July 6, 2003 - Iraq isn’t a quagmire. We have the President’s word on that. His sycophants keep echoing that proposition and go on to ridicule those who had the temerity to suggest that the war wasn’t over on May 1. It is important that the American People understand that the result of the Second Iraqi War was a victory. We have that dramatic scene on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln to prove that. Our President is a Top Gun – albeit one that has never fired a shot at an enemy or had an enemy shooting at him with anything except well aimed words.

Not enough Americans have died to call it a quagmire. Just one soldier was bagged and tagged today. Yesterday was better, the toll was just 7 Iraqi policemen dead and 40 wounded. How many of that 40 were Americans no one is telling us. But it is not a quagmire. A kid buying a soft drink at Baghdad University is shot in the face, but that doesn’t make it a quagmire. It is just another isolated incident in a growing series of isolated incidents – proof, I suppose, that the while the Iraqi people appreciate their freedom a few adherents of Saddam Hussein just won’t join the party. I wonder if the parents of the soldier who died today appreciate the difference.

How many Americans must die each day before Iraq becomes a quagmire? How many rocket propelled grenades must be launched at American vehicles before we can call it a quagmire? How many mortar shells must fall into American outposts before we can recognize the mud sucking at American boots? Ask Secretary Rumsfeld. He says that Iraq isn’t Vietnam. He says it is a different time and a different place. How do you tell the difference between a meadow and a quagmire when it is your son shipped home in an aluminum box?

I’ll give the Secretary that it isn’t the Vietnamese jungle and it isn’t the streets and alleys of Saigon in which death hides around the corner. The streets and alleys are in Baghdad and Basra and Mosul and all the other towns and villages where GIs are on patrol. Death doesn’t slip out of a jungle tangle. It rises out of the desert dust. It isn’t 1972 and the lapel pins aren’t Nixonian. It is a different time and a different place and not enough Americans have died to call it a quagmire. This one-a-day war may not even be a swamp. We aren’t hip-deep yet. Maybe it’s just a marsh and we are only ankle deep.

Someone asked Senator George Aiken (R-VT) who came to oppose the War in Vietnam during the Nixon Administration just how he proposed to get out – what was his exit strategy. “It’s easy”, he replied, “Just declare victory, get on the boats and come home.”
But we can’t do that, can we? There is all that oil!