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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The antiwar left shows a troubling indifference to the plight of Iraqis -- and flirts with irrelevance -- by demanding that President Bush bring the troops home now.
Sep 22, 2003 | It is a terrible thing to watch a war in progress, even from a distance. If there's a pulse in your imagination, you have some sense of the violence of it, the fear and the grief of it; men and women, children and animals, are killed and injured, losing homes, farms and possessions. Even when the worst of the fighting is over, there can be months, even years, of dislocation and suffering. It is impossible to watch without a solemn wish that it hadn't been necessary, and that it should come to an immediate end.
It is no surprise, then, that as we near the six-month mark in the difficult Iraq War, "bring the troops home" is emerging as a defining sentiment of the antiwar left and making its way into some parts of the mainstream political dialogue. A group of antiwar military personnel and their families has adopted the name "Bring Them Home Now." The sentiment is seeping into the Democratic campaign for president. Dennis Kucinich, the antiwar Democratic presidential candidate, issued a statement on Aug. 25: "It was wrong to go into Iraq. It is wrong to stay in Iraq. Let's support our troops by bringing them home." The language even crept into remarks from South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle, the hyper-cautious minority leader of the U.S. Senate, when he insisted earlier this month that Bush must offer to Congress a war spending plan "that clearly lays out how we're going to succeed in Iraq and how we're going to bring our troops home safely."
Daschle's demand is not only justified, but responsible -- and yet his choice of words is disconcerting. It is the nature of mass politics that the most complex issues are distilled to bumper sticker slogans; the unfortunate effect is that these slogans can become the driving political imperative. And so the emergence of "bring the troops home" as a slogan this early in the Iraq War is an ominous development. The slogan is catchy, yes, but it is laced with contradictions and questions that resist simplification.
At what point, exactly, should we bring them home? What happens then to Iraq? Is it realistic to expect France and Germany or the 21 neighboring governments of the Arab League -- none of them democracies -- to take over? Who prevents Saddam followers or hard-line Islamists from seizing control at the barrel of a gun? And in that event, what happens to the Iraqis who were thrilled by Saddam's fall or to those who oppose rule by conservative Muslim clerics?
In the months and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, it was possible for reasonable people to disagree about whether the war was in the interests of national security or morally justified. Such disagreements were inevitable, because the prospect of war presented Americans their counterparts in the U.K. with one of the most complex dilemmas of our era. In the aftermath, as it has become clear that the administration of President George W. Bush misled the American people about the nature of the threat, many liberals and leftists have rightly pressed to hold him accountable. But in a climate of frustration and rage, the use of slogans like "bring the troops home" or "he lied, they died," is luring partisans into a realm of moral simplicity. And for everyone on the left -- whether antiwar, pro-war or morally conflicted -- this should be a cause for concern.
In adopting a seemingly single-minded campaign against Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their allies, those in the antiwar left run the risk of alienating moderates and losing perspective on the war. Their perspective distorted by righteous indignation, they run the risk of forgetting the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the profound suffering endured by the Iraqi people for the past quarter-century. They run the risk of forgetting that, no matter how dubious and confused and corrupt the White House motives, the invasion might in fact work toward the liberation of the Iraqi people. That is a worthy goal, and one that the left might invest in. But that point increasingly seems lost in the hyperbole and hysteria of some attacks against Bush.
Consider the evidence: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes Iraq as a "country full of people that revile us." Left-wing journalist Greg Palast writes a frivolous fantasy about Bush resigning at the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. A Salon reader writes a letter to the editor: "It's a travesty that our soldiers and the Iraqi citizenry are made to endure the mess the administration created." A woman at a political forum in Iowa tells the Des Moines Register: "George W. Bush is ready to blow up this world in our name ... The vast majority of people watching this are never going to vote for you or anyone else because the disbelief and the disenchantment is that great."
No doubt there is great disenchantment. That's the inevitable product of Bush's arrogance, deception and incompetence, compounded by the unprecedented budget deficits created by his tax cuts. Bush didn't ask the American people to go to war to liberate Iraq; he sold it as essential to American security, and in fact it seems now that the outcome could tip decisively toward greater insecurity. And yet, these and other commentators lack a sense of history, and of moral proportion. Bush is guilty of profound failures, but nothing as immediately urgent and irreversible as the crimes against humanity committed by Saddam. He provoked war with his neighbors. He starved and repressed his own people, systematically murdered and tortured intellectuals, artists, clerics and others who opposed his regime. He is responsible for the deaths of a million people. And all the while, he fanned anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism throughout the region.
There were good arguments against the war. The United Nations should have signed off on the invasion (though it must be said that the U.N. showed no particular concern for the plight of the Iraqi people). The administration manipulated intelligence to justify the attack. Bush and Blair did not have a postwar plan adequate to win the peace. In the days after Bush submitted his low-ball request for $87 billion to support military and rebuilding campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are reminded of the best argument against the war: That it would be so expensive in human lives and taxpayer dollars, and so destabilize the region that it could not be justified, even if that meant cost-savings and geopolitical stability must be achieved on the backs on the Iraqi people and on Iraqi generations unborn.
Today, though, all of those arguments are moot, even the best of them. The invasion is done, the moment is past. Now we see how the plan was flawed, and we see there are life-and-death problems. The time has come for the antiwar left to determine what role, if any, it will play in solving those problems.
For some, especially in the antiwar camp, this is not an easy transition.
