One Big Lie

I'm an old fart who remembers the clusterfuck in Vietnam very well. Digby gets in right in this must read post when he says that there are similarities between Iraq and Vietnam there is one big difference. In the case of Vietnam the US was forced to withdraw when after years of lies the American people simply didn't believe a word the government said anymore. Vietnam was a running collection of little lies. The US will be forced to withdraw from Iraq for the same reason. The difference is there was a big lie up front, WMD and Mushroom Clouds. Go read the entire Digby post but he concludes with this;

You can't convince the country that we are winning against all evidence to the contrary once you have been proven an ass on that scale. The game was up for Bush as soon as people fully realized that the WMD threat didn't exist. Either Bush was a liar or an idiot. Unfortunately, it didn't happen until after the last election.

It took the multitude of little lies years to catch up with Johnson and then Nixon. The Bush administration put all of their money on the "big lie" thinking the war would be a "cakewalk" and over before anyone realized they had been had. It didn't work out that way and now it's impossible for them to convince a majority of Americans that there rosy picture of the situation is anything but BS.