Ross Douthat has a great post up at Andrew Sullivan’s place (The Daily Dish) about Harry Reid’s comment regarding Iraq and the reaction of quite some conservatives to it. Andrew writes:
Is there any imaginable point in any imaginable conflict where Mark Levin would admit that the United States had lost a war? I don’t mean to be flip, and I say this as someone who generally thinks that the U.S. hasn’t necessarily lost in Iraq; we probably have, but the outcome is still sufficiently in doubt and the stakes sufficiently high that I want to give the “surge,� however ineffectual it may prove (or may already be proving), at least a Tom Friedmanesque six months to work. But even allowing that Reid shouldn’t have said what he said, it’s still the case that the United States can lose wars, like any world power; that we may well lose this one (in some sense, at least); and that at some point, in this struggle or another, some American politician will say “we’ve lost the war� and be entirely correct. Given this reality, I wish Levin (and many of his fellow “till the last dog dies� Iraq War backers) would clarify whether there’s any situation in which they would greet a U.S. defeat abroad with any response save a rote invocation of the stab-in-the-back narrative.
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H/t to D.G. Hall for pointing out that Ross Douthat wrote the post, not Andrew Sullivan.
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