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I know this isn’t going to popular on this website, but may I just point something out?

A soldier’s #1 job is to stay alive. If you die, you can’t accomplish the mission, and you weaken your team and put your buddies in danger.

Obviously Sheehan’s son, I forget his name at the moment, didn’t die on purpose, and he may well have have had no control over the circumstances that let to his death.

BUT.

In war, there are no excuses. You find a way to stay alive, whatever it takes — if you’re a good soldier. Sheehan’s son didn’t do that. He paid the price. but he als failed the mission and let down his buddies.

As a soldier, he was a failure. He was brave (maybe), but he was also incompetent.

So, really, how much exactly are we supposed to grieve over this guy? Isn’t a certain amount of disapproval in order for the guy — and by extension his mom, for making such a fuss over a person who was, in the last analysis, by definition a loser?

So shouldn’t Mrs. Sheenhan be showing a little more shame about the situation and maybe not wanting to get her son and his shortcoming splashed all over the media?

Something to consider, anyway.

I shouldn’t have stolen that from Andrew’s comment section, but I needed to get it out there. To start the meme. To provide the right with the argument they’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been thinking for a while that we might be seeing the beginning of a new trend in American politics — the anti-military right. Rush is calling marines “pukes,” veterans are being called cowards and fakers, disabled vets are mocked for not having the right wounds or getting them in the right way, GOP hags are wearing cute little “purple heart” bandaids on their cheeks. People are selling busts of the president using his lack of combat experience as a selling point saying outright that physical courage is no longer particularly worthy of conservative approbation. Being a veteran buys you no credibility and no respect in today’s Real Murika.

This is how they transform Chickenhawkery into a badge of courage.

I suspect that what we are hearing (aside from the self-loathing fidgeting of those who loudly beat wardrums yet are too selfish to serve) is the distant rumblings of a massive rightwing frustration with the military’s inability to just “win” this damned thing so we can move on to our next country. It was supposed to be a cakewalk. They are reading things like this and seeing red:

Administration officials have all but given up any hope of militarily defeating the insurgents with U.S. forces, instead aiming only to train and equip enough Iraqi security forces to take over the fight themselves.

[…]

Top Pentagon officials have made no secret in recent weeks of their eagerness to begin withdrawing some troops to ease the strain of lengthy deployments. At the same time, military commanders have cautioned against expecting that Iraq’s new army and police forces will develop quickly enough to operate on their own within another year or two.

“It’s a race against time because by the end of this coming summer we can no longer sustain the presence we have now,” said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who visited Iraq most recently in June and briefed Cheney, Rice and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This thing, the wheels are coming off it.”

But none of this can’t be Dear Leader’s fault. He’s the man with the real courage.

Bush distanced himself from such predictions Thursday, pointing out that he, not the generals, would have the last word.

“The decision finally will be made by me — upon the recommendation of Gen. Casey, through [Defense] Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld, to me,” Bush said.

Well thank god for that. None of those pukes over there know what they’re doing. It’s a blessing that our commander in chief, the man with the political courage to start wars for no reason and bankrupt the country, is in charge. All hail Dear Leader.

Update: Guys, I realize that this might be a parody — or it might not. Wingnuts are just this crazy these days. That’s why wrote the little thing about getting the meme out there and providing them with an argument. It’s that absurd.

The larger point, however, is not. The right is getting a little bit disresepctful toward the military these days. It’s not marching quite to their tune the yway they want it to — which is to kick ass and move on.

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It’s About Time

Check out Arthur’s response to the inchoate anger towards Cindy Sheehan. It’s a good one.

Returning to the present controversy about Mrs. Sheehan, one aspect of John Cole’s remarks deserves comment:

I think Cindy Sheehan has moved beyond the role of grieving mother, and is now a political figure who gets no free pass for her bizarre, outrageous, and offensive statements.

No one has ever maintained that Cindy Sheehan’s views are entitled to a “free pass.” But it is not her views that are being attacked: it is Cindy Sheehan as a person. Cole thinks many in the “anti-war left” are “cynically exploiting” Mrs. Sheehan’s tragedy. Perhaps some of them are. If that’s true, I wouldn’t like it much (although my mind-reading skills are not too advanced, so I can’t determine people’s motives that easily in the absence of sufficient evidence).

But here’s the truth, which I do not hesitate to name: given the propaganda onslaught that’s gone on for the last several years with regard to Iraq—and the propaganda onslaught that is now underway with regard to Iran, with a still willing and still servile media—I don’t give a damn. Cindy Sheehan is being “cynically exploited” in order to stimulate a national discussion about whether we should get the hell out of Iraq? Good. It’s about goddamned time.

Exactly. Although I’m pretty sure that Cindy Sheehan hasn’t been guided or exploited by anyone in her quest. “The left,” if you’re talking about organizations, can’t get it up to do anything that effective. Believe me, the Democrats would have peed their pants at the idea of sending a woman to Crawford to demand to see the president. It’s so awfully unseemly you know. Someone might get upset. Besides it isn’t manly and we want ever so much to be super-duper manly.

In fact, last year at this time, if you’ll recall, Max Cleland went down to Crawford and wheeled his chair right up to the gate. The Democrats got all nervous that it was too … undignified. Max was getting a little bit shrill, you see, and looked like he might be getting ready to force the secret service to push him off the property in his wheelchair. How indelicate.

No, this was a grassroots move started by one individual who felt strongly enough to put herself on the line. No leftwing group could have ever orchestrated anything this successful.

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They’re New At This

Here’s a blog report from Camp Casey yesterday when the counter protestors arrived. I’m sure everybody’s heard by now that they were all chanting “we don’t care” which is right up there with “hey, hey ho, ho, social security’s got to go” for sheer political brilliance.

But this really cracks me up:

They’ve got a whole bunch of counter-protesters walking down the street towards Camp Casey like a parade, about 50 people. One is holding a sign that says “Help, I am surrounded by American-hating idiots!” He is apparently quite proud of his sign, Not exactly the brightest bunch!

I just want to shake that guy’s hand. He was a plant wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?

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Mendacious, outrageous…

Yesterday I said that Cindy Sheehan is driving the Republicans crazy because she is asking the unanswerable question. The cognitive dissonence is short circuiting their cerebral cortexes. Today The Poorman catches John Cole having a total meltdown, which doesn’t surprise me because Cole actually has a brain and he often uses it. These are the first to have their heads explode in situations like this.

If you haven’t linked to this Poorman post from Atrios’ site already, do so at your own risk. You will laugh until you cry but the evil kitten-man will also implant the nastiest, most unkillable, earworm you’ve ever had in your life. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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The Other Opinion

“Our interest in the event is consistent with our past support of causes related to the victims of September 11 and the veterans of wars past and present,” said Eric Grant, spokesman for The Post. “The event was never presented to The Post as a rally to support the war. We would be disappointed if it took that approach.”

The Pentagon spokewoman seems to think something different:

Mrs. Barber said organizers and police expect anti-war backlash. “It would be naive to do anything in Washington and not expect the other opinion,” she said.

Protesting the walk, she said, would be tantamount to “protesting the events of September 11 or protesting our veterans.”

Clearly, this is not expected to be a standard fourth of July, John Philip Sousa freedom-fest. Any child can see exactly what’s going on. The pentagon is very cynically using 9/11 as their 3,000-dead-civilian-humans shield to stage a war rally. The bastards.

We have a day set aside to honor Veterans. It’s called Veterans Day. The whole country gets the day off and everything. We also have a holiday set aside to commemorate the fallen in wars throughout our history. The whole country gets the day off for that too. It’s called Memorial Day. Both of those holidays are appropriate days for the Pentagon to hold events. Veterans Day is the perfect day for a march and a concert — and they’ve been holding them on that day for many, many decades. Memorial Day, of course, should be more solemn with the traditional ceremonies at the various War Memorials.

September 11th is a civilian day of mourning. If the Pentagon wants to hold a memorial service for those who died in the Pentagon that day, fine. Staging a march and a concert is in terrible bad taste. And if I’m not mistaken, there were some who were very upset at this kind of thing not long ago — and that event wasn’t paid for by the tax payers and sponsored by the media:

“What a complete, total, absolute sham,” said Vin Weber, a former U.S. representative from Minnesota. “The DFL clearly intends to exploit Wellstone’s memory totally, completely and shamelessly for political gain. To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event.”

September 11th apparently is just another opportunity to sing along with “I-raq and Roll.”

But…. for those of you who won’t be able to make it to the big event in Washington, in New York the day before you can go to another memorial rally, organized by Take Back Our Memorial — which is not sponsored by 9/11 families as it appears, but is instead the work of a confused gay right wing blogger who has a blog called Lime Shurbet. (Like all cosmopolitan, hypocritical wingnut fag hags, Michelle Malkin is a big fan.)

For those who are looking forward to attending the solemn event in New York on the 10th, lets hope that Robert will be there to provide some inspiration on that sad day. Here’s what you might expect:

I hope Cindy Sheehan brought lube to Crawford because every anti-war moonbat in this country looks to be jockeying for a chance to ride her ass.

Update: I understand from Robert Shurbet that the web site Take Back Our Memorial, while not being officially sponsored by the some 9/11 family organizations, is acting as a clearing house for various activities they support. Shurbet says these groups are sponsoring the rally so I stand corrected.

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Courage

I think we’ve found Kaye Grogan’s day job:

President Bush is a Leader who has the courage to lead. It is political courage. It is not poll driven it is conviction driven. It is consistent and does not change because of pressure or threats of political survival. It is reconfirmed every day. It differs from combat courage in that it is thought oriented not reaction oriented. Combat courage does not necessarily translate into political courage. Combat courage is admirable and you only know if you have it when you are in combat. President Bush has demonstrated that he has political courage and this is why he was re-elected. By owning a bust of President Bush, Commander in Chief you will be making a statement and in a politically charged environment, it takes courage.

Unless your decorating style is early meth lab, it takes courage in any environment. I think the eyes move and everything.

“Combat courage” while admirable (I gue-uss) is nothing compared to “political courage.” See, warriors are “reaction” oriented instead of “thought” oriented like our brave preznit. In fact, the whole military is nothing but a bunch ‘o pukes when you stop and think about it. Real men don’t fight wars. They join the Republican party and run for office and then get re-elected by demonstrating political courage.

And the neat thing is that he’s wearing his hot chippendales flight suit in the sculpture. That’s because even though he isn’t a puke, he’s still our Commander in Chief and he looks better in a uniform than any old combat puke ever could.

Update: Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast astutely observes that “resoluteness” and consistency is exactly what child psychologists advise that parents must show to young traumatized children. TV’s Supernanny says the same thing — routine, predictablity are what young children need to feel safe. Jill writes:

In the nearly four years since 9/11, Americans have been like the young children who are the subject of the above article, and they have responded to the President’s “consistent” message the way a child would — as a sign that everything’s going to be OK, instead of as an adult should — by comparing the message to the reality and realizing that this president isn’t “resolute”, he’s delusional.

Changing one’s mind and one’s approach in light of new evidence is what an adult does. Only a child continues to insist that Santa Claus is real even after catching Mommy and Daddy putting the presents under the tree and eating the cookies. But this insistence on believing everything George Bush says is a symptom of the persistent juvenile state in which American adults have wallowed since 9/11. His “consistency” and the petulant way he has of continuing to insist that the Iraq war ws the right thing to do are reassuring to adults having who are still unable to accept that there’s nothing special about our status as Americans that is going to keep us safe in this current world. It’s that reassurance that keeps them from facing the lies that he told about why he wanted to go to war in Iraq. Because if Daddy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it feels to many people as if the rug was pulled out from under them.

It’s polite to say “Americans” but she’s really talking about Republicans. The rest of us have felt much more insecure since our “Daddy” sat stunned at the moment of crisis and ever since then has been acting like a drunk 15 year old with the keys to his brother’s corvette.

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The Appearance Of Winning

This cracks me up. In a story called “No Clear Finish Line” Peter Baker examines the fact that the administration is really becoming stuck in its Iraq policy as the country turns against the war.

Failure to meet the deadline, analysts say, would be a devastating setback to Bush and could accelerate the sense at home that the process is not going well. Alarmed by falling domestic support for the war, Bush aides resolved in June to rally the public by having the president take a more visible role explaining his strategy and predicting victory. Bush flew to Fort Bragg, N.C., to deliver a prime-time address pleading for patience, part of what aides said would be a sustained campaign.

But Bush then largely dropped the subject until yesterday’s meeting at the ranch, addressing the war mainly in reaction to the latest grisly events on the ground. In the ensuing vacuum, Rumsfeld and the U.S. effort in Iraq have come under increasing fire even from Bush supporters, such as Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and the American Spectator magazine.

“The Bush administration has lost control of its public affairs management of this issue,” said Christopher F. Gelpi, a Duke University scholar whose analyses of wartime public opinion have been studied in the White House. “They were so focused on this through 2004. . . . I don’t know why they’ve slipped.”

Now let’s think about this. In 2004 what was going on? Oh that’s right. A presidential election. And who was running that election? Oh that’s right, Karl Rove. Hmmm — what’s happened since then that would put them so off their game?

And even more astounding, what could have happened in Iraq that made them lose control of the public affairs management? Could it be — reality?

Gelpi, if you recall, is one of the public opinion experts who told the president that people don’t care about why a nation goes to war, only if it can win:

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

“The most important single factor in determining public support for a war is the perception that the mission will succeed,” Gelpi said in an interview yesterday.

[…]

In studying past wars, they have drawn lessons different from the conventional wisdom. Bush advisers challenge the widespread view that public opinion turned sour on the Vietnam War because of mounting casualties that were beamed into living rooms every night. Instead, Bush advisers have concluded that public opinion shifted after opinion leaders signaled that they no longer believed the United States could win in Vietnam.

Most devastating to public opinion, the advisers believe, are public signs of doubt or pessimism by a president, whether it was Ronald Reagan after 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors were killed in a barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, forcing a U.S. retreat, or Bill Clinton in 1993 when 18 Americans were killed in a bloody battle in Somalia, which eventually led to the U.S. withdrawal there.

The more resolute a commander in chief, the Bush aides said, the more likely the public will see a difficult conflict through to the end. “We want people to understand the difficult work that’s ahead,” said a senior administration official who insisted on anonymity to speak more freely. “We want them to understand there’s a political process to which the Iraqis are committed and there’s a military process, a security process, to which we, our coalition partners and the Iraqis are committed. And that there is progress being made but progress in a time of war is tough.

There is nothing that isn’t just a matter of PR and marketing to these people. Unfortunately when your soft drink tastes like horse piss, you have a problem no matter how resolute you are about saying it tastes good. Apparently they all agree that if the president just goes around singing “I’d like to build Iraq a coke” until you feel like jamming icepicks in your eardrums, everyone will be satisfied.

Here’s the problem. People might be willing to stay the course and stick with the mission — if they knew what it fucking was. They’ve changed their rationale so many times that nobody has a clue. And people aren’t as dumb as these guys think they are. Setting phony “benchmarks” in a process nobody understands isn’t “winning.”

What does winning in Iraq mean? That we’ve created a beautiful Jeffersonian democracy in the mid-east that is so successful that everybody sees it and says “I want that too?” Or is it “training” the Iraqi forces to become the new strongman’s Gestapo? Is it an Islamic state along the lines of Iran? Or is it as David “let them eat cakewalk” Ignatius says, we will have won if Iraq finally gets down to having a functioning society 30 years from now?

Ridding the world of evil, or winning the war on terror, or spreading freedom and democracy are impossible to quantify. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons why,as Wolfowitz put it so prosaicly, WMD was the only reason “they could all agree on.” (And then there turned out not to be any…)

You can’t convince people they are winning a war that has no real purpose and is unwinnable in any real sense. These are slogans not goals. The president can blather on forever about how resolute he is but unless he can convince people that he knows what winning is, and that it’s a cause the American people actually want to win (as opposed to installing a new Ayatollah in iraq)and that we are actually, you know, winning, it cannot work.

It was fine during the presidential campaign when people were making a one on one comparison and judged that he was the one they thought could “win” — whatever it was. Now that he’s out there on his own, he’s actually going to have prove it. And he can’t. Because I don’t think he gives a shit about freedom and democracy and wouldn’t have th first clue about how to define what winning in Iraq would be.

He’s probably going to declare victory and strut around in a codpiece sometime around election day. It bought him some time before — at this point I think all he cares about is getting through these next three years and then demanding blow jobs from the Carlyle Group for the rest of his life. The only winning he ever cared about was winning the last election.

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Gearing Up

Amanda Marcotte and quite a few others are upset that NARAL pulled their ad. But I think the ad did what it was intended to do. They were only running it in a couple of states, remember. It was designed to cause controversy. And it succeeded. Yesterday the story was on the front page of the NY Times.

They used the swift boat model. Oh yes, all the congoscenti are clutching their pearls and the anti-choice groups are running their own ads and everybody’s in a tizzy. But just as the swift boat ads were targeting veterans and military types who were possibly lulled into complacency by Kerry’s war record, NARAL is targeting pro-choice women who may not yet realize how high the stakes have suddenly become. They are trying to wake them up to the threat and sometimes it takes a firestorm to do that. The details don’t matter, it’s the headline and the image.

I don’t know if the tactic succeeded, but I don’t believe it hurt the greater cause any, despite the handwringing about its “intemperence.” (Where would we be if liberal pundits couldn’t call for the smelling salts everytime some liberals forget their manners.) They could put on a tea party and have everyone wear white gloves and the right would still say the feminazis are on the march.

NARAL is playing a rough game and they are willing to take some heat to do it. They give cover to pro-choicers in the Senate who feel they must pretend to be above such nastiness to do their solemn duty (although why the other pro-coice groups piled on is beyond me.) They’ll now put out a more “temperate” ad that will not inspire nearly the same level of vitriol — and the other side is running ads about ads, always a good thing. I think it was a pretty good play.

Let’s face some ugly facts. Roberts is almost assuredly going to be confirmed. I wish I had some hope that we could stop him — hell, I wish we could stop all of them. Not that we shouldn’t try, but unless something really shocking is revealed I just don’t see it. There is no way that the gang of 14 is going to go along with a filibuster on this guy and it will take pictures of him dressed in his Peppermint Patty costume with Karl Rove naked on a dog leash to get enough Republican defectors. (That would probably lock in their support, actually)

No, the point here is to punch hard for Rehnquist’s seat — the one that will swing the court definitively. I know we don’t want to have to face this, but the fact is that when we “lost” last November it always meant that a guy like Roberts, right wing hit man that he is, would probably be the best we could hope for. Which is nothing.

For the pro-choice advocates, the stakes could not be higher. If Roe vs Wade is overturned, they are looking at spending years — decades — fighting tooth and nail in places like Alabama, Missouri, Utah and Mississippi to try to win back for women the rights they have had for the last 30 years.

I know that some people think that’s a radical and unlikely outcome, and I can’t figure out why. It is quite clear that a fairly large number of states are going to make abortion illegal and very quickly too. While some Democrats blithely discuss whether it wouldn’t really “be better” if the states handled abortion and allowed the local people to decide such a thing (never mind that the woman who needs an abortion and can’t just jump on a plane to California will just have to take one for the team) for pro-choice advocates it means that they are going to have to ramp up their advocacy to unprecedented levels, hire huge staffs to begin the legal challenges and defenses that are going to be required in probably at least 25 legislatures and courts.

They are rallying their troops in hopes that they will be able to stop that horrid eventuality, but if they can’t they are going to need lots and lots of help and they know it. And all the while the constitutional right to privacy that undergirds the entire panoply of reproductive freedom issues is going to remain under assault.

I would suggest that any young lawyers out there who are sympathtic with this cause study up on the history of abortion law in your state and begin to think about strategies. It’s highly unlikely that Roe vs Wade is going to stand. No matter how much people believe that keeping it legal is a masterful Rovian strategy to keep the rubes hungry, they are going to have to deliver someday. They will do it by throwing it to the states. The rubes will then be more than thrilled to keep fighting for the fetus there.

Update: I just realized that none other than Bob Novak, who must be back on his meds (or I need to go on some) more or less agrees with me that this isn’t really about the Roberts nomination and that NARAL is playing a longer game.

The current hard count for Roberts is 60 senators. That would be more than enough to confirm him and barely enough to end a filibuster. But it is not enough to further the grand strategy for a conservative court. At least 70 votes for confirmation may be needed to make it comfortable for President Bush to name somebody at least as conservative as Roberts to the next vacancy, which soon may be in the offing.

The 30-second television ad aired nationally by NARAL Pro-Choice America this week claimed that Roberts as a young Justice Department lawyer supported bombing of abortion clinics. In fact, he worked on a brief intended to protect peaceful picketing. NARAL’s approach was not meant to sway the Senate but to pick off nervous Democrats and perhaps a Republican or two, keeping Roberts as close to 60 votes as possible. The president and his closest advisers then would have to ask themselves: If a nominee as squeaky clean as John Roberts cannot do better than this, can we risk nominating another conservative for the next vacancy?

For those of you playing at home, if Novakula is right we have at least 14 5 Democrats who are going to vote for Roberts. I say “at least” because it’s theoretically possible that a Republican or two (or Jeffords) might not. There will be no filibuster.

Novak is probably right that in that case, barring a shocker, this is all about keeping the vote low enough that Bush doesn’t think he can nominate Randell Terry next time. The best we can hope for is to play at the very margins. Depressing.

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When Will Iraq Be Free?

An e-mail from Rick Perlstein and some of the comments from others to my post below, have made me realize that there is a corollary to The Question:

George Bush said that Casey Sheehan died in a noble cause. We know that this noble cause was not to “disarm Sadam Hussein” because Saddam Hussein had already been disarmed. Perhaps some thought that he hadn’t and so pushed for war, but that is not noble. That’s a terrible mistake.

We know that this noble cause was not to fight terrorism. There was no terrorism in Iraq, it had no association with 9/11 and they knew it. The terrorist mastermind of 9/11 remains at large — his number two guy just put out another video. By all accounts the invasion of Iraq has inspired terrorist recruiting. And terrorists just attacked London, the capital of our closest ally. Perhaps some thought that invading a country that had nothing to do with terrorism in order to fight terrorism was noble, but it isn’t. That’s a horrible delusion.

So, we are left with the final reason. We are there for the noble purpose of bringing freedom to the middle east.

The question then becomes: Have we brought freedom to Iraq?

It is occupied by a foreign power and is dividing and sub-dividing among ethnic and religious factions that are killing Americans and each other. And they are very likely to put in place religious laws that will make half of the country, along all religious and ethnic lines, demonstrably less free than they were under Saddam. Our occupation is creating conditions that make freedom more unlikely than if we leave. As president Bush famously said, “they’re not happy they’re occupied. I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.”

So, I ask these people who can so easily dismiss all the earlier reasons they fervently believed demonstrated that invading Iraq was a noble and just cause: If we haven’t yet brought freedom to Iraq, when will Iraq be free?

I certainly hope that nobody is going to say that Casey Sheehan died so that Iraq can spend the next thirty years in a civil war, as the Marie Antoinette of the beltway, David Ignatius, suggested. He believes that America’s noble cause will be a success if we turn Iraq into Lebanon circa 1975:

The alarm bells are ringing in Iraq this summer. I don’t agree with Gaaod that it’s time to abandon Iraqi democracy. And I don’t think the Bush administration should jettison its baseline strategy of training Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. troops. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s trip to Iraq this week carried the implicit message that America’s time, money and patience in Iraq are not endless. The Iraqis must step up and find their own solutions.

Wise observers see new cause for anxiety. John Burns of the New York Times suggested last Sunday that an Iraqi civil war may already have begun, in the Sunni suicide attacks against Shiite targets and in the anti-Sunni death squads that are said to have been organized by Shiite militias. Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, wrote a column yesterday, “Preparing for a shipwreck in the Middle East,” in which he cautioned: “The American adventure in Iraq — creative, bold and potentially revolutionary — threatens to sink under the weight of a Sunni insurgency that has fed off the Bush administration’s frequent incompetence in prosecuting postwar stabilization and rehabilitation.”

A useful rule about Iraq is that things are never as good as they seem in the up times, nor as bad as they seem in the down times. That said, things do look pretty darn bad right now, and U.S. officials need to ponder whether their strategy for stabilizing the country is really working.

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn’t so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn’t provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

What happens in Iraq will depend on Iraqi decisions. One of those is whether the Iraqi people continue to want U.S. help in rebuilding their country. For now, America’s job is to keep training an Iraqi army and keep supporting an Iraqi government — even when those institutions sometimes seem to be illusions. Iraq is in torment, but the Lebanon example suggests that with patient help, its institutions can survive this nightmare.

I’ll probably be dead by the time Iraq would get through the next 35 years of bloodshed, along with hundreds of thousands of much younger Iraqis and Americans who will be killed before their time, so I won’t be able to celebrate the noble success of keeping institutions, as opposed to people, alive.

Spencer Ackerman in TNR said it best:

In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs’ Square. (Hey, you need martyrs, right?) It’s a debatable contention whether the “national identity” of Lebanon survived, though sectarian loyalty certainly deepened. What aren’t debatable contentions are that 100,000 people didn’t survive, nearly another million were displaced, and one of the world’s premier jihadist networks, the still-powerful Hezbollah, was born. These aren’t footnotes, and I have a feeling that the participants of the Cedar Revolution would never dream of treating them as such.

So, yes, an Iraqi civil war–which could be as bad as, or even worse than, Lebanon’s civil war–really is the end of the debate about whether the decision to invade Iraq was justified. (As TNR editorialized a year ago: “Iraq’s political future could well be decided by guns rather than ballots. If another dictator murders his way to power, or the country dissolves into violent fiefdoms, the war will have proved not just a strategic failure, but a moral one as well.”) Sure, something would follow a civil war, but our enterprise won’t and shouldn’t be judged by that far-distant outcome. Instead, it should be judged by the path that led, under U.S. auspices, to widespread sectarian violence.

If we invaded Iraq to liberate it only to watch it decend into chaos,sectarian violence or fundamentalist theocratic rule (which we will, of course, eventually escape because as Don Rumsfeld says, “our patience is not infinite”) then invading Iraq will finally, definitively not be a noble cause. Freedom may be untidy — this is a bloody misbegotten mess. It is possible that this will not happen. But each day that goes by the odds are getting worse. And in every measurable way so far, the Iraqis in their everyday lives are less free than they were before. They are in constant danger of being killed in random and not so random violence over which they have no control. Violent anarchy is not freedom.

Oh, and by the way, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism continues unabated.

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The Question

I’ve been wondering what it is about Cindy Sheehan that’s gotten under people’s skin. Her loss is horrible and everyone can see that she is deeply pained.(Only the lowest, cretinous gasbags are crude enough to attack her in her grief.) She’s a very articulate person and she’s incredibly sincere. But she’s touched a deeper nerve than just the personal one.

A couple of months ago, when the Downing Street Momos came out and the media elite pooh poohed them as nothing but old news, I wrote a post called “The Elephant”:

…the Downing Street Memo gives the press the chance to ask, finally, why we really invaded Iraq.

Have any of you been at a social gathering in which this question comes up? Have you felt the palpable discomfort? Nobody really knows. Those that adhere to the “CIA fucked up” rationale can’t explain Downing Street. Those who think you had to back the government in a time of war, are visibly discomfitted by the fact that we never found any WMD. Flypaper is crap…

Yes, we already knew the intelligence was fixed, we knew they understood that Saddam was no threat, we knew they lied to the American people and we knew that they intended to go to war no matter what.

But we still don’t know for sure why they did all that. Until we do, I don’t think we will be able to figure out how to deal with it.

I asked “why did we invade Iraq” and commenters had dozens of possible reasons. Everybody “knows” why Bush did it — oil, revenge, imperial ambition, because he could etc, etc etc. There are many possible reasons and perhaps the truth is that there wasn’t one reason. But we really don’t know.

Atrios posted a question from a reader around that time about the same subject in which he or she asked:

…Can’t someone come up with a pithy sound bite that captures this and makes it accessible to a non-political, non-foreign policy public? I love your indignation and your explanations, but I have a hard time seeing this go anywhere without a talking point that even a Democratic senator can remember.

That’s what Cindy Sheehan has finally been able to do. And it’s why she’s driving the Republicans crazy.

I said I want the president to explain what was the noble cause that my son died in, because that’s what he said the other day when those 14 marines were killed. He said their families can rest assured that their sons and daughters died for a noble cause. And I said, “What is that noble cause?”

It is not an academic exercise for her. She lost her son — and she’d like to know why. Nobody can explain to her — or to any of us — why we invaded Iraq and why people are dying. They said it was to protect us — but it wasn’t a threat. Then they said it was to liberate the Iraqi people, but Saddam and his government are a memory and yet the Iraqi people are still fighting us and each other. Our invasion of iraq has inspired more terrorism, not less. Oil prices are higher than they’ve ever been. The country is swimming in debt. People are being killed and maimed with the regularity of the tides.

And everybody knows this. Deep inside they know that something has gone terribly wrong. We were either lied to or our leaders are verging on the insanely incompetent. That’s why when Cindy Sheehan says that she wants to ask the president why her son died — in those simple terms — it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s not just rhetorical.

She literally doesn’t know why her son had to die in Iraq. And neither do we.

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