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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Clearly the administration has sold this war with a combination of deception and distortion. A poll last week found that a majority of Americans think Bush didn't tell the truth about the cost of the war, either in fiscal terms or in terms of the loss of human life, and I thought once again how silly polling is: The fact that Bush didn't tell the truth about this war and its costs is not a matter of opinion, it's fact, and he should pay for it.
But as U.S. forces close in on Baghdad, what should war critics do and say? The antiwar left loses me with talk of a quagmire in Iraq. Some of it sounds like wishful thinking, and it will likely be proven wrong: This war will probably be won in months, not years, and it could still end in only weeks -- though the battle for Baghdad is so fraught with potential nightmares it makes realistic predictions impossible. (Coalition forces still do not decisively control any Iraqi city.) Yet all week the lefty news site Common Dreams has been awash in stories about the coming U.S. defeat, with headlines like "It Will End in Disaster" and "The Monster of Baghdad is Now the Hero of Arabia" and "The Bright Side of War." I recognize that reporting bad news isn't the same as enjoying it, but some on the left seem to be wallowing in it, a little too self-satisfied that the war has seemed to be going badly.
The other problem with all the talk of a "quagmire" is that it seems to lead to comparisons with Vietnam, from which it's just a short but dishonest intellectual hop to thinking of defiant Iraqis as the Viet Cong. But it's obvious that the "resistance" to American and British forces can't be considered any kind of mass popular uprising; so far it's mostly the result of Saddam's brutal coercion. The reports of fedayeen shooting soldiers who try to desert and civilians attempting to flee from combat are chilling. Read Phillip Robertson's haunting report from northern Iraq on Saddam's "execution committees" that keep soldiers from deserting. On Wednesday, Iraqis were once again cheering invading troops as liberators in the city of Najaf. There will no doubt be more scenes like that to come.
Opponents of this war can't be invested in the quagmire theory, or in the myth of widespread popular Iraqi resistance to the U.S, or a pan-Arab uprising against the coalition. For starters, it's morally corrupt to root for a dictator like Saddam under any circumstances. And those banking on a "big muddy" scenario in Iraq risk further political marginalization if the pace of victory accelerates again. If the war was wrong -- and I believe its timing and unilateralism certainly were -- it will remain wrong even if Saddam's regime is toppled sooner than the quagmire theorists expect.
So what do opponents of the war, and the president's policy in prosecuting it, do now? I can't support Kucinich's call to stop the fighting immediately; it would only let Saddam's regime come in and crush those who've risen up against him, and submit the country to further terror and chaos. On the other hand, I think Rumsfeld's sneering insistence that a cease-fire is completely off the table is frightening: Should the battle of Baghdad bog down, should there be a reasonable chance to resume diplomatic efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't we stop the killing and talk about it? Democrats should be ready to call for that if there's evidence there's still a diplomatic solution to this tragedy.
Even with the war yet to be won, the Bush administration is trying to impose Rumsfeld's military model on postwar Iraq, handing power to the Defense Department while marginalizing Colin Powell's State Department, not to mention the United Nations. The indefatigable Powell is of course fighting back, but Democrats need to speak out against the Pentagon power grab. Meanwhile, another military leader marginalized by Rumsfeld, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, told Congress it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the war, and was slapped by deputy Paul Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark." The cakewalk conservatives' arrogance about the war will be extended to the peace, whenever it comes, and they deserve to be fought at every opportunity.
Some Democrats still insist silence is politically wise. "Democrats don't need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now," consultant Jenny Backus told the Times. "The unnamed generals are doing that job for us." But top Democrats have been preaching silence as strategy since before the midterm elections, and the party's shellacking at the polls cost them all credibility. Americans won't let them sit this fight out. Yes, Democrats must choose their words carefully, they should critique the president fairly and cogently, they should always think about the impact of their words on the troops. But the GOP attack dogs will come after them whatever they do.
In a dishonest piece of writing in the Weekly Standard this week, "The War for Liberalism," cakewalk conservative William Kristol described the Democrats as divided between brave "Dick Gephardt liberals," the "patriots" who back the war-supporting former minority leader, and the despicable "Dominique de Villepin left," -- there's the French slur again, after the foreign minister who led the U.N. opposition to Bush's war -- whose adherents "hate conservatives with a passion that seems to burn brighter than their love of America, and so, like M. de Villepin, they can barely bring themselves to call for an American victory." And though Kristol's list of de Villipin leftists is short on names, one of the handful he includes is Nancy Pelosi -- despite her vote "in support and appreciation" of Bush's conduct of the war.
Kristol is wrong: Most war critics still hope for an American victory, one that results in as little loss of life and as much freedom for Iraqis as possible. But it's already clear that he and his neocon friends designed a war that wouldn't ensure we could do either, and they and their war deserve criticism. There will be a reckoning for bullies like Kristol, and all the pampered, pink-cheeked scions of no-sacrifice who sold this war dishonestly. Yet I fear there will be a lot more Iraqis and Americans dead before that day comes.
