Enough with This "Winning" Crap, Already!

Winning is a good thing. It’s nice to feel victorious or know you are the best at something. I like winning, and feeling like a winner, but lately, I’m not all that fond of the word itself.

Last night I was flipping stations endlessly under the delusion that I would find something interesting and informative, when I passed by Fox News. Fox’s shorter, younger, more egotistical version of Rush Limbaugh, otherwise known as Sean Hannity, was grilling an anti-war activist asking him how he expected the U.S. to win the war if the citizens didn’t give all of their blind devotion, love and dollars to Resident Bush. Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but anyone who’s had to listen to this blowhard fuck for five seconds knows I’m not off base by a centimeter with the above description.

After being completely disgusted, and launching into a verbal rant that would have made a sailor blush (thankfully, the toddler was in bed), I began to consider the whole concept of “winning” this war in Iraq.

In order to give a thorough analysis, let’s look at war. War is when two tribes, countries, groups of people, decide that they hate each other so much that they can’t bear the thought of living on the same earth as the other, and therefore arrive at the only reasonable solution: the other tribe/country/group of people must die.

The only way to win a war, under the above particular definition of war, is to kill more people than your rival tribe/country/group of people, which means that the only way to win the war in Iraq, at this point, is to begin killing a hell of a lot more people. I’m sure folks like Hannity and his ilk are all in favor of it, but given the half million people who showed up in Washington D.C. to protest the war, the registered voters who gave the Republicans the boot, and bloggers all over the world who are screaming for an end, thankfully, the neocons don’t have the consent needed to pursue their bloodlust.

Not that the lack of support will stop them in their desire to conquer all, and spread democracy, no matter how many Iraqi children they have to send to their graves, damn it! Unfortunately, we have an asshole in the White House who is so rooted in simple definitions that he refuses to look at the broader implications of winning this war. I wouldn’t put it past him to begin discussing nukes in the near future, which as previously mentioned in the above, simplistic definition of winning a war, would be a way of winning. He doesn’t have any regard for human life, no matter how hard he trumpets the anti-choice agenda, and since our troops are maxed, nukes will be the next thing our fearless leader tries to convince us will work.

In previous generations, war has been used to combat aggressors, put an end to human suffering, and achieve peace. Leaders who went to war with the purpose of fighting tyranny agonized at the idea of the innocent human life that would be lost, but that seemed to change around the time of Vietnam, when war became nothing more than a way to make one ideology trump another. We should have learned our lesson then, but fast forward to 2002 when we were fighting them over there, so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here.

The reality is that winning this war isn’t possible, and, more importantly, we can no longer frame it as a winner/loser situation. Most Americans want to bring the situation to an end realizing that although we did combat an aggressor in Iraq, we failed to look at history and realize that the country was made up of three warring tribes that will stop at nothing to win their own age-old war. It is no longer about winning, more than it is about ending American involvement. There isn’t going to be peace or an end to human suffering until the Sunnis, Shiias, and Khurds work out their own disputes, which given the current state of Iraq, might be awhile.

The most important thing to do at this point, other than drop the word “winning” in terms of speaking about Iraq is to realize that no one wins a war. A lot of people die, cities are destroyed, and power changes hands for better or worse, but the very mention of a “winner” or “loser” is always subjective. The only winner I’ve seen so far in this whole Iraq debacle, despite what Hannity, Bush, and other dittoheads say, is companies like Halliburton, crooked Iraqi officials, fundamentalist Muslim groups who hate the U.S., and oil companies who have discovered the best long-range excuse to keep gouging a public that is already paying out the ass for the worst presidential fuck up in history. Nope, there are no winners here, and there won’t be anytime soon, so enough of this “winning” crap, already!