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By Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' MSNBC
It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.
A country -- a government -- a military machine -- can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.
But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.
The Bush administration has opened this Pandora's Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.
The lies and terror tactics with which it deluded this country into war -- they had nothing to do with the abomination that Iraq has become. It isn't Mr. Bush's fault.
The selection of the wrong war, in the wrong time, in the wrong place -- the most disastrous geopolitical tactic since Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in 1914 and destroyed itself in the process -- that had nothing to do with the overwhelming crisis Iraq has become. It isn't Mr. Bush's fault.
The criminal lack of planning for the war -- the total "jump-off-a-bridge-and-hope-you-can-fly" tone to the failure to anticipate what would follow the deposing of Saddam Hussein -- that had nothing to do with the chaos in which Iraq has been enveloped. It isn't Mr. Bush's fault.
The utter, blinkered idiocy of "staying the course," of sending Americans to Iraq and sending them a second time, and a third and a fourth, until they get killed or maimed -- the utter de-prioritization of human life, simply so a politician can avoid having to admit a mistake -- that had nothing to do with the tens of thousand individual tragedies darkening the lives of American families, forever. It isn't Mr. Bush's fault.
The continuing, relentless, remorseless, corrupt and cynical insistence that this conflict somehow is defeating or containing or just engaging the people who attacked us on 9/11, the total "Alice Through the Looking Glass" quality that ignores that in Iraq, we have made the world safer for al-Qaida -- it isn't Mr. Bush's fault!
The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of... Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American -- the now-vast majority of us -- who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, "Don't take my son; don't take my daughter."
Sen. Clinton has been sent -- and someone has leaked to The Associated Press -- a letter, sent in reply to hers asking if there exists an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.
This extraordinary document was written by an undersecretary of defense named Eric Edelman.
"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq," Edelman writes, "reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia."
Edelman adds: "Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."
A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman's remarks are "at once both outrageous and dangerous." Those terms are entirely appropriate and may, in fact, understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.
After the South was defeated in our Civil War, the scapegoat was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the ideas of the "Lost Cause" and "Jim Crow" were born.
After the French were beaten by the Prussians in 1870 and 1871, it was the imaginary "Jewish influence" in the French Army general staff, and there was born 30 years of self-destructive anti-Semitism, culminating in the horrific Dreyfus case.
After the Germans lost the First World War, it was the "back-stabbers and profiteers" at home, on whose lives the National Socialists rose to prominence in the succeeding decades and whose accused membership eventually wound up in torture chambers and death camps.
And after the generation before ours, and leaders of both political parties, escalated and re-escalated and carpet-bombed and re-carpet-bombed Vietnam, it was the protest movement
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