Our nation’s top diplomat shows her firm grasp of history :

Secretary of State Rice compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early.

“I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold,” Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine.

“I know there were people who said, ‘Why don’t we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?’” Rice said.

Then again, the Civil War itself, unlike Iraq, wasn’t the indirect cause of the problem that we’re supposedly there to fight. Saddam isn’t in power anymore. Mission accomplished, remember? The only way the comparison would make sense would be if the instability of the Civil War led to the outbreak of slavery. Even if it was a more apt analogy, it would still be a bullshit thing to say.

Besaides, using Condi’s reasoning, wasn’t Abraham Lincoln a cut-n-runner?

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

To be fair, Abe Lincoln eventually recanted his earlier indifference to abolition, but it wasn’t until after the Emancipation Proclamation and the failure of the British and French to support the Confederacy. If things had turned out the other way, we might have gotten stuck with this…

If you haven’t seen it already, definitely check out CSA. It’s a really good movie that just falls short of greatness due to its low budget and writing that in one or two spots becomes too clever.