WTF?

NPR
The 222 to 203 House vote was 62 shy of the required two-thirds majority needed to override the president's veto. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said that was a good thing. The bill sent to the president, he claimed, almost mandated failure in Iraq.

"I think it's time for us to work across the aisle to produce a clean bill that the president can sign into law to sustain our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, to make sure that, at the end of the day, we have victory," Boehner said.

Victory? Seriously? What the fuck does that mean exactly? I mean, I think we'd be a little better off if we were to admit what exactly it is we're trying to accomplish at this point. Iraqis don't want us, we're not really making any definitive progress, it seems to me that the only thing keeping us in this futile war is the constant assertion that somehow our efforts in Iraq stop terrorism. When we all know that terrorism was not a problem in Iraq before we went there. The whole, "fight it there so we don't fight it here" mentality is bubkiss. Occupation of a liberated nation does not equate to stopping an international terrorist organization. They just aren't related in the ways that our fearless leaders want us to believe. If victory means giving the Iraqis their own democratic government, well then we're done. If victory means ending sectarian violence and solving an ancient war between Sunni and Shiite arabs, we might as well forget about that achievement. Not only is it highly unlikely that these two religious groups will make a straight forward compromise, that we think somehow we can make it happen is pure lunacy. It's like saying us white folks did real well solving the tribal conflicts in Africa. There are wars in which you have a stake that is worthwhile and there are times when the world calls upon a great nation to end a crisis, but the Iraqi war is like a fishbowl and we keep putting beta fighting fish in there and expecting "peace".

Wow I missed this part somehow:

What constitutes victory is not clear. Although President Bush set the bar for success in Iraq at a new low in a statement he made Wednesday to a group of building contractors.

"Success is not 'no violence.' There are parts of our own country that, you know, have got, you know, a certain level of violence to it," Mr. Bush said. "But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that's what we're trying to achieve."

Umm... the parts of our country that, you know, have got, you know, a certain level of violence don't include large tribes of people intent on keeping their homeland attempting to destroy their rival tribes. I mean you could stretch the comparison to gang life or race wars in the U.S. but neither of those examples come close to the in depth religious mentality that we're talking about in Iraq. This isn't a group of people that got together to sell dope and decided that the competition needed to be removed, these are civilizations that were pushed into national boundaries by external forces. Just as the border to Israel is constantly in dispute, the people of Iraqi look at their country as separate groups occupying each other's lands. A better example in the U.S. would be if a hundred and a half years ago we decided to put the various Native American tribes in the same location, called it a nation and wondered why the Iroquois and the Hopi were constantly warring over an area of northern Nevada(no actual historic instance implied, I'm not that sweet on my NA history, sorry). But then you'd understand that two cultures with different values would require much more careful compromise than the crips and the bloods. Another way to look at it would be to take an area like the Serbia and Bosnia. There you had an over reaching authority that took over several sovereign nations. And then when the area was "liberated" by the fall of the USSR, it was nothing by chaos. That's what we're seeing in Iraq. It isn't so much another Vietnam as it is another Baltic war.