"Peace With Honor"

You must remember this

For all you Obamaniacs considering sitting out the general if your (and my) man loses out to Hillary because you don't like superdelegates or you just don't "like" her, check this quote on Iraq from the man you would be helping to elect President of the United States: "...the whole thing is keyed to Americans being able to withdraw and come home with honor, not in defeat."

Funnily enough, I thought the whole thing was "keyed" to preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining WMDs, er, avenging 9/11, um, hastening the spread of democracy, I mean, fighting the terrorists over there rather than in New York or Washington, yikes, how about stabilizing the Iraqi government and preventing the descent into civil war and genocide? No, wait, I know: "being able to withdraw and come home with honor, not in defeat." Yeah, that's the ticket.

For all of you who think that this talk about a false choice between honor and defeat sounds familiar, allow me to reach back through the mists of time to then-candidate Richard Nixon, who promised on the campaign trail to end the Vietnam War by seeking "peace with honor." Incidentally, after taking office in 1969, Nixon expanded the war by secretly bombing Cambodia (which he later invaded) and Laos, while laying waste to North Vietnamese cities and escalating the civilian death toll exponentially. American involvement in Vietnam finally ended in 1973, and the South finally fell in 1975. "Peace with honor", which had prolonged the conflict needlessly for four more years and cost thousands of American and millions of Vietnamese lives, ended up looking a whole lot like plain old peace. Or "defeat".