As the situation in Iraq worsens, a sadly familiar right-wing narrative has taken center stage: American success in Iraq is imperiled not by President Bush's incompetence or the lethal resourcefulness of Iraqi insurgents, but a lack of will. Dissent emboldens the enemy, the right-wingers claim. Victory is assured if we only stick it out.

A similar right-wing distortion entered the public mind after Vietnam, proclaiming that America would have won if only the public (and protesting hippies) hadn't given up on the war effort. This narrative was willfully ignorant of America's military failure to build up a dependable local ally in Southern Vietnam and destroy the Vietcong guerrillas. It also ignored the real cause of public dissatisfaction--the "credibility gap" between the government's hopeful press conferences and the reality on the ground.

The problem with both master narratives, as George C. Scott so famously explained in the opening monologue of the film Patton, is that patriotism alone does not win wars. No amount of "will" can wish away a massively unfavorable strategic and political situation. Only the most devout of the President's true believers can deny now that American forces only hold sway in the Green Zone, the Iraqi "government" has no power, and feuding Shiite and Sunni terrorists have destroyed any remnant of social order.

It is true that negative public disapproval does hamper the ability of the "Decider" to squander the lives of American men and women, but it's worth examining why. After all, the "embedded" media uncritically accepted Bush's war rationale in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and successfully hid (and still hides) the graphic reality of the Bush administration's failures from the public. Anyone silly enough to question the wisdom of the war was denounced as a traitor.

With anti-war sentiment so compellingly marginalized and a Republican congress (aided by Democratic rubber-stamps), Bush had all the power he needed to implement his war plan exactly the way he wanted it. Not surprisingly, his administration screwed up so badly that it eventually became impossible for the mainstream media to hide or sanitize the gruesome results. Thus, public opinion turned against Bush, the Democrats swept the elections, and members of his own party started eyeing the exits. That's simply the reality of living in a democracy. Although Bush styles himself a "unitary executive," only a real dictator could have prevented such an erosion of support given the disaster of his Iraq policy. Even that wouldn't have been enough--the totalitarian Soviet Union still lost to jihadists in Afghanistan.

The sad truth is that the conservative obsession with "will" stems from the nature of modern conservatism itself. In the minds of conservatives besotted with "personal responsibility" and centrist pundits enamored of unrestricted free trade, failure of any kind is an individual fault, and a moral one. Black and poor? You're probably a "welfare queen" who listens to gangsta rap while you leech food stamps! Laid off? It's because you lacked the necessary skills to compete with those industrious Chinese and Indians--and didn't marry a super-rich heiress like Thomas Friedman! Needless to say, this explanation completely ignores the real problems: structural issues of class, race, and power.

It's not surprising that conservative pundits are once again reducing the American failure in Iraq to a lack of will. They cannot acknowledge that traditional American supremacy has been checked by a change in how war is fought, a change that has made imposing "democracy" (i.e. creating American client states) substantially more difficult, if not impossible. Trapped by their narcissistic inward focus, conservatives did not seriously consider what the Iraqi public might have thought about being reduced to a "failed state" through a massively corrupt and destructive foreign occupation.

To acknowledge these things would trigger a cognitive dissonance so powerful it might threaten their deeper, cherished beliefs. Instead, they blame the public, the "liberal media," and the Democrats. And unless progressives act to challenge this pernicious right-wing narrative, the public just may believe it.

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Adam Elkus is a writer in Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in Z Magazine, Counterpunch, and Antiwar.com.

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