Can't see the forest for the trees

The ever-popular "300" Hanson whines about Jimmy Carter and the failed 1980 Iranian hostage rescue attempt:

That April 1980 rescue mission ("Operation Eagle Claw") was a catastrophe, costing the lives of 8 Americans, as well as over a dozen wounded, and top-secret plans falling into Iranian hands, as well as dispersion of the hostages. Carter seems to see the disaster not in terms of innate planning ineptness that led to death and mayhem of our troops, but as a wrong decision that cost him his precious reelection.

Of course, VDH isn't going to hold The Deciderer to the same standard:

It is of course true that the surge is working and our soldiers are far more sophisticated than in 2003. But in all the places one visits, there are reminders everywhere — pockmarked walls, rubble, memorial photos in bases — of all those killed during the worst ordeal between 2003-6. When one walks through these former battlefields, there is an eerie melancholy, a ghostly archaeology, a sense that now unnamed and largely anonymous Americans paid the ultimate price in those years to allow the opportunities we witness today. And that’s why we must continue and finish the job they started. [emphasis in original]

Of course, I hear the tiny voice from the back of the room say, Bush isn't running for re-election.

No, but he was willing enough three years ago to exploit his own "disaster . . . in terms of innate planning ineptness that led to death and mayhem of our troops" for HIS (re-)election:

The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls "good news" about Iraq to U.S. military bases, and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country.

The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans' opinions about the Iraq conflict -- a key element of Bush's reelection message.

But, of course, IOKIYAR. And if Operation Eagle Claw HAD succeeded, we might have been spared eight years of "Snoozy" Reagan AND the ability of idiots in 2007 to use the hostage crisis as justification for attacking Iran. And we couldn't have that, now could we?