Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> >
> More seriously, if the prediction is wrong, it makes the peace movement
> look stupid -- for claiming that something that proved to be successful
> could not possibly work. Not unlike the immediate aftermath of the Gulf
> War,
> when the Bush Administration sandbagged the Democrats by encouraging the
> myth that Iraq had some huge mean motha of a land army, then smashed
> it in days.
>
Except for googlers, no one has the least memory today of what the anti-war movement did or didn't predict at that time. I don't even remember very clearly what I did say, but I hope my predictions were stupifyingly wrong -- i.e. it would have been correct (even in hindsight) to predict a long and bloody war.
Without a long war, anti-war movements go no place. So it's silly even to start one _except_ on the basis of the possibility of a long war; so one has to base one's present actions and speech on that premise.
(Actually, it was from a bridge book written by an Englishman back in the early '50s that I got my first sense of the general principle involved here. The writer said that if a hand appeared hopeless, the declarer should envisage the distribution which would allow success, and play on the basis of that distribution no matter what the odds against it.)
Incidentally, I don't see what _you_ have to gain politically from your present position? By "you" I mean your general political agenda.
Carrol