Someday, someone is going to invent a board game of international strategy called "Hopeless." It'll be a reality game of the foggiest surrealism in which each player is charged with conducting U.S. foreign policy, but -- and here's the kicker from which the game derives its name -- each player, in each move, must pledge to think like George W. Bush.
To help this counterintuitive mental process along, copious quantities of mind-addling glue, toxic spray paint and Demerol, complete with refill Rxs, will come included. Psychotics will naturally excel at the game, however, since utter detachment from reality and any guiding ethical principles will be the game-winning sine qua nons.
A winner is declared by butterfly ballot when all players, in unison, scream in frustration -- "It's hopeless!"
Which, with respect to Iraq, appears to be the concluding move today. Everyone, including those whose diplomatic careers were renowned for their love of napalming extortion, are wailing in so many words -- "It's hopeless!"
"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country," Henry Kissinger qualified for the BBC, "that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."
Notice that three years into this, and well after we've been treated to repeated declarations of an elected, sovereign Iraqi government, the enabling advisor of "stay the course" uses the future tense: "If you mean ... an Iraqi government that can be established."
"I think we have to redefine the course," said Kissinger, "but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal."
And I think, dear Mr. Kissinger, there's a more familiar term for your bundle of garbled, dreary euphemisms that in reality propose to redefine very little: "Continuing occupation."
That's what necessarily protracted, regional negotiations portend -- the indefinite presence of unwanted foreign troops because a conclusive "military victory" establishing a friendly, stable government was unattainable, ensuring perpetual indigenous hostility and retaliation, which in turn make "total withdrawal" a total loser. Hence more of the same, day after bloody day.
What else do we call such a set of rock-and-a-hard-place circumstances? You got it. "Hopeless."
Gloomy Henry accurately topped off his observations by anticipating chess moves that even the seemingly sensible calls for an "immediate strategic redeployment to the horizon" anticipate. "A dramatic collapse of Iraq -- whatever we think about how the situation was created -- would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region."
In short, moving American troops to, say, Kuwait, would merely be an exercise in Ku-waiting for Iraq to implode, requiring the re-redeployment of those troops to the Iraqi hot spots formerly occupied. Check, but not checkmate -- forever.
The whole mess is reminiscent of the "Wargames" scene in which the thermonuclear-war-playing computer, "W.O.P.R.," finally realizes that the entire exercise is -- and always was -- as hopeless as a game of tic-tac-toe. For every move you make, there's the guarantee of an equally counterbalancing, negating move. The only way to win is not to play.
It would have been nice if someone had forewarned Mr. Bush of all this three years ago. Oh wait, someone -- a lot of someones -- did, but they were mostly the peacenik candyasses who don't understand the manly game of true national security.