The insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results* …

Interesting column today by WaPo style writer (?) Henry Allen, who argues that we should give Bush enough rope to hang not only himself, but also American military adventurism for years to come …

The problem, if we lose in Iraq, is that America is apt to keep on doing what it's been doing for decades when it loses, which is to say learn nothing and have years of hissy fits about who's to blame. And set itself up for another fiasco someplace else. […]

… our combat fiascos are coming to define America both to the world and to itself. They are also demonstrating that we are incapable of winning ground wars against some of the poorest people on Earth, if those wars last more than a week.

After Vietnam, one hoped that we could salvage pride in the courage with which our soldiers fought, and in the knowledge that we had learned our lesson well enough that we would never again send them to die in such a doomed cause.

As we watched our helicopters abandon our terrified allies on the roof of our Saigon embassy, it seemed reasonable to assume that the shame of that moment would lead to a new sanity.

I've read three Op-Eds just this morning that reference helicopters evacuating people from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. "Embassy," "roof" and "Saigon" nets you 100,000 hits on Google. But, interestingly, nobody was ever actually flown off of the U.S. embassy's roof -- the iconic image was of a random apartment building in downtown Saigon where CIA employees were housed.

Just a little trivia; now let's return to our column already in progress…

Instead, our failed ground combat interventions and nation building continue like a sort of neurosis, the kind that has been defined as doing the same thing over and over in expectation of a different result, in the manner of France fighting and losing one colonial war after another after World War II.

In America, however, this syndrome is a legacy not of colonialism but of World War II itself -- of a triumphalism of the sort John Kennedy perpetuated when he boasted of being from the generation born of that war, and said that the lesson to be learned was that we should pay any price, bear any burden, to assure the success of liberty.

How good we feel about ourselves, sharing this dream. Without the illusion that we can make it come true, we would be like Britain without its empire, like France without its mission civilatrice, a nation tinged by shabby resentment and existential resignation. The problem is that reality may leave us with nothing better in the end.

As part of our thought experiment, think now of our mind-set as an American sickness, an addiction in the form of a belief.

If it were an addiction, we would create a 12-step program to cure it. The first step would be recognizing that our governing establishment is powerless over it, and that our attitude toward our role in the world has become unmanageable.

Recovering alcoholics will say that they didn't begin their recovery until they "hit bottom." It turns out that it was a mistake to believe we hit bottom while watching those helicopters in 1975, or any of the smaller failures that have followed. And so, the proposal here is to make sure that this time we hit bottom hard enough to prove to ourselves once and for all that the very nation-building that George W. Bush swore off before the 2000 election still has him -- and, more important, us -- helpless in its grip.

I appreciate what Allen's trying to say here. The problem, somewhat obviously in my book, is that Iraq isn't part of some huge game of Risk and real people are really being slaughtered over there. In other words, we don't have the luxury of giving Bush free reign to escalate the conflict in Iraq and further destabilize the region in the hope that a strategic class addicted to a belligerent foreign policy will see the light after he fails miserably yet one more time.