There is a reason why the Democratic senators least inclined to vote for the Reid-Feingold bill calling for a cut-off of funds for Iraq were members of the Armed Services Committee.
First, I’ll demonstrate the truth of this statement. Twenty-nine of forty-nine (59%) voting Democrats voted for the Reid-Feingold amendment. Meanwhile, only four of thirteen (including Lieberman) Democratic members of the Armed Services committee did so. That’s 31%. To make this even clearer, of the thirty-six members of the Democratic caucus that are not serving on Armed Services, fully 25 voted for the amendment (69%). Why the discrepancy?
It’s both simple and complicated. The complicated part involves understanding the true nature of the American empire, our vast number of foreign bases, leases, contractual agreements, assets…and the policies (developed under both Poppy Bush and Bill Clinton) and strategies underpinning those bases.
The simple part is that the people that worked out those strategies (at least insofar that Congress played an important role) sit on the Armed Services committee and know that the Iraq War complicates and puts at risk the entire enterprise. These Senators are in charge of overseeing this vast overseas empire and they are feeling very insecure about how we can best manage the fallout from Iraq without putting those assets and agreements at risk.
And it isn’t just a risk that failure in Iraq will lead to insurgencies and attacks in other foreign lands. It isn’t just that a failure to keep commitments in Iraq will undermine the value of our word and credibility with other allies. It’s the domestic front, too. How will Americans react to failure? Will they finally embrace the logic of Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul? Paul explained why we were attacked on 9/11 in a recent debate.
“They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.”
The 9/11 attacks were intended to act as a wake-up call to ordinary Americans about what our government is doing abroad. They wanted us to look into it (which many did for the first time) and they wanted us to know that there would be an unacceptable cost to continuing with the same policies. They didn’t attack us for our freedom, as Bush likes to say. It was a purely political act.
Murdering 3,000 innocent Americans is not, in any way, a justifiable act, and the perpetrators were not freedom fighters or small (d) democrats. Their crimes could not go unpunished, nor could their demands be acceded to. But the attacks should have started an honest assessment about which of our policies gave rise to the threat and how many of them were necessary or could be changed to lesson the threat. Unfortunately, an honest assessment would have led the American people to question the necessity, wisdom, and cost of our foreign basing strategy. And that is precisely what the members of our foreign policy establishment (of both parties, and most certainly the Armed Services committees) did not want.
You can see their reasoning very clearly in an opinion column in today’s Wall Street Journal by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey. He will lay out the stakes of a withdrawal from Iraq, but nowhere will he even
broach the subject of blowback.
Kerrey lays out a flawed case for invading Iraq by refusing to see blowback as an inevitable cost of doing business the way we have been doing business (in the past or as a result of invading Iraq).
Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were “over there.” It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the “head of the snake.” But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.
Then Kerrey lays out a case that we must push for democracy in Iraq.
Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn’t you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.
American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq’s middle class has fled the country in fear.
With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power.
I want to interject one more quote in here as kind of an aside, because it explains exactly why I oppose doing anything about Darfur.
The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.
I, for one, am not guilty of his alleged hypocrisy. I don’t think we should intervene in foreign countries to stop civil wars except under a very stringent set of conditional circumstances. In any circumstance where someone is asking us to intervene, I ask myself a simple question. Why us? Why not Norway or China or Canada? Give me health care first, improve our schools, then come ask me to to take the lead on policing the world.
But, going back to our subject, these are precisely the types of sentiments that our foreign policy establishment does not want us to have. Yet, here we are, facing down a profound failure on the part of our foreign policy establishment (including the mainstream media) and they are trying to avoid accountability and consequences.
And this leads me to my last point on this. Bush and Cheney are responsible for getting us into this mess and they are incapable of getting us out of it. We have to look at current affairs through the prism of a foreign policy establishment that doesn’t want the fallout from Iraq to damage our arrangements with other regional allies. And this could happen either because our regional allies lose confidence in us or because the American people insist that we cancel existing arrangements and re-orient our forward leaning basing policies. The circumstances require careful diplomacy and reassurance of our allies (including demonstrations of resolve and the ability to keep committments) and they require a careful manipulation of domestic opinion (mainly through the maintenance of a prism of a pervasive threat of terrorism). The last part involves the ‘we must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here’ mantra, which doesn’t even make a facial amount of sense.
Recognizing this, the foreign policy establishment produced the Baker-Hamilton report which aimed to cover them on both the foreign and domestic fronts. When I saw the Bush administration reject the Baker-Hamilton report I knew that the survival of their administration was in deep jeopardy and expected the innards of the Republican-led bureaucracy to begin leaking impeachable-level stuff to the press and Congress. I haven’t been totally disappointed, although I have been surprised at the tenacity of the administration and their continuing ability to keep Congress on board. And I believe I now have an explanation.
The foreign policy establishment is in a vice. They are terrified of a withdrawal from Iraq, but they are particularly terrified of attempting it under the current administration. The Democrats in the establishment would greatly prefer to leave it to a Democrat to oversee the diplomacy and management of withdrawal and the Republicans want the bipartisan cover of leaving the withdrawal to the Democrats. The result?
What we see now. Damaging information is leaking out to keep Bush-Cheney weak and unable to escalate and worsen the situation. But absent a slam-dunk case for dual-impeachment, no one wants to force a withdrawal under this administration’s supervision. They simply can not or will not do the types of things necessary to limit the foreign and domestic fallout of a withdrawal…and that could screw up the whole imperial strategy they have developed in the post-Cold War world.
