Losing one for the Gipper

The dirty work of losing one for the Gipper, and the Empire, is now upon us. As I once learned from the minions in the newsroom of Investor’s Business Daily, owned by Archconservative stock picker, Bill O’Neill, “you can’t fight Mr. Market.”

Mr. War is just like Mr. Market, only he robs you with a sword, not a pen…and not just of your money.

Mr. War says we gotto go. Game over. The question is how will the Bush-Cheney team handle it? Will they show dignity, farsighted grace to make a path for their successors to move the country ahead on? Both nationally and internationally? Muslims are a global underclass. In some places, like France, they are a local underclass and they are pissed.

Mr. Market needs to address these issues. Pissed underclasses are the bald tires on the RV of capitalism. But Mr. War says the military game is played for now.

The public has already shown, by not impeaching completely, Bill Clinton, that the real issue is failure. That’s what gets you impeached. Not, ultimately, the cover-up, even if that is technically why you go down. The hand in the cookie jar is just the triggering event to bring up the “I” word…to start the Washington mandala spinning. The fates decide based on your popularity and the profitability of your policies with the voters. Poindexter took the bullet for Reagan…But Reagan’s policies were a winning campaign, so no “I” word there. Nixon took it in the neck for losing us Vietnam…no matter how necessary it was. It fractured his support and won him no new friends. Sort of like the old saying, “success has many fathers, failure none.”

The public will probably vote to support our strength and then ax the guy for using it to do something dumb…like getting us into this losing bar fight in a bad neighborhood.

In short, the public will vote based on the ends, not the means…They will support our projection of force, but not a losing strategy for such projection. So Bush-Cheney, if they stay the course, may win one for the Gipper in November, only to be “dropped” by the public a few months later when the investigation begins and blame for the failed strategy methodically works itself up the org chart.

Which brings me to the essence of Mr. War: The last ten yards.

First an explanation of that, courtesy of its astute observer, military historian John Keegan in his "Face of Battle:"

"For though the rise of industry has enormously enhanced the power which states can deploy against each other in war, and the improvements in weapons has almost infinitely extended the range of a general's reach, the predicament of the individual on the battlefield has, at whatever moment we choose to examine, still to be measured on one quite short scale: that of physical and mental endurance of himself and his group."

He is talking about the last ten yards between enemies on the front line. The no man’s land where you find a wall of homogenized people from which, randomly and miraculously, a few survive to tell us of it.

Before engaging at this range, a practical people coldly assess what happens there and the likely outcomes. A moral people consider what those last ten yards will look and be like for the people who wind up there. Hard choices are made and many factors may go into the decision, but the ten-yard stretch is always the same.

So soldiers learn what it means to win and lose there. To learn how to engage, and disengage, with as much safety as possible. How to conserve, finally, their forces the better to survive the day and to win on another.

This team thought this ten-yard game was an HR problem, so they wrote legalese to change the corporate manual called the Geneva convention. Then it was a PR problem so they changed the message…and the photo ops.

There are no HR manuals and no messages in Keegan’s last ten yards. The “managers” that people the Bush-Cheney team, the word people, the paper-pushers, won’t help you there.

And that’s why the Bush-Cheney team will lose finally. They took us to those last ten yards, knowing precious little about them, even second hand, took no advice from those who had been there.

Now they have to win, or lose, but in an expeditious manner, ultimately get us out. Get our armies disengaged to rest, eat, recoup. That is what the last ten yards are all about for soldiers. You can win the day. You can lose the day. But you cannot stay in that day forever.

That’s always the final judgment of Mr. War. That’s what it is this time, too, like always. ¶ 11:21 AM