I’ve gained some respect for Al Gore since he ‘lost’ the election of 2000. But I volunteered for Bill Bradley for a simple reason. In addition to sharing my roots in Princeton, in New Jersey, and as a Knick (I’m a fan), Bradley offered an alternative to what I considered to be the most godawful choice in modern American political history: George W. Bush or Al ‘no controlling legal authority’ Gore. But the depth of our political decadence didn’t become clear until Bush and Gore made their vice-presidential selections. And that is what makes William Kristol’s observation all the more rich.
The 1990s were a silly time. But that decade did produce, at its close, an impressive pair of vice presidential candidates–Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Both spoke up last Thursday as the congressional debate over Iraq reached a new low.
It wasn’t immediately clear just how unimpressive Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman would be. Seven years later, Lieberman has been cast out of the party he was primed to lead, and Dick Cheney has come to personify deceit and warmongering. Bill Kristol hails them as visionaries. Bill Kristol may soon find himself, like Lieberman, persona non grata in his own party. He certainly isn’t telling them what they want to hear.
Last week, Dick Cheney told Fox News that he didn’t come to Washington to worry about the fate of the Republican Party. Kristol nodded approvingly. Who are the rank and file Republicans to worry about their job security? And, for Kristol, they’re in a no-win situation anyway, so they should STFU.
Do the Republicans who want Bush to cut and run really think they would benefit if Iraq were to blow up, with U.S. troops helplessly standing by watching the slaughter, the full spectacle of American defeat unfolding before the American people? Here is a fine posture for a Republican to assume in 2008: I voted for the war, and then I voted for the surrender. Who in their right mind would vote for such a person?
We might ask who would vote for someone that had time to tell General Custer not to enter the valley of the Little Big Horn, but failed to do so out of concern that it would look like ‘surrender’? Custer lost that ill-advised battle with the Sioux, but it had no effect on the ultimate outcome of the war. It pays to remember that when it comes to Kristol’s critique of the Democrats.
As for the Democrats, they are in a way less abject. Most of them simply believe the war is lost, or that it should be lost, and want to throw in the towel. The day after panicked Republicans descended on the White House, almost three-fourths of the House Democrats voted to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 90 days. The rest of the Democratic caucus–with a handful of exceptions–embraced a slower-bleed defeat, presumably seeking a bit more political cover.
A more charitable interpretation wouldn’t talk about ‘defeat’ but about ‘living to fight another day’, and with an enemy that truly threatens our national security. For Kristol, the conflict in Iraq must be conflated with the war against al-Qaeda, and so…
Only one Democrat–now an “independent Democrat”–called them on their vote: Joe Lieberman. As the members of his party voted for defeat, he took to the Senate floor to plead for full funding of our troops: “Only a couple of months ago, the Senate confirmed a new commander to implement a new strategy in Iraq, General David Petraeus. That new strategy is now being implemented, and it is achieving some encouraging, if early, signs of success. . . . Yet, now many in Congress would pull the plug on this new strategy and thwart the work of our troops before they are given a fair chance to succeed. I am aware that public opinion has turned against the war in Iraq. . . . But leadership requires sometimes that we defy public opinion if that is what is necessary to do what is right for our country. . . . Al Qaeda itself has declared Iraq to be the central front of their larger war against our way of life. . . . Our judgment can be guided by the polls and we can withdraw in defeat. [But] no matter what we say, our enemy will know that America’s will has been broken by the barbarity of their bloodlust–the very barbarity we declare we are fighting, but from which we would actually be running.”
As Atrios would say, ‘Please Stop’. This neo-conservative language has been dishonest from the beginning. These people wanted to invade Iraq, for their own reasons, years before al-Qaeda attacked us. That is the truth. That is what more and more Americans have come to realize. They have been lying to us about the threat from Iraq since at least 1998, when they forced Clinton to accept regime change as the official policy of the United States. In 2000, we had four candidates (Gore, Lieberman, Bush, and Cheney) that all had signed on to a disinformation campaign with regard to Iraq. This time we have to choose candidates that will deal with reality and not create threats where they do not exist.
America cannot fix what has been broken in Iraq. What we can do is disassociate ourselves from anyone that had anything to do with hyping the threat and getting us into this mess. Iraq needs a national reconciliation project. America needs a national truth project.
Bill Kristol symbolizes and personifies the most insidious enemy that we face. His agenda is not America’s agenda. He has no respect for the truth. He and his type should be shunned off the stage of our national debate. They should be considered pariahs at best and criminals in certain instances. The world needs to see that we can police ourselves before they can consider letting us police anyone else. And we should police ourselves, regardless or whether we want to police anyone else.
The time is coming to select our nominee for president in 2008. We must not select someone that had it wrong in the those ‘silly’ 1990’s.
