The Winning Hand

In Betting on 00, I described an analogy to compulsive gambling. That is certainly one way to view the Stay The Course(TM) mantra, but it is perhaps not the most charitable one. So, carrying the analogy a bit further...

Stay The Course(TM) may find its roots in the typically American belief that, "We Are Right, We Are Just, We Are Strong, and We Can Totally Kick Your Ass." Few would dispute that the US military is unmatched on the planet. Our fighting forces are the best trained and the best equipped anywhere in the world. It is inconceivable that, given an objective, the US military could not achieve it.

At least, it was inconceivable until Vietnam. It was a colossal, unmitigated failure. It proved that even the finest, most powerful tools can be misused with disasterous results.

But that's not the lesson the authoritarians took away from their failure in southeast Asia. You may have recently heard transparent attempts at revisionism, saying that we failed in Vietnam because those Dirty Fucking Hippies made us stop lose. The Liberals chickened out and made us leave lose. We didn't Stay The Course(TM). If we'd stayed, we could have won...

Every time I hear this line of "reasoning," I find myself thinking of a game of poker. One of the players -- the US -- has been dealt a winning hand, in the form of our incredible military. Four aces, royal flush, whatever you like, the pot is ours. All we have to do is get to the end of the round and rake it in.

But there are a couple of problems. First, it's a no-limit table -- the stakes can grow arbitrarily high. And second, there are at least two other people at the table. And they're batshit-crazy. They keep raising, each against the other. And that would be fine -- the pot gets bigger -- except that that's all they're doing. We keep calling, they keep raising, we call, they raise again...

You've seen the turned-up cards. You know no one else can possibly beat your hand, so could we get to the end-game, please? But no, these crazy players keep raising each other, seemingly trying to scare each other out, but it's not working, and we keep calling, waiting for the cycle of madness to end.

Eventually, we look at our wallet and realize we can't keep this up much longer. Maybe we can borrow some money -- go to Congress and ask for supplementary funding. Great, we can keep calling the raises for a while. Surely they will soon tire of this brinksmanship. But they don't. Because they're crazy. And the raises continue...

Eventually, money needed for other things is now sitting in the pot, waiting for the game to end. The entire citizenry, which hitherto had been dilligently pursuing their own interests, are now sitting with us at the table, their own fortunes also in the pot, watching and waiting for the crazy people to stop being crazy and the game to end so they can get back to their lives. And still the raises continue...

In such circumstances, when does Stay The Course become plainly ridiculous and foolhardy, even when you have the winning hand? I think our leaders are having trouble figuring that one out.

One difference, I think, is that, if we leave the table, the other players will not -- as I suspect our leaders imagine -- snigger amongst themselves and split the pot. They will keep raising against each other, unto the end of time. Our mistake was not that we left too early, or stayed too long. Our mistake was that we assumed they were playing poker when, in fact, they were playing another game entirely.