Yes, seems that those who want to defend the GZ mosque insist on doing so in terms of the builders having a constitutional right to do so, which is entirely evasive - as if a bishop on hearing complaints that one of his priests is reciting pornography from the pulpit were to answer "well, you know, he has a constitutional right to do so" - or, since that tack ends in a doldrum, by extolling the lofty piety of the chief sponsor of the mosque, in other words, boiling all issues raised by this mosque down opaque rhetoric about religious principles as if the establishment and free exercise clauses were a victory for religion, were all about heralding the glory of God - but of course those clauses were a victory for secularism - our government and civic institutions and laws are secular and this secularism is the culmination of a western tradition that since the days of Athens had a view of personal identity and individual rights and the role and nature of absolutes and of abstract concepts and critical thought and governance and laws that was, although hardly an unbroken cloth stretching from Socrates to Jefferson - the weave was often uncertain and never far from troubles - but still, a tradition that signified at the very least a civilization and culture decidedly different from others that have come and gone and may still linger - especially the culture of Islam, which of course has no interest at all in keeping church and state separate or of allowing citizens the right to keep their beliefs or lack thereof private and free from censure by an absolutist authority.

Now certainly an elemental virtue of the Western tradition is the idea of tolerance - but of course tolerance has a limit - anything secular must be limited, must have boundaries in order to make any practical sense - there have to be lines you cannot cross, or rather, you can cross but things increasingly become unmanageable once you do - and building a mosque at a site that represents a great victory for Islam over the unclean West for those inclined to see the world in those terms is to have very definitely crossed a rather significant line.

And I don't buy this argument that to be against the mosque is to punish a whole culture for the radicalism of a few - extremism is always carried forward by a small influential group that manages to co-opt the sympathies of a larger group by exploiting favourable conditions within a specific population or culture - how many Germans followed Hitler to the bitter end despite not especially seeing themselves as true Nazis or sharing in the mad extremes of his racialism? When Philip sent the Armada against heretical England would it have mattered much if the average Spanish peasant saw little of themselves in his self aggrandizing religious zeal? When Lenin emerged victorious from the civil war not all Russians were suddenly Leninists, not even a majority would have called or seen themselves as such or actually have know what it meant if they did - nor would they have found themselves caring much what some obscure Jewish philosopher living a poor life in London a generation before had to say about capitalism and the historicism of Hegel.

I repeat, the inability for liberals to understand this very simple reality is astounding to me - and more astounding still I'm literally shocked that I have yet to read one liberal commentary on this insidious mosque that takes or seeks to make or even acknowledge the secularist argument - all you get from the left is obscurantist constitutional posturing and near puerile effusing over the inclusive, new agey ecumenism of the Imam at the heart of the controversy - oh, and of course their go to accusation, that anyone opposing the mosque must be a bigot. It's nothing short of an affront to the classical liberal secular scepticism of Hume et al.

A perfect example of this failing of liberalism in its modern incarnation - for I see it as nothing less than a failing - is that insufferable gadfly who founded the highly influential Daily Kos blog who has written a book called American Taliban where I take it he compares extremists on the religious right in America with the religious fanaticism of the Islamists - this is both obvious and meaningless to the point of being silly and will achieve nothing aside from causing many an earnest young liberal to nod head fervently in agreement as if they've been given the keys to everything that's wrong with America - as I've already said extremists, whether hatched on the left or right, tend to share commonalities when it comes to personality disorders, social traits, historical tunnel vision, cultural distortions and ideological intemperance - but my point is if you're a liberal and you're troubled by this aspect of American culture then why on earth would you not use the mosque controversy to extol and celebrate the secular nature of our civic life? Instead liberals try and sell an argument that may sound good in the staff lounge at the academy but does nothing but alienate a majority of Americans and entirely fails to address the fears most Americans feel, to some degree at least, when it comes to the nation's enemies in general and Islam in particular - not to mention does nothing to assuage fears middle America has when it comes liberals and foreign policy concerns - or to put it in more colloquial terms: completely missing the point on why the mosque disturbs causes many to wonder if liberals have what it takes to keep the nation strong - hell, makes many wonder if they even want the nation kept strong

Sadly, disturbingly, by failing to make the savvy non-idealogical argument liberals end up empowering disgusting populist charlatans like Glenn Beck who at his large Lincoln Memorial rally yesterday announced that the only way to solve America's ills, the only way mind you, is through appeal to the grace of God - and with the right wing base awash in this kind of messianic end of days bilge how does a moderate possibly win the nomination in 2012? Mitch Daniels looks like a very attractive option right now but how can a moderate like him possibly hold out if the base has decided only god can save the country now? This was always my worst fear concerning the nasty consequences of an Obama presidency [well, I had a lot of worst fears when it came to that - but this was certainly one of them] that his liberal agenda and the extreme liberal agenda embraced by the Daily Kos ilk that he drags in his wake would so piss off middle America that the country in over reaction lurches violently to the right. There are even some suggestions wafting from the sewers of that fringe that wonder if a Palin/Beck ticket in 2012 would be a good idea - I mean, how bad are things that one even has to worry about such a thing as being possible? I begin to despair that the only hope becomes that my outlandish [but there's a logic to it] prediction that Obama won't run in 2012 actually comes true and Hillary wins the nomination and then becomes the competent, reasonable, moderate leader I tend to imagine her being [although there's scant evidence to suggest her being that - but for some reason I just get that vibe from her - hardly a sophisticated endorsement, but what the fuck - we're living in a time where someone actually thinks Glenn Beck as VP is a good idea - the line between absolutely nuts and not as crazy as you think is entirely blurred].

"... seems to me most of you have missed the point of this essay - the point was not to compare Sri Lanka to Afghanistan - the point was to say that if your goal is to win a war than do what you feel is necessary to win it - I think what the author seems to want to say here is that he sees America is trying to hedge on winning the war in Afghanistan, thinking rather to manage some kind of resolution that sort of looks like victory but not at the expense of having to kill or piss off too many people... I think what the author is saying is that that is a phony compromise - either do what you have to do to win, which after all is the point of war, or go small ie stop trying to turn Afghanistan into a functioning democracy [an insane notion] and instead form tactical alliances with anti-Taliban tribes in the north, hold the Taliban to a stalemate in the south and then try and separate the malleable Islamists [the author's point was that you can indeed fracture an extremist movement if you apply force effectively] from the hardcore ones - and then once you've isolated the extremists, kill them all... if you can of course..."

If one's military as concerns traditional warfare is not the most powerful in the world, there's no reason to fret much over non-traditional, asymmetrical conflicts, is there? In other words. America is threatened by the latter because of its power which means it has a lot of interests to protect, a lot of allies to protect, a lot of influence that is felt pretty much everywhere and therefore a lot of enemies - small wars are the consequence of big power. My point being that there's much talk going on - entirely in military circles of course - the public is by and large unaware of these issues, nor do many it seems in gov't, the press and the liberal intelligentsia care or listen in much on the conversation - but there's much talk about how America's current obsession with COIN and its affiliate small scale entanglements is drawing too much energy and resources from the 'big' war services, specifically the navy, but also the air force [is the F-35 a small wars platform only?], which increases the likelihood that China eventually catches up - and China doesn't actually even need to be caught up, just caught up enough so as to make opposing them in the western pacific either unthinkable or undoable.

So the logic is obvious, yes? There's no point in concentrating on COIN et al if it's at the expense of the broader strategic picture since it's the broader picture that creates a need for COIN in the first place - in other words, winning in Afghanistan is possibly worth it if we plan on remaining the preeminent global power - which means diverting and promoting the necessary strategic, technological and financial resources - if we're not going to do that, or find ourselves unable to do that [let's say Obama and his liberal catamites bankrupt the country] then all we're doing in Afghanistan [win or lose, sadly enough] is setting the table for China - it may be 10, 20, 30 years before they sit down at that table but regardless that's what all this effort will amount to.

A word, mosque-wise, about moderation, the supposed or claimed moderate Muslim line of reasoning which the troubled and troubling mosque is putatively supposed to promote - the question, it seems to me, when it comes to moderation and the mixing of religion with politics, the question that needs to be answered is: for the citizens of any given state with whom or what does legitimate civil authority ultimately rest? For America and liberal democracies in general the answer is obvious, it's right there in the first three words of the Declaration of Independence - we, the people - the authority rests with us and we safeguard that authority by certifying through regular and open elections officials entrusted for a time to enact certain laws according to the wishes of a majority and in keeping with a permanent yet secular and mutable constitution that attempts to express as well as is possible the needs and rights and freedoms and obligations of every individual living under it and reflect as best it can the values and culture of the people that created it.

But for a theocracy such is not the case - true authority does not rest with the people and the people, if they are not apostates or heretics, would not consider it legitimate to claim it did - nor therefore could it rest with any Potemkin village government that the people may have been asked or commanded to elect for the purposes of carrying out quotidian but necessary functions - no, for a theocracy and the citizens who populate it the only true and legitimate authority is God and by extension the self-appointed clergy who decide how that authority is to be imposed and propagated.

And so, when it comes to Islam and moderation, the question to be answered, as far as we the free citizens of a liberal democracy are concerned, is: according to the dictates of your religion can a Muslim be a true Muslim outside of the bounds of a theocracy or, conversely, within the bounds of a philosophy that demands separation of church and state and not only asserts but celebrates the right of individuals to keep their own counsel? In other words, for a true Muslim with whom or what does legitimate civil authority ultimately rest? If the people behind the Cordoba initiative can answer that question in a straightforward manner without causing the average American to immediately reach for his gun and flag and, to an equal degree, without being branded a heretic or apostate or servant of Satan back home - then go ahead, build your Mosque.

Or, to streamline and expedite the approval process, one could simply request that the sponsors of the mosque support, in the name of promoting peace and goodwill between peoples of differing faiths of course, the building of a synagogue in Mecca. They sign on for that and I think we can come to an amicable agreement here.

But of course ever dyspeptic liberals would whinge and wail 'but we don't make other religions etc etc' - but I imagine that's because no other religion has threatened our existence and then followed through on those threats - and no other religion struggles so with the separation of church and state and the rights and freedoms of the individual to believe what they want, say what they want and do what they want - these things are fundamental to Western culture, they're not negotiable - you can talk in absolute terms about 'freedom of religion' but any honest reckoning would admit that that freedom is an expression of skepticism regarding religion and the harm it can do to the liberties we hold dear if politicized - and Islam not only wants to be political it in all likelihood needs to be political in order to function in accordance with its beliefs - so I doubt very much the founding fathers if roused from their slumbers would have much trouble holding Islam to a different standard.

Ongoing mosque considerations... my prediction that opponents would struggle to find a convincing voice because of an unwillingness to throw a critical light on religion in general has proved accurate... regardless of that an overwhelming majority of Americans still oppose, although for reasons which troll from disingenuous to ignorant... but that probably because the average American feels the wrongness of it more clearly than they can conceptualize it... and that probably increases likelihood of incident catalyzing larger political complications... I'm still kind of shocked that I've read no one questioning the meaning or true intent of the granting of 'freedom of religion', the instinctive interpretation seems to be that espousal of this freedom was of course a testament to the greatness of religion... when you consider the enlightenment philosophical milieu that hatched much of the thinking of the founding fathers, plus their deist beliefs, I find this anodyne view of their thinking on religion to be absurd... I'm especially shocked that democrats are making the most foolish arguments in this regard, touting freedom of religion as the crowning glory of the American way... which, in many ways, it is, but not for the reasons they cite or laud... I mean, if there are true secularists in America a great many of them must be from the left wing and so why democrats are acting as if religious association is an unimpeachable good is striking, especially when they are the first to express outrage when republicans hug their bibles close come election time... I'm also shocked how many want to talk in absolutes here, for example talking as if all religions are basically the same and that to be truly tolerant we have to see the faithful as one glorious whole... crazy talk... there may be a commonality to religious experience and faith, but just as a matter of history, forget ideology and doctrine, just as historical fact Christianity is very much different from Islam and it's insane to pretend otherwise... it cheered me though to read one critic quote one of my favorite writers, Karl Popper, on the practical, conditional nature of true tolerance, that if it attempts to foster an illusion of a complete acceptance of all and everything it will be rendered incapable of defending itself and thus be left vulnerable to threats from the fervently intolerant absolutism of an enemy, from without or within... there seems to be a failure to understand that tolerance is in essence a rejection of the imposition of unreasonable absolutes on the freedoms of the individual and that therefore tolerance itself loses meaning if it comes to see itself in absolute terms... in other words, what America is really about is the coming to the fore of a practical, pragmatic view of the imperfect nature of the individual citizen, as the West had come to understand such a creature after two thousand or so years of social evolution, and his relationship to his fellow citizens within a state and to the idea of the state as a whole... it is, oddly enough, given at least the current context, a very secular view, in fact represented what seemed the final victory of secularism over religion when it came to an individual's right to say what they are and are not in both in private and the public forum ... which, given the perverse and needy nature of the species, given the shock of seeming sudden isolation in the universe possibly explains why America feels compelled to love its God so much... and why they appear to have such a problem understanding what it is exactly about the 'ground zero Mosque' that offends them so...

Two things [among others] that trouble me about this... liberals should be the ones making the pragmatic, secular argument against the mosque, or rather, in favor of subjecting the idea of the mosque to a cold and reasonable skepticism... but instead they prattle on idealistically about the inviolable principles of 'freedom' and 'tolerance' as if the two only truly existed as pure, Platonic forms which the abjectly ignorant citizenry can only experience as flashes of light and shadow thrown obscurely on a dark cave wall... the classical liberalism of a Hume would make the secular argument and make it convincingly but these people are mere ideologues vainly promoting a naive communitarian, post nation state, anti-American agenda that buries the practicalities of real world concerns under clouds of academic dust.

The other problem one sees stirring here is that the religious right in America will be empowered, that a legitimate or what should be legitimate argument over the troubling political nature of Islam will devolve into a mere phobia which the Christian right will exploit for the purposes of making it seem that they are in the mainstream, that they speak for the real America... 

So, again, to summarize... liberals should be making the skeptical secularist contra mosque argument but instead have wandered off into a rarefied wasteland of theory, like befuddled idealists dropped into a party made for empiricists, jabbering on about absolutes and conceptually perfect renderings of eternal truths... if the Cordoba initiative has done nothing else it has certainly revealed what a besotted troupe of ideologues the new left is... as for the republicans, well... they're somewhat disqualified on account of their Christ infatuated base... the libertarian element of the republican party can have this argument but the right in general?.... not really... they get caught in an irrational loop of equivocations... they in truth want to express an anti-Islamic point of view but to do that without calling one's own faith into question you'd have to do it from a skeptical secularist point of view and obviously that's not something they can do... and so they flounder about trying to fit the square peg of "Islam is a beautiful religion etc etc that has rights etc etc" into the round hole of "but just don't build your fucking mosque there!"... it's absurd... and the sad irony is this is exactly what the founding fathers feared when it came to religion and politics and why they had hoped that by enshrining a broad freedom of religion in the constitution all such nonsense would be put to rest...

Andrew McCarthy over at National Review - who the left would consider a poster boy for Islamaphobia - makes the proper argument, my argument when he says that fundamental to the Western tradition is the separation of church and state because it represents the victory of secularism and its belief in individual freedom and rights over the homogenizing tyranny of religious doctrine and the absolutism of faith based claims to power by regents  - but that the true practice of Islam is entirely dependent on the controlling apparatus of Shariah law which is [according to its own dictates and proclamations] completely at odds with secularism and therefore is not compatible with Western norms. As he points out, of course there are moderate Muslims just as there are moderate Catholics who practice birth control and don't take confession etc etc but still consider themselves good catholics - but, because of shariah, there's no such thing as a moderate Muslim, at least in terms of Western values and traditions, when it comes to doctrine - and central to that doctrine is the exercise of Shariah law which is both a judicial system and political utility entirely at odds with the norms of the West - which means that questioning the purpose of and motives governing the mosque is not to be a bigot flailing away in the throes of an irrational Islamabobia but rather suggests one is a pragmatic skeptic asking the entirely reasonable and very American question: what the fuck do ya think you're doin'?

Again - do I really want the mosque banned and Islam repudiated? I suppose not... maybe... in a sense... but more than that I think is I want the argument, the public debate to reflect the Western tradition and therefore espouse a healthy skepticism concerning these questions - that ultimately is what we're about and what it seems Islam is not - and what troubles me the most I think is that liberals should be making this secularist argument but instead are running away from it as fast as they can, trying to cover their tracks with highly speculative academy friendly circumlocutions about 'freedom of religion' and ignoring entirely the secularism that lies at the heart of that principle, a secularism which Islam, according to its own doctrines and dictates, is not compatible with - and what that says to me is that the new left, which Obama is a product of, is enslaved to an ideology that is in complete denial of the harsh realities that govern the world and America's place in it - bad things will flow from this disconnect, we're already seeing it in Obama's presidency which has been as far as I'm concerned an abject failure to this point - but, as relates particularly to mosque question, the left's failure, led by Obama, to take up the secularist argument and defend the Western tradition and thereby deeply offend and agitate with unease the broad middle of the country, means they leave the argument for right to make, which means the argument is vulnerable to being hijacked by the religious right - and no sane person wants to see that - I was convinced long before most that a president Obama would prove to be a bad thing - but a president Palin? a president Huckabee? a president Thune? - that does not inspire confidence.

I'm having problems with many right wing declarations about the GZ mosque that go something like "we're not saying they can't build a mosque, just don't build it there" - to me this is illogical and inherently contradictory, a consequence, as I've said, of wanting to criticize the mosque without criticizing the religion it represents - and I imagine that hardline Islamists understand how this weakness [freedom of religion, that is - Islam sponsors no freedom of religion and therefore has no problem with the Koran calling followers of 'the book' unclean etc] makes America vulnerable and exploit it accordingly. Critics of the mosque don't want to get into an argument based on suggesting Christianity is better than Islam and thusly be lead by reasoning to the reality that Christianity is indeed 'better' than Islam but not because it's more noble or glorious or sanctified or truer to the intentions of God [all of which are not demonstrable] - but rather because, relative to Islam, history has made it safe, purged it of the worst tendencies endemic to organized 'faith'  - that is of course if one believes in democracy based on open markets and the exercise of a free conscience by an individual - if you're interested in one of the various strains of autocracy and state control of all and sundry then a religion not circumscribed or reduced by an inconveniently evolved history would work nicely - Islam, for instance.

In the same vein, this inability to understand or accept what is being implied by the license granted to freedom of religion by the constitution also leads those in opposition to the mosque to make the absurd declaration that until Islam reforms itself it's unreasonable to expect Americans to welcome it with open arms - a fair enough point I guess except that it lives in complete denial of the fact that Christianity's own progress to reform left in its wake war, predation, abuse in the service of power and untold other miseries - Islam cannot simply reform itself, at least not without raising havoc and upheaval in the process - I admit that without reform I don't see how any true or lasting comity can exist between Islam and the West, but to imagine the price to be paid for such a turn will not be high and fraught with danger is, to say the least, naive.

Seems to me the paradox of the arguments made by those defending the building of the 'Cordoba' mosque is that they talk of how freedom of religion is central to the epoch making idea of liberty as enshrined in the American constitution and that to even hint at limiting those rights in the case of the ground zero mosque would threaten everything we hold dear - which prima facie seems ludicrous since America throughout its history has abused the rights of various groups and nonetheless done quite well for itself - no one seemed to mind lauding America as the great defender of liberty and democracy and the rights of man during WWII even though for instance Jim Crow laws still discriminated against blacks in the south regardless of what the constitution had to say about about the blessings of liberty - but aside from that, the paradox I'm struck by is that no one seems to want to address the fact that the motivation for the establishment clause sprang from a fear of religion - the founding fathers didn't want religion anywhere near government because they understood how dangerous such a confluence could be to the practice of democracy and therefore they had to guarantee the freedom of religion so government would have no excuse to try and exploit religious faith and vice versa - in other words the establishment clause isn't an expression that honors religion but rather an expression of great skepticism towards it. With that in mind, given that Islam does not believe or accept easily the separation of church and state and tends to be highly politicized, rather than being seen as an affront to the constitution opposition to the ground zero mosque can legitimately be viewed as something of an affirmation of the founding fathers inherent skepticism.

What people seem to be missing is that the whole point of guaranteeing broad freedoms for the religiously minded in the constitution was not to glorify god[s] and his faithful believers and the various dogmas they adhere to, but rather to control them because of the immanent threat they pose to freedom as a whole. The unfortunate irony is that in severing religion so boldly from politics like no nation had ever done or attempted the founding fathers it seems ended up heightening its importance for the social animals now set loose in the new world and in search of meaning - heightened to such a degree that religion is again perforce made political since no politician dare question the merits of believing in a heavenly father and the redemption of sins through the blood of his only begotten. The saving grace here - and this is very important - is that this native fervor of the faithful is largely symbolic once you move outside of the church - what I mean is, the overwhelming majority of Americans would not tolerate, no matter how strong their personal faith, the intrusion of religion into the public sphere beyond that symbolism - in short, something akin to sharia law or any number of other manifestations of Islamic overreach into the lives of citizens that actively disdains the rights and virtues of the individual would find little quarter in any true and coherent reckoning of America.

It seems to me that many of the arguments both for and aginst the ground zero mosque struggle to make sense because they can't or don't want to acknowledge the negative animus motivating much of the constitution - once you accept that the enshrined freedom of religion is actually an expression of fear and caution concerning the dangers of an organized belief in a creator then it becomes a much easier task to criticize the 'Cordoba Initiative' [cunning name that - can mean one thing to a Christian and something else entirely to a Muslim] since Islam quite clearly embodies the very thing the founding fathers were so disturbed by.  

"... seems the obvious problem with this approach is that layoffs can reveal hidden efficiencies that would remain unrevealed should intrusive gov't subsidies get in the way... I mean, this is the whole problem associated with gov't interference, no?... sure, stepping in to save GM can seem like a good deal in the short term, but how long before that seedling turns into a weed the gov't insists on calling a flower?..."

... your spew of bile over poor Massoud conveniently overlooks fact that had he not been blown to bits a couple of days before 9/11 we would have made great use of him in our little follow up war - and given the fact that to those not predisposed to revile him or think him a war criminal most seemed to have reckoned him a great military mind and a charismatic leader who inspired loyalty and devotion while championing a more progressive view of Islam, who can tell what difference that may have made.

As for the essay itself, I agree that it's odd if not at times weird and in the end not convincingly argued - but what I take to be its central point rings true, ie you have two options if you wanna win in Afghanistan: go big - destroy or radically alter the prevailing culture [thus her going on about Japan and Germany - this an extreme option to be sure but not in theory completely nuts - after all, when you get right down to it, war is usually about, explicitly or implicitly, modifying the cultural framework of your enemy]; or go small - accept the limitations of the prevailing culture and try and exploit what tactical 'virtues' it has to offer to your immediate advantage and then hope when all is said and done that in the end you can wrangle something positive out of the consequences.

Now, I understand why some [most] are troubled by the way she's framed this conceit - one does sense a certain Nietzschean darkness lurking in her psyche there - but still, as far as I'm concerned, I reckon she, not withstanding all her seeming flaws, strikes closer to the truth than some more 'enlightened' types have managed lately...

... the problem is that in a country as obsessed with 'religion' as America it's impossible to effectively and convincingly criticize religion - the opponents of Cordoba House don't trust Islam [and for legitimate reasons] but to convincingly oppose on those grounds they would have to call into question all religious belief and that of course is an impossibility - they would have to argue that all religious fervor is dangerous but how we practice such here in the West is less so because we purged or at least tamed the worst of our faith based demons centuries ago whereas the Muslims have yet to take that evolutionary step and therefore the threat implied by their particular brand of zealotry is different - in other words, if Islam has yet to figure out the whole modernity thing and their relationship to it and therefore has yet to pass through the inevitable turmoil and upheaval of such a turn it is decidedly not unreasonable or irrational or 'intolerant' to question the sanity of indulging their wholly unpredictable attempts to do so here - but of course no god fearing American is gonna make such an argument and therefore they are doomed to struggle with the having of their constitutional cake whilst eating of it too...

... but let's not forget, the constitution is merely a necessary mechanism [as judged by our values] for portioning out justice and arbitrating differences - that provisional necessity does not confer upon it the power of an absolute truth and therefore to conjecture that the abrogation of certain religious freedoms would doom the very idea of America, as those who challenge the dubious constitutionality of the anti-Cordoba forces do, is in a sense no more certain a statement or more valid a concern than to conjecture that the allowing of too much latitude to particular belief systems possibly threatens national security...

... you've phrased the question to get the answer you want - the proper way to put it would be: In the context of pre-surge violence, disruption and general unrest, and with an unjaundiced eye peering with difficultly down the long road ahead for Iraq and the various potentialities, both positive and negative, lying in  wait, can the surge be viewed as a success? The answer would clearly be a conditional yes. You on the other hand Tom have put a biased declaration in the form of a question so as to make the preordained answer seem like a fact - to wit, since Iraq is a failure according to the arbitrary criteria I choose to judge it by, how then can the surge, a necessary cause and constituent agent of this 'Iraq' and therefore fit to be judged by the same criteria, be seen as anything but a failure too?

Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics had a word for this kind of reasoning - 'bullshit' I believe he called it.