The Wider War Meme

How are right-wingers responding to the American failure in Iraq and the Israeli failure in Lebanon? First, a lot of them are bellying up to the bar of reality and calling the outcome of these enterprises by their proper name--"failure."

But the right always moves back to the more familiar ground of delusion.

It turns out that they believe that the current wars weren't conducted on a large enough scale to win. On the Laura Ingraham radio talk show this afternoon, conservative columnist Ingraham and Michael Ladeen of the American Enterprise Institute were blaming the failure of the American and Israeli wars on a failure to widen the wars to include Syria and Iraq. They weren't particularly clear on whether the U. S. and Israel should bomb the two renegade nations, invade them, or nuke and firebomb them as suggested by Cal Thomas and Rush Limbaugh.

After 9-11, right-wingers and Democratic Party toadies like Joe Lieberman were insisting that we "give war a chance." Now that the wars have turned into disasters for us and setbacks for the Israelis, the right is starting to demand that we give "really big wars" a chance.

Somebody should start asking Republican candidates if they agree that bigger wars are needed.