The last couple of weeks I've been posting a lot of my shorter posts only on The Blue Voice. It's not exactly that I'm posting there rather than here. We've just been trying to post more current-events kinds of things there lately, so I've been doing a lot of posts where I just mention an article and quote a paragraph or two with minimal comment. Usually I add more comments here or post about longer articles that I want to say more about.
Sometimes I cross-post things, but not usually. This is going to be a partial cross-post. To celebrate topping the 50-thousand-hits milestone, we've been trying to each post on the same theme of, what about the Democrats and 2008? In my first entry in that series, I talked about the Democrats' position on the Iraq War. I'm posting that part here also with only minor changes for clarification where needed. (For those who haven't necessarily followed by earlier posts on the Iraq War, I've always thought the war was a terrible mistake even on narrowly-conceived national-security grounds.) Here's what I said in the Blue Voice post:
One weakness in the the more cautious approach associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is that it implicitly assumes that antiwar voters have nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. But the handwriting is on the wall on this one. Mr. "Shut Up!" himself, Bill O'Reilly, just came out against the Iraq War:
[H]ere is the essential problem in Iraq. There are so many nuts in the country - so many crazies - that we can't control them. And I don't - we're never gonna be able to control them. So the only solution to this is to hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible. Because we just can't control these crazy people. This is all over the place. And that was the big mistake about America: They didn't - it was the crazy-people underestimation. We did not know how to deal with them - still don't. But they're just all over the place. (Media Matters for America 02/22/06)
A lot of the liberal comment I saw on this focused on the blatant hypocrisy of it, though our postmodern Republicans reinvent reality so often that "hypocrisy" has almost become a meaningless concept with them. The Media Matters report says:
As Media Matters for America has documented, during a November 30, 2005, appearance on NBC's Today, O'Reilly called those advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq "pinheads" and compared them to Hitler appeasers.
Longtime conservative polemicist William Buckley is now also saying directly that the Iraq War is a bust :
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that "The bombing has completely demolished" what was being attempted - to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. (It Didn't Work National Review Online 02/24/06)
What we're seeing here is the further development of a Republican/conservative alibi for the Iraq War. For those who have been following the military's public discussions of the war, it's been obvious for a while now that the scramble to assign blame for failure is being pursued with great energy behind the scenes, and more and more often in public.
But now we're seeing more mass-market versions emerging. Buckley's version is aimed more at the highbrow segment of the Republican faithful, the ones who like to imagine they aren't part of a party dominated by superstitious flat-earthers. His argument says with dignified restraint that the natives in Iraq just aren't up to the higher calling of civilized behavior that the Bush administration expected of them. Nice try,but the savages aren't ready.
O'Reilly's version is the same argument but aimed more at middle-brow FOXists. They're just a bunch of crazy Arabs, his version says. They don't deserve our help any more. We did everything right but those Iraqi savages screwed it up. Same argument, different market segment.
The lowbrow version can easily be derived from those two. Except it will talk about dirty A-rabs and ungrateful "hajis" and so forth. What the lowbrow version will likely settle on pretty quickly - because anything else would require too much mental effort - is some version of, if we're going to war, we oughta fight to win! And if someone unaware of the inner wisdom of that statement asks, the alternative suggested to "win" will be something along the lines of, "We shoulda just killt us a lot more them dang hajis".
Now, Bills Buckley and O'Reilly are unlikely in the extreme to be endorsing Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean for President in 2008. Nor are they likely to win many voters among mean-minded white folks who get off by fantasizing about killin' foreigners.
What this kind of argument does do, though, is to give people who are disturbed about the war a way to rationalize voting for the Republicans even though they may be appalled by their foreign policies and by the Iraq War. We news junkies can easily make the mistake of assuming that voters are processing issues through the same kind of elaborate ideological structures that we get used to seeing from politicians, analysts and publicists.
Yet it's important to recognize that this kind of nativist-isolationist criticism is in a real sense the flip side of Bush-style unilateralism. And even calling it the "flip side" may understate how similar their assumptions are. Old Right isolationists are also opposed to US participation in the United Nations and to nuclear nonproliferation agreements. Radical free-marketers see international efforts to combat global warming as a deadly danger to their golden calf, Free Enterprise. And they are perfectly willing to promote a hostile nativism, just like supposedly "moderate" Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger are doing in pandering to the far-right Minutemen militia groups.
It's not at all far-fetched that a significant number of swing voters could be convinced that the Republicans are less warlike than the Democrats. One of the more lucid of the isolationist critics of the war, and one who is coming from what I would describe as largely an Old Right perspective, is Justin Raimondo, editorial director of the Antiwar.com site (which by no means restricts itself to highlighting only conservative critiques of the Bush policies). In a recent column at that site entitled Arianna Huffington, Racial Profiler, in which he defended the controversial UAE ports deal,he wrote:
She's right that the pro-war, pro-spending, pro-big government consensus extends to both parties, overarching the Left and the Right, but she seems blithely unaware that her own commentary best reflects the staleness of this orthodoxy. Nothing exemplifies this better than her view of the controversy surrounding the granting of Dubai Port World (DPW), an international shipping and port management company based in the United Arab Emirates, a franchise to manage maritime facilities in major American cities, including New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans. ...
I really don't have the stomach to wade through Arianna's farrago of falsehoods and catty cheap shots and follow down each and every link to its absurd dead end - go ahead, be my guest. But I'll say this: The HuffPuff and her gaggle of wild-eyed Democratic Party bloggers have no interest in this issue, or any other issue, except as a bludgeon with which to bash George W. Bush. They aren't antiwar - they're anti-Bush. Otherwise, they wouldn't be so eager to join in this latest orgy of Arabophobia. They would be sensitive to the atmospherics - to the clear message being broadcast by the U.S. Congress that Washington has no use for Arabs of any sort, no matter how pro-American, secularized, and capitalistic they may be. ...
Parading her ignorance with all the arrogance of a wealthy dowager flashing her diamonds, Arianna doesn't even begin to realize that her polemics could have dangerous - and even deadly - consequences. By ratcheting up the atmosphere of hate and hysteria that has characterized the relations between the Arab world and the West in recent weeks, she is lining up with the War Party. In open alliance with neocons like Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and the National Review/Weekly Standard crowd, Huffington and herfellow "progressives" are poisoning American politics to the point that "World War IV" - the wet dream ofevery neocon - becomes a distinct possibility.
The more stuff I see like this from Raimondo, the more reluctant I am to quote him when he actually does a good analysis of an issue. Which he often does. But what I want to illustrate with this point is how someone taking an antiwar stance and criticizing the Iraq War can rationalize that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, if not worse, when it comes to issues of war and peace. Raimondo is trying to make some other elaborate ideological point, which probably has something to do with his favorite obsession, alleged Israeli plots. ("War Party" in caps is used by Old Right isolationist types to mean "the Jews", as Raimondo surely knows.) But for all his antiwar fervor, which in many ways is in agreement with liberal critics of the Iraq War, he has no trouble making harsh propaganda against the Democrats.
In other words, its not be any means automatic that the Democrats will benefit politically from the debacle that the Iraq War has been pretty much since the day that Bush declared Mission Accomplished, if not even before. If the Democrats go down the road that Hillary started down by trying to sound more warlike on Iran's nuclear program than the Bush administration, they could very well fail to take advantage of a crucial opportunity to appeal to swing voters who are against the war.
And, more importantly in the long term, they could pass up the opportunity to reframe the national security issue on a much more constructive and pragmatic basis. We just have to get away from an atmosphere in which "sounding tough on national security" is equated with military threats and advocating war.
To gain an advantage from Bush's foreign policy and national-security failures, they will have to differentiate themselves on national security issues, hopefully by positioning themselves for a broad attack on Bush's foreign policy: pragmatic attacks on the Bush's administration's failure to adopt sensible "homeland security" measures; emphasizing how thin the administration's actual record on prosecuting terrorists and breaking up terrorist plans actually is; criticizing the Iraq War and all the deceptions and illegal actions connnected with it head-on; beginning tochallenge some of the blatant waste in the military budget (e.g., Star Wars) and the crony-capitalist excesses that are part it.
Ultimately, what the country needs is a much more realistic foreign policy, one that does is not based on illegal, preventive wars of aggression as the Bush Doctrine is. One that is not based on the assumption that the United States must spend most of the military dollars of the entire planet. And one that deals realistically with the still very real threat of international and domestic terrorism.
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