A Wedge Issue To Exploit

by poputonian

DemFromCT at The Next Hurrah picks up on what might be the season’s most critical election issue:

Is the Iraq civil war a “good” war?

The point being made is that how the Iraq war is characterized can help determine the likelihood of Congress to continue its support for the war, and also, and perhaps more significantly, help determine the likelihood of American voters to continue sacrificing their children in someone else’s war.

Basically, DfCT’s post deconstructs how the Republicans got to their desired new framing, the one being promulgated by GWB’s current speech campaign, where the Chief Executive offers perfumed pink clouds as an antidote for administration-induced fear. DfCT then goes on to suggest the alternative frame by quoting from a News and Observer op-ed:

Facts have also accumulated to conspire against the administration’s preferred frame. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda in Iraq is dead, Iraqis are killing each other at a much greater rate (approximately 3,400 per month) than they are killing U.S. troops, and American generals have admitted the possibility of a “civil war” fought along sectarian lines.

The generals’ frank admission has created a temporally limited opportunity for critics of the war to reframe the conflict and begin to credibly discuss disengagement alternatives.

Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia apparently seized upon this potential when he recently speculated that the president might need a new statutory authorization from Congress legitimizing American involvement in a nascent Iraqi civil war. Acknowledgment of a civil war would truncate the U.S. intervention into three phases: a major combat operations victory, a counterinsurgency campaign draw, and a civil war of which many Americans want no part and legislators did not approve.

This recognition offers an opportunity (for either side of the aisle) to reframe the war as a humanitarian intervention with questionable prospects for success. Ample research has shown that Americans are less tolerant of casualties in this type of war — suggesting that they might be persuaded the time has come to begin the process of disengaging from Iraq.

Isn’t using the term “civil war” a wedge tactic that could gain bipartisan support, and one which the Dems should fully exploit? DemFromCt says yes, and says it much better than I can. Inquisitive political minds should read the full post in order to capture its saliency.

By the way, who said this: ” … the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people … is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”