I saw Phil Lesh at the Tower Theater last night and he jammed out. My mind is putty this morning. I sat down to read the morning papers and I am glad to see Armando has taken Fred Hiatt apart limb from limb. Hiatt’s position is that the Democrats are undermining the war effort for political advantage. Apparently, we are not supposed to talk about the manipulation of intelligence in the lead-up to the war because it erodes public support for the debacle in Iraq.
But the aptness of Mahdi’s view of the United States is already evident in Congress, which pours most of its Iraq-related energy into allegations of manipulated intelligence before the war.
“Those aren’t irrelevant questions,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). “But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to sustain public support for the war.”
What Lieberman doesn’t say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush’s war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy — to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.
I am very sorry, Fred, that the we don’t have any great alternatives to getting the fuck out of Iraq. It’s not like any of our advice has been heeded at any stage of this phony war. It’s not like the commanders in the field have been listened to when they asked for more troops. If we went into a preemptive war based on forged documents that were fixed around the policy and none of our advice has had any effect on the way the war has been conducted, one eventually has to ask what the point would be of offering an “alternative strategy”.
The bottom line is that it is too late to salvage our Excellent Iraqi Adventure, and it is ridiculous to fault Democrats for not having a plan to save Bush’s bacon. What is needed is some honesty, not false bravado and self-censorship.
