... when it comes to Iraq. And apparently Russ Feingold has too. I'm still not convinced that withdrawal won't lead to civil war, but I am increasingly convinced that staying indefinitely is delaying the inevitable at a very high price. Feingold's very smart to be first out of the gate on this one -- especially if he's looking to run in 2008.
Sadly, the title for this post is not sarcastic. Marc Cooper brings the unfortunate, if not all that surprising, news -- originally reported by Al Jazeera -- that Ramsey Clark is joining Saddam Hussein's legal defense team. Clark was an attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, but he's long since gone off the deep end into the authoritarian loony left.
I share Cooper's extreme distaste for Clark and his various protest outfits. (As an impetuous first-year, I even wrote a letter to the local alternative paper blasting the outfit, which immediately accused me of red-baiting). But I don't agree with his conclusion that ANSWER's sponsorship of several of the larger protests did serious damage to the anti-war movement's effectiveness, if for no other reason than the organization's sinister political agenda went mostly unnoticed in mainstream press coverage. There may be a way for massive street protests to be an effective tool for political persuasion, but the anti-war ones mostly weren't, regardless of whether Clark was associated with them.
Another soldier from my town has just been killed in Iraq. I believe he's the third. And I'm from an affluent, well-educated suburb -- not a demographic heavy on military enlistments.
I was able to time my visit back to Hampshire so as to see Seymour Hersh's lecture yesterday afternoon. Somebody over as Daily Kos has posted a great diary entry summarizing the speech, which is worth checking out (Hampsters: check the comments for misc. Valley gossip).
As I said to several people afterwards, Hersh didn't say very many things that I didn't already know. But he put them together with such conviction and urgency that the cumulative effect was something of a punch to the gut. In particular, his repeated insistence that there was no conceivable scenario in which the Bush administration changes course on its own.
At the outset of the campaign, there were smart people speculating that Bush (or, more precisely, Rove) would begin to move towards claiming victory and planning for a major troop pullout. Based on the polls, that would've been the smart thing to do; I think he would've won with a much healthier margin.
But clearly that didn't happen, and Hersh's central point -- that Bush has an irrational and steadfast commitment to this crusade -- now seems to be dead-on. Even more disturbingly, he argued that the only scenario for a serious course correction involves some combination of European intervention and American macroeconomic catastrophe.
Not a pleasant thought.
Anyone who says, 'I don't care if Bush gets elected' is basically telling poor and working people in the country, 'I don't care if your lives are destroyed. I don't care whether you are going to have a little money to help your disabled mother. I just don't care, because from my elevated point of view I don't see much difference between them.' That's a way of saying, 'Pay no attention to me, because I don't care about you.' Apart from its being wrong, it's a recipe for disaster if you're hoping to ever develop a popular movement and a political alternative.
And Seymor Hersh on the Bush administration:
Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe.
So Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall think the press is giving Kerry a bum rap on Iraq.
Quoth Marshall:
Sometimes in baseball a batter decides to take a pitch. He's decided in advance that he's not going to swing no matter what comes down the pike. But in most cases, when a batter steps up to the plate, he doesn't decide whether he's going to swing until he sees the pitch. Only an idiot decides in advance not knowing what he's going to face. And yet this is roughly what the Bush camp says was the only reasonable, or I suppose manly, approach to the Iraq war.I see the war decision in very similar terms to this baseball analogy. Voting for the war resolution was not remotely the same thing as going to war at the first possible opportunity.
Of course it was, for the very simple reason that (still quoting Marshall):
Bush went to the plate knowing he was going to swing at whatever pitch he got.
There are then two possible explanations for Kerry's vote:
1) He's so stupid that he had no idea that Bush was hell-bent on attacking Iraq, despite all the available evidence pointing in that direction.
2) He knew damn well that Bush was going to go to war regardless, but he was too chickenshit to take a stand.
So which is it -- is Kerry a moron or a coward?
I caught a fascinating panel disccussion on C-SPAN the other day about the future of the Iraq. It was put on by the Center for American Progress, but the really provocative comments came from Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute(!), who argued strongly that the U.S. would be wise to get out of Iraq now -- that the timetable should be months, not years.
I'm having a hard time reconciling myself to any proposal on the issue. On the one hand, I remain vigorously opposed to the administration having gone to war, and to its continuing insistence that Americans should be deciding on how and when the country transitions to democracy. And I want us to stop spending billions of dollars and sacrificing the lives of hundreds of young men and women for such purposes.
But at the same time, I don't think it's a moral -- or even strategically wise -- course of action to aid a dictator's rise to power then destroy a country with two wars and a decade of economic sanctions, only to turn around, say "oops" and let it fall into the hands of whoever winds up with the most guns. And let's not kid ourselves: that would be the consequence of an immediate pull-out from Iraq. There is no international community waiting in the wings to come in and pick up the pieces. Iraqis deserve the chance to live under a democratic government, on their own terms, not George Bush's or Muqtada al-Sadr's.
Meanwhile, Ruy Teixiera (an increasingly good person to be reading as the campaign season heats up), chimes in with some polling-driven criticism of the Kerry message on Iraq:
Personally, I think Democratic voters are likely to stick with Kerry no matter what his Iraq position--because they want to get rid of Bush so badly. What I worry about is his ability to appeal to independent voters, without some kind of exit strategy.
Very interesting.