Well, there's your problem right there

Of the many nuggets found in Bob Woodward's documentation of BushCo's incompetence, I doubt many of us were surprised to see that the neo-con dream team was being advised by none other than the world's favorite American war criminal, Henry Kissinger:

The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.

In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.

In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."

He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.

Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.

Ah, still fighting Vietnam, 30 years after the fact.

It's the last paragraph there that gets my attention, specifically the "American culture of avoiding hardship." Now, as far as my recollection goes, I seem to remember the GOP always extolling the virtues of heroic American individualism and Yankee can-do attitude as pillars of the nation. Are we to believe that our leaders actually believe the American public to be a bunch of knee-knocking weaklings who will run at the first sign of hard work?

Or maybe there's a more plausible reason for the public's squeamishness for continuing to fight a war that is draining our treasury and costing us thousands of lives. The American public didn't "go soft" on the Vietnam War because of the cost of victory. The American public turned against Vietnam because it was unwinnable, despite what the sage Kissinger might say. The U.S. carpet-bombed North Vietnam to no effect. Showing "resolve" would have only extended the conflict and cost thousands more lives.

Similarly, "not giving an inch" on Iraq isn't going to all of the sudden make things better. In fact, as Ben Franklin said, it's the very definition of insanity.