Karl Rove has declared war on the war while Vice President Cheney and the BAA Boy have declared war on reality.

The last time I heard someone invoke the domino effect was when Reagan was trying to rationalize his military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America. Well, yesterday, like the abandoned WMD argument, Cheney scrapped the “spreading democracy around” rationale for the continued occupation of Iraq when he invoked his own little domino theory. gopsissies490x569

Consistent with PNAC pugnacity, as well as BAA’s macho-chickenhawk views, Cheney suggested that troop withdrawal is only for those who “don’t have the stomach for the fight”.

When John King, CNN, asked Cheney what he thought of the proposed Democratic timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the man went off:

"If we were to do that, it would be devastating from the standpoint of the global war on terror. It would affect what happens in Afghanistan. It would make it difficult for us to persuade the Iranians to give up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. It would threaten the stability of regimes like Musharraf in Pakistan and the Saudis in Saudi Arabia. It is -- absolutely the worst possible thing we could do at this point would be to validate and encourage the terrorists by doing exactly what they want us to do, which is to leave…

"The fact of the matter is that we are in a global conflict. It's not just about Iraq. It's -- we've seen attacks around the world from New York and Washington, all the way around the Jakarta and Indonesia over the course of the last five years. Our strategy that we adopted after 9/11 of progressively going after the terrorists, going after states that sponsor terror, taking the fight to the enemy has been crucial in terms of our being able to defend the United States. I think one of the reasons we have not been struck again in five years -- and nobody can promise we won't -- but it's because we've taken the fight to them.

"And if Jack Murtha is successful in persuading the country that somehow we should withdraw now from Iraq, then you have to ask what happens to all of those people who've signed up with the United States, who are on our side in this fight against the radical extremist Islamic types of bin Laden and al Qaeda. What happens to the 12 million Iraqis who went to the polls last December and voted in spite of the assassins and the car bombers? What happens to the quarter of a million Iraqis who've gotten into the fight to take on the terrorists? The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting. And no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060622-8.html

In Cheney's mind, the U.S. role in Iraq is part of a global domino game - not a bloody occupation. In his mind it's still a war with extremist Islamic terrorists - when it’s increasingly obvious, U.S. troops are largely fighting and dying in battles with Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation. Plus, a sectarian civil war is breaking out all around them. And hey, don't just take my word for it. Even White House spokesman Tony Snow agrees that the battle in Iraq is not, by and large, with extremist Islamic militants anymore.

Now, BAA speaks of unleashing the military and winning the Iraq War! No so Cheney. The Veep speaks of “not losing”. To understand this curiosity, an excerpt from the Salon review of Ron Suskind's One Per Cent Doctine provides a context:

"Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a 'global experiment in behaviorism': If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior.

" 'The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.' This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration's first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to 'dissuade nations abroad from challenging' America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

"The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a 'default' -- a fallback, driven by the 'realization that the American mainland is indefensible.' America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. 'If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,' Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: 'It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response.' "

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/23/suskind/index_np.html