"What is this 'Left' of which you speak?"
Yeah, I get that a lot.
I appreciate the detailed and thoughtful answer.
You can prove I'm deluded by locating one major news story that indicated that the writers really hoped we would win in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That they wanted the outcome to be a good one, not a failure.
In my more cynical moods, I would like to grab the editors of the New York Times and ask them exactly what they would have written differently over the past three years if al Qaeda and the insurgency had been paying them hard cash.
From James Lileks:
Look. I'm a big-tent kinda guy. I’m willing to embrace all sorts of folk whose agendas may differ from mine, as long as we share the realization that there are many many millions out there who want us stone-cold bleached-bones dead. It’s the Andre the Giant philosophy, expressed in "Princess Bride":
I hope we win.
That’s all. If you can agree with that without doing a Horshack twitch, intent on adding conditions - oh! oh! what about genetically modified soy? - then we understand each other. We know that we have many disagreements, but we agree: I hope we win. Oh, we can argue about every word in that four-syllable statement. But when it comes down to it all, we’re on the same page.
I hope we win.
Read the rest of it, too.
I've had this argument here quite a bit.
My metaphor is a football game. You don't have to watch the people in the stands very long to know which team they want to win, and which team they want to lose. Is the favored team ahead? Cheers and glee! Loud hooting at the opposition. Is the favorite team behind? Well, a good play or two and they might catch up. Has the favorite team screwed up badly? Well, you know, that quarterback has had his head up his ass for the first two quarters, but he made some damn good passes in the last game. It ain't over until the fat lady sings. Remember that intercepted pass return last month?
Then you see somebody wearing your team's shirt sitting there and declaring that there's no hope, that the team sucks, and has always sucked, that the other team is better, that we don't deserve to win, in fact, the very idea of football is a little...primitive...
Well, you get the idea.
Lynn Cheney and Duncan Hunter have pointedly asked CNN, which will not show DoD-produced footage, but will cheerfully show enemy-produced film of their snipers knocking off American soldiers, "Do you want us to win?"
Why of COURSE we do, is always the response, although they have never done anything to show it.
A victory in Iraq would be the worst thing that could happen for a LOT of people in the U.S. and elsewhere. It shows. They really aren't kidding anyone. Not sure why otherwise perceptive people don't see it.