Winners hate quitters.
That’s one of the unspoken truths about gambling in general—though technically we’re not talking about gambling at all. In real gambling, the result is at least uncertain to some degree, however much the odds might favor the house. What makes gambling a game is that anything might happen: Even the most feckless player has a chance of hitting it big and—like the guy who nailed the record multimillion-dollar Megabucks jackpot a couple of years ago at the Excalibur—going home with a fat payday deposited in his account. And, of course, jackpots like that are a budgeted expense for the casinos, good advertising that keeps the hopeful coming through the doors. If nobody ever won, nobody would ever play.
But there’s another type of activity, which apes the rituals and protocols of “anything could happen” gambling, but which isn’t gambling at all. These aren’t games but simply commercial processes where the outcome is so foreordained—the pro rakes in the chips, the patsy gets fleeced—that the similarity is less to casinos than to slaughterhouses. The only difference is that the cow doesn’t have a choice about heading down the ramp toward the guy in the blood-stained overalls. Poker playing hasn’t been made mandatory yet, not even here in Vegas, so human patsies always have the option of recognizing what kind of hopeless situation in which they’ve found themselves, muttering, “Screw this,” getting up from the felt-covered table, pocketing what’s left of their bankroll and going for a walk around the swimming pools. The fact that so many patsies—or marks; pick your term—don’t follow that eminently rational course of behavior, but instead ride it out until their last pawnable possession has been converted into chips stacked up in front of the pro on the other side of the table, only goes to show how persuasive the “Don’t be a quitter” rhetoric can be. And in fact, the pros who really rake it in have a whole litany of verbal techniques to keep their victim in the game. Don’t quit. You’re in this far; how ya goin’ to get any of it back if you stop playing now? You just need one good hand to come your way and you’ll be the one on top. And of course, a perennial favorite, though perhaps heard more often away from the tables:
Stay the course.
Poker is often metaphorized as war, a clash of wills, fought on a small green battlefield with the heavy artillery of a deep bankroll and the lighter, maneuverable forces of guile and cunning. But perhaps it’s even more instructive to think of war as something like poker—especially when you’re losing.
One of the things of which the Bush administration and its tethered media hawks would like to convince the American public—who, after all, are the ones ponying up the chips, in the form of our national treasure and the lives of young men and women—is that the other side in Iraq wants us to quit, get up from the table and go for a walk around the pool. (Pool-strolling is my own personal favorite metaphor for taking a break from any activity in which you’re fuming from getting your ass kicked; I got it from Ed Silberstang’s 1979 Snake Eyes, the best novel ever written about Vegas, in which a self-destructive player is advised by wiser and cooler heads to “take a walk around the pool.” He doesn’t take the advice, and craters.) We’re told that if the U.S. were to pick up what’s left of its chips and go home, this would be such a morale-boosting victory for al Qaeda that new followers would come flocking to its banner and Islamic extremists would take over the secularized Arab states, same as what happened after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. (Actually, nothing like that happened at all—Arab secularization increased after the Soviet defeat—but never mind.) So what al Qaeda really wants, of course, is for us to quit and go home. Sure they do—just like the guy on the other side of the poker table, who’s been stripping us hand after hand, wants us to get up and pocket what’s left of our bankroll rather than continuing to play.
It’s probably a good thing for local sharks that poker is frowned upon by Islamic fundamentalists, as the al Qaeda crew are apparently good enough players to know that the whole point is to keep the patsy in the game as long as possible. Why should they encourage us to leave now, when we’ve still got something left? The other side has openly admitted for years that they want us to stick around. Al Qaeda master strategists have boasted that the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq, and the long, slow “death by a thousand cuts” that results from it, is the best recruiting tool they could ever have. That’s not just mere bravado trash-talk. It’s borne out not just by the facts, but also by al Qaeda’s internal documents, such as the private letter that our military intelligence picked up after the June 2006 attack that killed al Qaeda bigwig Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The translation of the letter by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point spelled out Zarqawi’s position that pinning the U.S. down in Iraq would strengthen the jihadists not just there, but also everywhere else in the world.
When the other guys are on record as to an ongoing U.S. commitment in Iraq being their objective, you’re tempted to start wondering whose side George Bush and his top military commander, Gen. David Petraeus, are on when they argue that we should continue doing exactly what al Qaeda wants us to do. Not that we would get anything out of it—patsies at least keep on playing because they mistakenly believe they have a chance of winning. But the entire boiled-down gist of Petraeus’ long-awaited report to Congress is that the surge is working so well that a year from now we’ll be back in the exact same position we were in a year previously (and the Iraqi parliament will have taken another vacation in the meantime). This is the equivalent of the sucker boasting that he was able to pawn his watch for enough money to stay in the game for another couple of hands. The more successful we are at managing to stay in a game which we’re losing—and Bush flacks are happy to tell us that their plans call for us being in Iraq for another decade or more—the happier it makes the winners. They might not be popping champagne corks at al Qaeda World Headquarters, but it’s likely there’s some high-fiving and “Woot! Woot!” noises every time they hear the U.S. convincing itself to stick around while the cards are shuffled one more time. Deal us in. Don’t quit now. Ante up ...
Or we could go for a walk around the pool.