Reply #153: Chasing the Pot -- By Lewis H. Lapham -- in July's edition of Harper's Mag

[bemildred]

I've been trying to find this for a while. This poor sod
seems to have typed it into his blog.

Poker players who win more often than they lose obey a rule of thumb
expressed in the phrase "never chase the pot." Were the United States
to apply the same policy to the cards it has been dealt in Iraq we
would fold the hand sooner instead of later--without conditions or
complaint, accepting the loss as a fact beyond the hope of rescue by
Commander James Bond or the ace of hearts.

President George Bush apparently doesn't know the game (doesn't know
it or believes himself too rich to care what any of the numbers mean),
and so in the news from Washington and Baghdad these days we see the
squandering of the country's fortune (its wealth, the lives of its
young men and women, its character and good name) on the vanity of a
feckless commander in chief who holds the equivalent of five low
unmatched cards--a bankrupt theory of world domination, a collection
of lurid snapshots from the Abu Ghraib prison, a botched military
occupation of the Mesopotamian desert, a delusionary secretary of
defense, few allies in western Europe and none in the kingdoms of
Islam. Undetterred by circumstance, well pleased with his persona
as the last, best hope of mankind, the President smiles his spendthrift
and self-congratulating smile and bets another Marine division on the
chance that it will save Mel Gibson's Jesus from a mob of bearded
terrorists in Najaf.

I can understand why some people might find the performance terrifying,
also why some otehr people might see it as darkly comic, but what I
don't understand is why anybody continues to think that the man knows
what he's doing. Presumable they're unacquainted with the lessons of
the poker table; maybe they don't know that the President imagines
himself in a game with John Wayne, Omar Sharif, and the Devil.
Important personages in the news media, sources well informed and
highly placed, acknowledge the mess that the noble heir has made of
the American gamble in Iraq, but when I suggest that the President
would do well to heed the advice of the historian A.J.P. Taylor, the
tribunes on the jingo right accuse me of cowardice or treason (not a
true American, no friend of our soldiers in the field); representatives
of the conscience-stricken left draw my attention to the geopolitical
reality of the international oil price and Woodrow Wilson's high-minded
notion of making the world safe for democracy. But no matter what the
provenience of the correction or the rebuke, all present in the chorus
of responsible opinion (Senator Kerry as well as President Bush) offer
sentiments identical to the ones that for twelve years bankrolled the
American losses in Vietnam--the United States must "stay the course,"
discharge its "moral responsibility," protect the Iraqi people from
the scourge of civil war, maintain its "credibility" as the all-powerful
wonder of the world. The sales pitch is as disingenuous now as it was
in 1968:

America must finish the job

What job? Instead of going to Iraq with plans for military occupation,
we went with the script for a Hollywood western, and we have done as
much as we know how to do--captured the bad guy, discovered that he
didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, expended large quantities
of ammunition, reduced to rubble a substantial weight of antiquated
architecture, killed or maimed 4,000 American troops as well as an
unlisted number of Iraqi civilians. Begining with the plotline of High
Plains Drifter and similar in both disposition and result to the
American expeditions to Cuba and the Philipines at the turn of the
twentieth century, to Haiti in 1915 and 1994, to Vietnam in 1962-75.

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