Mark Steyn's B.S.

UPDATED: New portion is in red.

This article by Mark Steyn underlines the utter stupidity of the neocons.

Last week, the Republican majority, to their disgrace and with 13 honorable exceptions, passed an amendment calling on the administration to lay out its "plan" for "ending" the war and withdrawing U.S. troops. They effectively signed on to the Democrat framing of the debate: that the only thing that matters is the so-called exit strategy. The only difference between Bill Frist's mushy Republicans and Harry Reid's shameless Democrats is that the latter want to put a firm date on withdrawal, so that Zarqawi's insurgents can schedule an especially big car bomb to coincide with the formal handover of the Great Satan's cojones.

Put another way, we don't want Bush to set any actual goals or to propose a schedule for how we will make Iraq independent. We'll jsut keep doing what we are doing and keep looking forward to someday, you know, completing the job, but without any knowldge now of what "completing the job" means.

"Exit strategy" is a defeatist's term. The only exit strategy that matters was summed up by George M. Cohan in the song the Doughboys sang as they marched off to the Great War nine decades ago:
"And we won't come back
Till it's over
Over there!"
And that's the timetable, too. If you want it fleshed out a bit, how about this? "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''

Translation: Our goal is to finish the job. Or, more pertinent to our discussion, "our goal is to meet our goal."

Has Mark Steyn ever heard the term tautology? What we want to know is what "finishing the job" entails. One might think that "fleshing it out a bit" would elucidate this, but no, "fleshing it out" simply means saying "Our goal is to meet our goal," with a bit more long-windedness.

Steyn then misrepresents the real issue by claiming that the real debate is over whether or not the U.S. plans on maintaining any forces in Iraq for the long-term:

But, even with full-scale Iraqification, America would be grossly irresponsible if not clinically insane not to maintain some sort of small residual military presence somewhere in the western desert.

As I pointed out in my previous post, the issue is not whether we will long keep a small military presence. The issue is that last month during the elections we had 161,000 troops there, the greatest number at we have had in Iraq at any time since the invasion. The concern is that our presence will have to be very large and very expensive, and be taking part in a lot of actual fighting, none of which is comparable to Germany, Japan, or South Korea. So his retort that we can reduce military costs by taking troops out of Japan and Germany, with the implication that they worked out without an exit strategy is not really relevant.

He also implies in passing that the insurgents are mostly foreigners:

I'm all for "Iraqification" — though those Democrats urgently demanding everything be done by the locals will be the first to shriek in horror once the Iraqis start serious score-settling with the foreign insurgents.

Can't he read? At all? Of course he can, but he is dishonest.

If you want it fleshed out a bit, how about this? Mark Steyn is a liar, liar, pants-on-fire. The issue is not whether or not Iran ever had troops or agents in Iraq prior to our invasion in 2003, it is how lying a liar Mark Steyn is.

So in short, Steyn is advocating an indefinite major military commitment to Iraq without clear goals (that clear goals would mean the terrorists win!), without any plan for even reducing the forces below occupation levels, and ll the time he does not accurately indentify whom we are actually fighting.

Sounds like a neocon wet dream to me.

That is all.