to help out the friendly Iraqi government, then we're disloyal friends if we leave, but we're not surrendering anything.
But thinking about this reminded me of another place where the "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" rhetoric was historically very effective. Remarque's German soldiers, who plausibly represented actual German military attitudes at the time, considered the horrible war they were fighting a pointless waste, for which they directed not a little blame at their own leaders. But they were glad at least that all the devastation was happening in France, so that whatever they had to face, their families were all right back home. The Kaiser's government lasted exactly as long as they thought that; it collapsed the moment fighting threatened to enter Germany. Note that this suggests the cheese-eating surrender monkeys were more dedicated fighters than the Kaiser's Germans, since the French fought on despite the devastation it brought to their homeland. But giving up was surely the right thing for Germany to do (and for that matter, the world would have been a much happier place if the French had given in early on in WWI; the general effects of that war were to kill tens of millions of people without markedly improving stability, freedom, prosperity, or anything else worth having).
Of course, there is no danger of Iraq invading the U.S. (fortunately). So some other way of ending the current pointless war is needed. Here's hoping the good news out of Congress develops into some positive results eventually.
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