Familiar Argument

From the NYT Sunday Magazine:

“I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends,” says [Max] Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh. “With thousands dead and tens of thousands more injured, and years later you ask yourself what you were doing there. To the extent my friend John McCain signs on to this, he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall.”
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It doesn’t help that McCain has never put his argument for staying into some larger context that might explain what he really means by “winning” the war in Iraq. If you ask him to define victory, his answer is that Americans soldiers will have stopped dying, and that the Iraqi military and government will be functioning on their own. That would be a great day, no doubt, but surely the overarching purpose of a war can’t be to stop more soldiers from dying in it.
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McCain’s main reason for continuing on in Iraq seems to be that we’re already there and must not accept defeat, and that’s an argument that probably feels all too familiar to many Americans who lived through a decade of aimless war in Vietnam, to no discernible end.