Political Constraints

by digby

Josh Marshall is chronicling the rapidly emerging rightwing “stab in the back” meme in which George W. Churchill was betrayed by both the American and Iraqi people. Big surprise. It’s an interesting series of posts and I urge you to read them all. Here’s an excerpt from one:

Stanley Kurtz’s excuse: “The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and “nation building” plans around those political constraints, crafting a “light footprint” military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq.”

It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who’ve pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren’t ‘domesic political constraints’. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.

That’s true enough for those who thought the war was even feasible from the get — and there were plenty of us who didn’t think so, which Josh acknowledges. But to the extent Democrats supported the war they certainly believed that Bush should have gotten UN backing, created a large coalition, put more boots on the ground and hired smart people who knew something about nation building, none of which he did.

I had actually assumed during the run-up that Bush thought he could get a large international coalition to join him simply because he was the president of the United States and when he told countries to join us, he meant it — and they would be so impressed with his mighty codpiece and magnificent “gut” they would do as they were told. I had long believed that it was when that failed that the large scale occupation force was no longer possible. That turned out to be wrong. Bush never gave a damn about a coalition, he wanted to use Rummy’s light force and he thought that democracy would magically happen because people everywhere just wanna be free. He has been revealed to be even more of an idiot than we previously thought.

But if the current stab-in-the-back argument is that the American people should have supported the war more, perhaps the people who are making that argument should go back and look at what the American people actually thought at the time we went in. It’s not something that couldn’t have been anticipated. A majority backed the war if the US could get an international coalition together. Throughout the run-up polls said over and over again that Americans expected Bush to get UN backing. He did not feel he needed to do that, he lied repeatedly, invaded anyway and once the invasion began most Americans rallied because they felt they had no choice. They hung in longer than they had any reason to.

So Kurtz is essentially right. The public had never fully approved of the war in the first place. But I don’t know why this translates to some sort of failure on the part of the public. It’s Bush’s fault for going ahead anyway and then making the whole mid-east FUBAR. His job — and the job of his followers — was to get the public on-board. They didn’t make an honest case and now they have to deal with the consequences.

I’m sorry that these starry-eyed neocons who looked at George Bush and saw a genius are disappointed that the rest of the country didn’t support their vision. They were given more of a chance to prove themselves than dreamers and fools usually are — and they failed on a grand scale. This is what the Bushites deserve and what they should expect for ram-rodding through a war without real public support and then screwing it up royally. The families of all these dead and wounded soldiers, unfortunately, didn’t deserve this and neither did the poor Iraqis who didn’t know they were going to be guinea pigs in a 7th grade neocon thought experiment based on cartoons and psycho-babble.

Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There’s nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous. (I know I’ve been enjoying it for the last couple of decades.) I’m sure all those independents and moderates who now see through Bush and the Republicans are going to love it too. It really clarifies your thinking.

This isn’t the 1970’s. They aren’t going to get away with blaming the cowardly public this time. There are no hippies to hate —- just millions of average, taxpaying, middle class Americans who know damned well when they’ve been lied to. And if they don’t, there are many of us out here who will remind them.

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