Cutting and Running in Baghdad

The "D" word—as in "defeat"—could be with us for a while.

By Robert Dreyfuss
April 6, 2006

It didn't take long after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003 for one of the radioactive words of the Vietnam era to make its first appearance, even if in stunted, referential form. Media pundits, former military men, and others began fretting, even as American soldiers advanced, about the "Q word." They were, of course, worrying about entering the infamous "quagmire" -- the word many Americans had applied to Vietnam as the war there dragged on and on and on. Three years after the fall of Baghdad, with the Bush administration well into their Iraqi version of the quagmire, a couple of letters closer to the ultimate ABCs of political life, are now making their appearance. And little wonder.
Both of these probably began their journey from the political Internet into the mainstream in mid-February when, of all people, conservative icon William F. Buckley raised them both in a near-tombstone op-ed published in the National Review and entitled It Didn't Work. With that single piece, you could promptly add "D" and "F" to the Iraq alphabet. "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," Buckley wrote and in a single bound, "failure" made it onto the list of the Bush administration's official ills in Iraq. "Iraqi animosities," he added, "have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans." Buckley then suggested that the President had somehow to admit to this reality in order to ensure "the survival" of his larger "strategic policies." Offering a final line of advice, he ended: "And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."
Defeat. The unthinkable. Call it the dreaded "D" word. And suddenly on the scene was the part of the Vietnam era that the President's high officials and neocon supporters never considered in their wildest dreams and so never spent a day preparing contingency plans for. Now, like it or not, believe it or not, they are in terra incognita and, to mix metaphors, visibly at sea.
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