The Huckabee/Paul Smackdown

[minionofmidas]

Of course, Huckabee got the "break and buy" thing from Colin Powell, who used it to try to explain to Bush why you should NOT go in.

Paul is of course wrong about this not being all Americans' responsibility (but then, he wants Republicans' votes. Couldn't tell the truth under these circumstances, couldn't possibly.) ... He's also wrong to continue the sentence after "we're losing" - that was all that was necessary there. The war was lost the second it was ordered, because its objectives were completely unachievable. He's completely right when he said that digging in and not facing up to the fact the war is lost is not helping America's "honour" at all, of course. Once the only reason you're doing something is to save face / to preserve America's honour (it is the same thing, just that the second version is weasel-worded) you've pretty much lost all over already. Doing something in order not to show weakness is perhaps the strongest way of showing weakness there is.

I have argued a wee bit like Huckabee for a while... ooh, around 2004/5... although not exactly quite the same way... but I've come around to seeing I was wrong.
Iraq can achieve peace, but only after the Americans are gone. It's a necessary condition for further progress. It's not in itself sufficient, of course, but it's necessary- That's a pretty bleak assessment, but it's the facts as I see them.

[minionofmidas]

The greatest flaw in the Huckabee line of think is that we are "fixing" it.

We are not "fixing" it - we certainly broke it, but now we are trying to create something new there.

We are not trying to provide a stable government in Iraq - we are trying to create a government there in our own image; in a place that has never had anything close to that.

The reality of what Huckabee means is "since we broke it we need to remake it in our image" - which is a fool's errand and one that the American people would never buy into if they understood what he (and Bush and most of the other Republicans standing on the stage with Huckabee) was actually saying - and they know that, so they run this line of crap about "fixing it" out there.

Very true as well.