I think some of us are getting too caught up in watching how the sausage gets made. We can't let ourselves get paralyzed at how icky it is. If sausage doesn't get made, we don't eat. So how hungry do we let ourselves get before we realize what we're doing to ourselves and our own efforts?
No single reason that we went into Iraq, on its own, was powerful enough or compelling enough to make the case alone for doing so. It was the overwhelming synergistic weight of all the reasons together, the overarching strategic purpose, that determined that we should. Likewise, all of the individual reasons may well be proven, in retrospect, in detail, to come up short or be left wanting. But that doesn't matter. The combined synergistic weight still remains. The strategic purpose still remains.
So we need to stop flaying ourselves over the details. We need to simply address them and move on. We have not truly failed until we've convinced ourselves we've failed, or let ourselves be convinced. We're over a year into this, and even now we have not seen the real military setbacks and level of causalties I was prepared to see in the first two weeks of the war. I really despair of this nation if we have no longer have any more fortitude than this in pursuing a long-term strategic goal.
We are resourceful, we are creative, we can adapt. We need to stop defeating ourselves just because we inevitably come up short, something less than perfect, as we work our way forward.
Because we have to continue. |
