Vietnam forever!

Just a thought I had when writing my last post: I once saw Larry Sabato on TV talking about how war always kills reform movements--progressivism was ended by WWI, the New Deal by WWII, the Great Society by Vietnam, etc. Will Iraq be the war that kills the modern conservative movement? It seems eminently possible. I won't deny that there isn't an element of wish fulfillment in this--I don't hate small-c conservatism, and I'm willing to buy into the importance of tradition, history, culture, etc., up until a point. Movement conservatism, though, is not really a conservative philosophy at this point. It has become a movement that is still obsessed with re-fighting the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, and it is therefore unsurprising that people born after that era don't identify with the GOP's goals and ideals. And Iraq is Vietnam, redux. The same exact arguments about dominoes falling, the importance of training soldiers, the need for a vaguely-defined "victory", and so on (watch this YouTube clip to see how similar Lyndon Johnson's rhetoric w.r.t. Vietnam resembles that of George Bush). This time, though, conservatives seem determined not to lose it, although I sometimes get the feeling that they care less about winning the war than having another turn of accusing liberals of hating America and spitting on the troops after the inevitable pullout occurs. If they actually wanted to win the war, surely something more impressive than a temporary, 30k troop enhancement would have been in order last year? Then again, using this issue as the GOP has makes sense if you think of the Iraq War as essentially cynical vote-grabbing enterprise (which it was, along with a cynical oil-grabbing exercise). Got to keep the 70s counterculture-hating wheel turning. It's a paradigm that we see very often these days from the right--create a mess, have the other side fix it, then blame the other side for fixing it. I'm not sure when it happened that the right decided that embracing irresponsibility was the quickest road to power, but nowadays it's not even news anymore.