THE STAKES. Josh...

THE STAKES. Josh Marshall says the unsayable:

[G]etting our policy in order is also being stymied because the political opponents of the war aren't willing to say that, yes, the policy has failed. Not 'defeated'. To be 'defeated' you need to have some other party 'defeat' you. This is just a failure. But whichever it is, that bogey is being used by the White House to scare off the opposition. It's a failure. There's no recovering it. And the unspeakable reality -- truly unspeakable, apparently -- is that it's not that bad. Horrible for the Iraqis. Horrible for the American dead. Terrible for American prestige, power and honor. All that. But not the end of the world. The future of our civilization isn't at stake. And our physical safety isn't at stake. We'll go on. We are not the brave British standing behind Winston Churchill bucking us up with the confidence that "We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender ..." Those aren't the stakes here. Put it in those words and it's almost comical. President Bush wants us to believe that it is because it serves his grandiosity and direct political interests to believe that, to believe that his political interests -- where everything, history, legacy, etc. is on the line -- are the same as ours as a country. They're not.

No one wants to admit this. But Josh is right. If our future were truly at stake -- if we really, really had to win in Iraq -- we would never stand for the president's piddling surge proposal, because it's just not going to be enough to fix the situation. To really stabilize the situation on the ground in Iraq would require a military draft and sending several hundred thousand more troops to Iraq for a period of years. After four years of botched plans and incompetent leadership, no one, left or right, wants to entertain such an idea. Heck, we did not want to entertain a commitment of that scope before we went to Iraq in the first place, because it was a war of choice, not of survival. Another radical proposal that's been floated calls for dissolving the military war colleges for a few years and putting all those strategic minds into the war effort, instead of teaching. We will never do that, either.Why? Because America's failure in Iraq is not an existential threat to the United States. It is a horrible outcome for U.S. power, prestige, and authority, and it is a disastrous outcome for the Iraqis, to say the least, as well as a destabilizing outcome for the region, and for America's regional allies. But America will go on. No one wants to say this. To say it sounds callous, and awful, and morally bankrupt. And yet it is true.Sometimes I think I agree with the conservative critique that Americans don't have the will to win this fight. But we never did -- not from the start -- and I place conservative politicians first among the ranks of the unwilling. They wanted victory on the cheap, with neither unity nor sacrifice -- and managed to pour out our nation's coffers, anyway. Where were the conservative lawmakers working to resurrect the draft, to relieve the pressure on our citizen soldiers? Where were the conservative legislative advocates of deployments of an additional 150,000, 200,000, or 300,000 troops -- and for up to ten years? The conservative creators of a Manhattan Project-like intensive search for alternative fuels? The conservative attacks on war profiteering by military contractors? The conservative advocates for major tax increases and belt-tightening and yes, once again growing our own food in backyard Victory Gardens, or rationing fuel, if it came to that? That's the level of commitment existential wars require. Everything on the table, real sacrifice, politics out the window. Existential wars turn survival and victory into the same word. All of us, together, one nation, one purpose: a future.Conservatives have lacked the will to propose actions on this scale, because they know their constituents won't support them in the absence of a greater threat than is posed by the dissolution of Iraq. Instead, Bush will fight hard for his unhelpful surge, more Americans will die, Iraq will grow ever more disrupted, and the inevitable day of reckoning will be delayed. But it will come. The disaster is foretold. It will be awful, a humiliation to be followed by an agony. But not for us the painful reckoning -- for the Iraqis. We will assuage our guilt with recriminations and hearings, and the sneering of the world.And America will go on.

--Garance Franke-Ruta