Bush Lost the War - Pass it on

AND MORE: Several other blogs have posted: Signs of Insanity, Be Lambic or Green, and 95% Certain.  Best of all Songs of Unforgetting  created a picture!  Check out her side bar. I've posted it up top.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Two more blogs have signed on: Pandagon and Cafephilos.  Perhaps after the holiday lull we can ramp this thing up.  Pass the word: Bush Lost The War!

UP-UPDATE: Anderew Sullivan comes close to saying it in this post, but not quite.  Come on, just say it: "Bush Lost The War."   Sparhawk said it.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't work very well - not yet at least.  The big blogs largely ignored me.  My neighbor Abu Aardvark gave it a line on his del.icio.us scroll but that was about it.  So, I'm changing the game.  If you see this, and want to follow along, just do it, like Sporadic Maunderings did.  No need to link back here.  Just pass it along... Maybe if we build up some momentum, the big guys will jump in...

   I want to try to start something here, to start a meme and see how far it gets.

    It seems to me that the simplest, most direct response to the continuing efforts of the Bush administration to deflect responsibility for the fiasco that Iraq has become, is to say: Bush Lost the War.  If many just said that, whenever confronted with the dissembling and lying and evasions, it would remind us all of the one clear fact in all of this: Bush Lost the War.  He lost it in a variety of ways, but surely he lost it, not the media, not the Democrats, not Iran, not the liberal professorate; no, none of these.  Bush Lost the War.

      I am going to tag five bloggers and ask them to put up a simple post that states Bush Lost the War, and pass it along.

      How about:

       Roland
      Josh Marshall
      Andrew Sullivan
      Abu Aardvark
      Kevin Drum

Comments

[yc]

In your earlier post, you listed a variety of ways that Bush lost the war. Since you are the expert of Confucius and Taoism, I wonder what you think of the Iraq War itself. If the president were not Bush but someone else who could have handled the matters better, do you think the war can be won? Should the U.S. start the war in the first place?
Respectfully,
yc

[Sam Crane]

I have been opposed to this war from the start. I was never convinced that the US had the capacity - which had to include political-economic capacity, not just military capacity - to successfully accomplished "regime change" in Iraq. So, with a different President, I suspect the invasion would still have failed (at least in the broader goal of creating something stable after Saddam).

As to war more generally, I tend toward a Mencian position. He suggests that there may be circumstances in which war is just, but he maintains a very strong position against killing. To override the moral ban on killing requires very clear-cut and very threatening conditions. I think Iraq was never that clear cut and threatening a situation (however repressive the Saddam regime may have been) so, on Mencian grounds, Iraq would not be seen as a just war. Again, the Mencian position is not absolutely pacifistic; rather, it demands that a high standard of threat and clarity be reached before the ban on killing can be overcome. That's my sense of it at least.

[The Western Confucian]

I've joined in, with these comments:

As far as this blogger is concerned, it was an unjust war from the get go, so who lost it is really immaterial. Who started it is the real question. The buck stops at the Oval Office, whose current occupant is famously uncurious. It seems he likely simply went along with a plan put in front him.

Who started the war, then? The neocons shoulder a lot of the blame, but so do we the people, our corrupt system of government, and our decadent culture.

[Paul Sunstone]

"Decrepit Old Fool" has joined in:

http://www.decrepitoldfool.com/index.php/weblog/comments/bush_lost_the_war/

[Doctor Zombie]

And the truth spreads!

http://doctorzombie.blogspot.com/2007/04/jumping-everybody-elses-train.html

[kay]

Check out my sidebar and tell me what you think. :)

[Will]

I'm in...

http://community.livejournal.com/floatingbadger/5266.html

[Paul Sunstone]

Kay, your sidebar rocks!

[Sam]

Kay! Brilliant! Is there some way we could copy it and pass it around. Your image should become the meme itself...

[kay]

I "created" it for that purpose (meaning - I added the text). Should we worry about my not creating the pic?