"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
A Big Pundit sees No End in Sight in Iraq by Bob Herbert New York Times 08/11/05 (sourced at CommonDreams.org).
Bob Herbert's column seems to me to be a good illustration of the Big Pundit laziness so often desscribed by Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby. Although Herbert expresses a healthy skepticism about the war, he does so with a carelessness that ultimately represents a problem for those of us in the "reality-based community" who want to see a more constructive, more realistic and more effective foreign policy for the US.
First of all, he complains about Bush being on vacation:
For American troops, it's been one of the worst periods of the war. And yet there's still no sense of urgency within the Bush administration.
The president is on vacation. He's down at the ranch riding his bicycle and clearing brush. The death toll for Americans has streaked past the 1,800 mark. The Iraqi dead are counted by the tens of thousands. But if Mr. Bush has experienced any regret about the carnage he set in motion when he launched the war, he's not showing it.
The last part is true, as Bush's response to the current protest vigil by Cindy Sheehan shows. Bush doesn't convey any sense that he recognizes the human costs of his disastrous Iraq policies.
But what does the fact that he's on vacation really have to do with it? Presidents, CEOs and ordinary workers all need to take vacations. I would very much prefer the western Euorpean approach where 4-6 weeks vacation are common. Europeans are understandably aghast when they discover that two weeks vacation is standard in America for most employees. The fact that he's taking vacation is a satisfying cheap shot. But it really says nothing at all about Bush's lack of concern for the lives his policies are destroying.
He then approvingly quotes the media darling Maverick McCain on the Vietnam War:
It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.
Since it comes from McCain, Big Pundits expect us to treat a statement like this as weighty and profound. But what the [Cheney] is he actually saying? That its fine to ask soldiers to suffer and die in a bad cause that's not in the national interest as long as "for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time"?
If Maverick McCain is applying that logic to the Iraq War, which he has supported all along, that would explain why the only solution he can come up with is to escalate, escalate, escalate. Because once we've sent soldiers to war, no matter how dishonest the war propaganda or how badly the ongoing war is damaging the United States, the country has to support the cause "over time."
And the US should never undertake a war where the leaders believe that victory can "be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay"? What do these vague abstractions mean? Except for various "police actions," mostly in Latin America, in which local forces were hopelessly overmatched by the US, what war has the US ever fought in which our leaders didn't hope that victory could be achieved at a cost lower than what we actually wound up paying?
I suppose the 1991 Gulf War could be a candidate for that distinction. But since the Gulf War laid the basis for the current Iraq War, and the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia as a part of the Gulf War and its aftermath were a major motivation for Osama bin Laden and his jihadists to turn their attentions to the US, that would be a hard argument to make.
Both points in this abstract form are ahistorical and silly. Any war that drags on for years is going to attract criticism. Any war that drags on for more than 30 days or so is likely to be less popular at the end than in the patriotic rush that always accompanies the beginning of a war. The notion that the length, difficulty and costs (expected and otherwise) of a war should have no bearing on how long it should continue is so dogmatically strange that it's virtually meaningless. No one actually believes that, although it might fit nicely with jingo enthusiasms.
I also wonder just what framework McCain is using to make that comment about the course of the Vietnam War. Beyond echoing favorite Republican Party talking points, I mean. Does he think that the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, negotiated and agreed to by Richard Nixon's Republican administration, were an inappropriate surrender of "victory"? Does he think that the US should have committed new forces in 1973, 1974, or 1975 when it became clear that after all those years, the huge South Vietnamese army couldn't hold its own against the North? What kind of US forces does he think should have been committed, and how many?
And how long should we have continued to intervene after 1973? Ten years? Twenty years? The Big Pundits don't ask such questions of Maverick McCain, the man who stands out in today's Republican Party because he's willing to overtly (if safely ineffecctively) criticize the practice of torture in the Bush Gulag, while at the same time he joined the rest of the Torture Party in blasted Demcratic Senator Dick Durbin for criticizing torture?
Cohen writes:
Ask a thousand different suits in Washington why we're in Iraq and you'll get a thousand different answers. Ask how we plan to win the war, and you'll get a blank stare.
Really? Because administration officials and the Republican echo chamber have been saying pretty clearly for quite a while that their plan to win is to train enough Iraqis to take over all "security" functions so that they can defeat the guerrillas.
Sure, it's bogus talk. But it is more than "a blank stare," which would probably be a more pragmatic response. If we can read in the daily newspaper the comments of officials talking about their plan to turn over the fighting to Iraqis, why is it that a Big Pundit can't elicit more than "a blank stare" on the subject?
Cohen then spends a few paragraphs talking about the recent claims that US troops will soon be drawn down in Iraq. And he sensibly focuses on the obvious doubletalk involved in that claim, as well. But the alleged drawdown of troops is based in part on the notion that he explicitly mentions, that Iraqi forces start "providing their own security." He's right to raise questions about those claims. But the real problems in not that "a thousand suits" in Washington produce nothing but "a blank stare" when asked about their ideas of winning the counterinsurgency. The problem is that the plan they are implementing is unrealistic.
He concludes by using the Vietnam War analogy to criticize Bush's Iraq War policies. And for critics of the Iraq War, it's tempting to just cheer for his argument:
When Lyndon Johnson sent American troops into the flaming disaster of Vietnam he had no real strategy, no plan for winning the war. The idea, more or less, was that our boys, tougher and much better equipped, would beat their boys. Case closed. Fifty-eight thousand American troops succumbed to this schoolyard fantasy.
George W. Bush has no strategy, no real plan, for winning the war in Iraq. So we're stuck in a murderous quagmire without even the suggestion of an end in sight.
The problem is that, well, it's just not true that Lyndon Johnson's strategy in Vietnam was based on "our boys, tougher and much better equipped, would beat their boys." Johnson used a graduate esclalation strategy which was expected to reduce North Vietnamese support for the Vietcong/National Liberation Front insurgency in South Vietnam. That, he thought, would enable the South Vietnamese government to establish itself permanently. And that was the goal: an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam.
That plan failed, just as the plan of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon mafia has failed in Iraq. It's perfectly valid to say, at this point, that the Bush administration appearsto have no *reasonable* plan or exit strategy to concludethe current conflict for the US. But there is good reason to believe that they plan to keep permanent American military bases in Iraq. And that *plan*, which has never been publicly acknowledged, and suspicions on the part of Iraqis that such a goal is in the plan, are major complications for any American war-winning or exit strategy. And, in fact, Cohen mentions that likely plan in the quote below.
So why say, oh, Bush has no "plan," just like Johnson had no "plan"?
Maybe the last two paragraphs are a clue:
The administration has never been straight with the public about the war, and there's no reason to believe it will start being honest now. There is a desperate need for a serious national conversation about alternatives to the Bush approach in Iraq, which is tantamount to a permanent American military presence in that country.
The president, ensconced in a long vacation, exemplifies the vacuum of leadership on this crucial issue, which demands nothing less than the sustained attention of the wisest men and women the U.S. has to offer. They could be politicians, academics, civic or religious leaders, corporate executives - whoever. The longer they remain on the sidelines, the longer the carnage in Iraq will continue.
Say what? Dude, Bush and Cheney think they *have* "the wisest men and women" in America - including themselves, of course.
But this allows Cohen to come out with a pretty result that validates the high-school civics-textbook picture of the virtue and order of the American political system. The "wisest men and women" will recognize the "desperate need for a serious national conversation about alternatives," and they will persuade Bush and crew of the "vacuum of leadership" from which they suffer, and they will then step up and provide a wise and enlightened solution?
That one sentence, "There is a desperate need for a serious national conversation ...", probably says all we need to know about Cohen's viewpoint on the Iraq War. Because the guardians of the conventional wisdom of our Potemkin press corps, guardians like Richard Cohen, haven't been having a "serious" conversation on the Iraq War, it's obvious (to them!) that "the wisest men andwomen" of the country haven't been engaged with the issue.
The unwise among us - you know, like the soldiers who have gone off to war and their families, for a start - have been having "serious" conversations about the Iraq War since Bush's 2002 State of the Union address where Iraq was declared to be part of an "axis of evil." Meanwhile, wise men and women like Judy Miller of Cohen's paper the New York Times were pimping phony claims about nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" in order to build public and Congressional support for invading Iraq. Unwise people have been talking about the war a lot, in theirhomes, at their workplaces, in the blogosphere, everywhere where people gather in some way to communicate.
Gee, it's nice to think that "the wisest men and women" are finally perceiving a need to begin such a conversation. Too bad the wise people didn't jump in when there was still time to prevent the war. Maybe they should start by checking out what the unwise people have been saying all this time.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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