Iraq, Surrender, Consequences, and the National Conversation
Be warned: Screedy, partisan comments follow. Something here will probably offend you. If you don’t like that sort of thing, there’s plenty more to read here.
* Finally, some talks with a senior Iranian leader I can support without reservation.
* Insurgents have killed two soldiers and captured four others … Iranian Revolutionary Guards, actually. You will remember that I previously mentioned another Iranian insurgent attack, and I’ve read about others since. It doesn’t look like this is a one-off. Let’s hope this has staying power and proves a serious drain on the mullahs’ thug squads.
* Because history tends to remember wars as chronologies of dramatic events, we tend to forget that they have always been long, grueling, bloody things punctuated by a few moments of drama, mostly insignificant, and more significant events that were harder to recognize at the time. It’s exasperating that we forget — because some choose to omit it from our national conversation — that our primary enemy in Iraq is al-Qaeda, and that its avowed goal is to bring its war back to our own country. And if the news that we captured its political leader in Iraq is true, that will be one of several encouraging signs we’ve seen recently. I’ve foresworn strong emotional ups and downs, because in this war, victory will go to the patient, not the lucky, and we’ll measure progress toward it by how little we hear about it. Of course, the terrorists replace each dead or captured leader with a new one, but new leaders are drawn from the back benches — those with less charisma, fewer ties to other terrorist leaders, less experience, and less skill. It’s just a part of the gradual wearing down of an enemy that can’t be pacified, forgotten, or escaped.
* I am still waiting to hear the advocates of withdrawal explain away the predictable result of what they advocate: a wave of genocide and terror unlike anything the world has seen since 1975. No honest person can fail to foresee that, no compassionate human being can want that to happen, and no statesman can believe that this will make us more secure.
* I was hoping for a narrow Democratic victory in the mid-terms because, for the country’s greater good, I wanted the Democrats to catch the fire truck they’ve been chasing. I wanted them put in a position where they would have to advance an actual policy for Iraq and start a national conversation on the consequences of defeat. My belief was that this would focus national attention on the lack of a clear Democratic alternative, and just how catastrophic the option of a sudden withdrawal would be. It’s March, and I still see no coherent policy, and if you wonder why not, just watch Rep. David Obey, who voted against the war, confronted by the surrender lobby in the halls of Congress (“Man: Filibuster his supplemental request. Obey: There is no filibuster in the House!“). This is a fairly vivid illustration of the aftermath of unsatisfying intercourse, when two participants in an intoxicated tryst start to wonder just what brought them together in the first place. Whether Obey’s proposal will do any better than John Murtha’s, or Nancy Pelosi’s non-binding resolution, is anyone’s guess. But the problem for Obey isn’t just that the votes aren’t there in Congress. The problem, as Obey knows, is something else about the voters who elected the Congress.
* The most hopeful sign is that the American people are even less excited about surrender than they are about the war. Obey is smart enough to read all of the polls, including those given very little media play. Here’s one of them, as summed up by Powerline:
According to the survey, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, 57 percent of Americans say “The Iraq War is a key part of the global war on terrorism. 57 percent also “support finishing the job in Iraq, that is, keeping the troops there until the Iraqi government can maintain control and provide security for its people.”
Moreover, 56 percent believe that “Even if they have concerns about his war policies, Americans should stand behind the President in Iraq because we are at war. And 53 percent believe “The Democrats are going too far, too fast in pressing the President to withdraw the troops from Iraq.
In the same poll, 60 percent predict that Iraq probably will never be a stable democracy and 60 percent disapprove of the job President Bush is doing. Yet, unlike most Democrats, they are willing and able to distinguish between these issues and the matter of what we should do going forward in Iraq.
More here. I still don’t know if we will have the national conversation we need to have, but this is a good sign as we enter a presidential election campaign.
* John Murtha is Congress’s foremost advocate of surrender at any price, and his stillborn plan to “undermine” the war effort was to be, in essence, an Iraq strategy that strategically converges with al-Qaeda’s. That doesn’t make Murtha an ally of al-Qaeda any more than it makes Muqtada al-Sadr an ally of al-Qaeda … so don’t question his patriotism. Instead, you can question his judgment and his understanding of the facts, as the Washington Post did:
His aim, he made clear, is not to improve readiness but to “stop the surge.” So why not straightforwardly strip the money out of the appropriations bill — an action Congress is clearly empowered to take — rather than try to micromanage the Army in a way that may be unconstitutional? Because, Mr. Murtha said, it will deflect accusations that he is trying to do what he is trying to do. “What we are saying will be very hard to find fault with,” he said.
Mr. Murtha’s cynicism is matched by an alarming ignorance about conditions in Iraq. He continues to insist that Iraq “would be more stable with us out of there,” in spite of the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies that early withdrawal would produce “massive civilian casualties.” He says he wants to force the administration to “bulldoze” the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year. He wants to “get our troops out of the Green Zone” because “they are living in Saddam Hussein’s palace”; could he be unaware that the zone’s primary occupants are the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy?
The Post then chides Nancy Pelosi for her supportive comments about the Murtha plan, although it’s not clear if even Pelosi represents her own party’s center of gravity.
* So many have tried so hard to help us forget that invading Iraq was a national, bipartisan decision, despite the fact that most representatives of one party who voted to send soldiers into battle have now abandoned that decision. (The soldiers’ expression at such a moment is, “Sorry ’bout that.”) That’s why it’s so edifying to review the video of just how hawkish Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, John Edwards, and Harry Reid sounded before the war became unpopular. Either they expected a cakewalk, they exercised poor judgment, they can’t assess intelligence, or they were trying to advance those false pretenses about weapons of mass destruction (which Saddam had used before, but which of course he’d never have used again, right?). None of those things says very good things about their qualifications to make, and see through, grave decisions while occupying higher office. And that was before we were in a ground war against al-Qaeda, which would love nothing more than to send its victory-buoyed jihadis on to Afghanistan, and to America itself. Surrender in Iraq won’t end the war; it will intensify it dramatically.
* A brief, strictly political diversion: You have to love this story by a hack named Mike Baker, who writes for the Associated Press. It starts off like this: “Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who remarried one month after his 1980 divorce, said Friday that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign.” The story then proceeds to run down a list of most of the Republican candidates and say tawdry things about each of them. It’s just about the most transparently biased detour through the gutter you could dream up; notably absent are new sexual harrassment accusations against Bill Richardson by his Lieutenant Governor, and Baker doesn’t jiggle the handle on that ossuary of a closet Hillary Clinton keeps. I remember a time when plenty of people wanted us to move on from that conversation, too. It’s odd, then, that this same anti-war MoveOn herd, which now demands that Hillary Clinton apologize for voting for the war, is giving those old scandals new life.
* Gov. Richardson, by the way, is the great American who recently suggested that Democrats should not attack each other’s positions on Iraq, but should attack only Bush’s.
“The worst we can do is tear each other down,” said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who called on his Democratic rivals to sign a pledge to avoid negative campaigning and concentrate their energy on taking the White House away from the Republicans next year. [AP]
In other words, Richardson proposes that the candidates collude to cheat voters of a debate on what each of them will actually do about the most important issue our country faces today. If these were corporate CEO’s, any who signed that pledge would be prosecuted for violating the Antitrust Act. It is often said, correctly, that dissent — though perhaps not all forms of it — is patriotic. That is because constructive debate about how to solve our nation’s problems is patriotic. What does that say for what Richardson is proposing?
Let the flamewar begin!