Who'll be the last to die for a mistake,
The last to die for a mistake,
Whose blood will spill,
Whose heart will break,
Who will be the last to die?
-- Bruce Springsteen,
"Last to Die," Magic Album, 2007.
DETROIT -- The Boss belts out the crunch questions the presidential candidates should be asked. Throughout the endless debates and Sunday morning gabfests, the reporters and pundits who grill the candidates usually don't frame questions about the war in Iraq with the stark premise that it is a mistake and people continue to die for a futile cause.
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will at least discuss the decision five years ago to invade Iraq. Sen. John McCain doesn't want any conversation about how the United States got into the disaster he enthusiastically supported, and for good reason.
In the autumn of 2002, when Hillary Clinton got that 3 a.m. phone call, she decided to trust President George W. Bush. It was the worst mistake of her public life. Late last year, gearing up for the election, Clinton pointed to "false" intelligence and told her supporters, "If Congress had been asked (to authorize the war) based on what we know now, we never would have agreed."
Still, Clinton will be haunted by her contempt for the truth, good judgment and international law. If she gets the Democratic nomination, Clinton and McCain will only debate post-invasion issues and what we do now. Her plan for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces will certainly distinguish her from McCain's commitment to endless war.
Obama's position on the invasion of Iraq, articulated during his 2002 campaign for the Senate, showed courage as the nation was merrily marching to war. He also demonstrated exceptional prescience and prudence.
Obama recognized Saddam Hussein as a murderous thug, a bad guy, but he also understood Saddam posed "no imminent and direct threat to the United States." He then offered an insightful analysis of what would happen after Saddam was ousted.
Obama was spot on: "I know that even after a successful war, Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that our invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."
McCain wants to eradicate from political discourse the fundamental questions of how lies were used to sell the war and the horrific consequences of the grand deception. McCain wants no discussion of what really happened five years ago and his role in peddling the delusions. He sees no value in looking at Bush's decision to rush from Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was, to start a war in Iraq, where al-Qaeda wasn't.
In his speech in Texas last week after wrapping up the Republican nomination, McCain made it clear he wants no national soul-searching, telling the crowd, "It is of little use to Americans for their candidates to avoid the many complex challenges of these struggles by re-litigating decisions of the past."
McCain wants us to believe discussing the road to war is akin to a talking about an old lawsuit. He prefers to relegate the most important national security issue of our times to a high school debate club topic -- "Resolved: The war with Iraq was necessary to protect our most vital security interests."
While McCain would certainly stand in the affirmative, he wants to slough off that debate dismissively, saying, "Americans know that the next president doesn't get to re-make that decision."
McCain wants to be positioned as the inheritor of Iraq, but he wants to avoid discussions about his blind devotion to Bush's designs in the region and how conspicuously flawed his judgment was on key issues about the war and occupation. Clinton does some backpedaling but ends up in the right place about the phony arguments for the war. Obama wants an open discussion of the topic because, he says, "I want to end the mind set that got us into war."
McCain's mind set merits serious scrutiny. He claimed Saddam was a serious threat and was "on a crash course to construct nuclear weapons." Where did you hear that, senator?
McCain also shared Bush's messianic madness in the Middle East. In the runup to war, he claimed regime change in Iraq" would lead to "demand for self-determination" in the region. Where are all those pro-democracy rallies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt?
In spite of his fine credentials, McCain's military judgments on Iraq now look down right silly. In January 2003 he proclaimed, "I think the victory will be rapid, within about three weeks." Weeks, months, years, decades -- what's the difference?
And right about the time Bush strutted across an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and proclaimed "Mission Accomplished," McCain was gushing that "the war in Iraq succeeded beyond the most optimistic expectations."
Last year brought the greatest number of U.S. casualties since the war began. Now that the American death toll is down, McCain and others want us to conclude the surge is a ringing success.
Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the architects of the surge, was effusive in praise of his own ideas in an article in The Weekly Standard, the Pravda for neoconservatives.
Kagan heaped kudos on Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno for following his advice, claiming, "On February 14, 2008, the civil war was over," and adding, "The situation in Iraq has been utterly transformed."
Bush set the standard for success when he sold Kagan's surge plan last year. He said, "If we increase our support at this critical moment and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home."
Michael Kinsley wrote in the Washington Post about the steady troop presence needed in Iraq and the strange definition of success being used:
"Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its 'de-Baathification' campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and 'only' 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain equilibrium. You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them."
In a chilling report in Rolling Stone magazine, Nir Rosen describes the increasing sectarian violence in Iraq and the failure to develop an independent security force -- trends usually ignored in the mainstream media.
Rosen spent time with Captain Arkan, a Shiite police officer who has seen the growing hostilities the occupation fosters. "He is not optimistic for the future," Rosen writes. "Arkan knows the U.S. surge has succeeded only in exacerbating the tension among Iraq's warring parties and bickering politicians. The Iraqi government is still nonexistent outside the Green Zone. While the U.S.-built walls have sealed off neighborhoods in Baghdad, Shiite militias are battling one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry."
Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent for Britain's The Independent, sees a tenuous calm in danger of unraveling. In his new book, "The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq," Cockburn -- who has been on more than 60 assignments there since 1978 -- sees right through the public relations images of the surge and deals with the realities of the occupation. Cockburn's assessment is bleak:
"The U.S. had failed to pacify Iraq between 2003 and 2007. Now, with much of the U.S. public openly disillusion with the war, Bush was to try for victory once again. Common sense suggested that he needed to reduce the number of America's enemies inside and outside Iraq. But his new strategy was only going to increase hem. The U.S. army was to go on fighting the million-strong Sunni community as it had been since the capture of Baghdad. The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal was not being met. At the same time the U.S. was going to deal more aggressively with the 17 million Shias in Iraq. It would contest the control over much of Baghdad and southern Iraq of the Mehdi army, the powerful Shia militia led by nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is regarded with cult-like devotion by many Shia Iraqis. Not content with this, Washington was more openly going to confront Iran, the most powerful of Iraq's neighbors."
Cockburn works in the streets of Iraq, unlike Frederick Kagan, the quintessential house cat, lapping up the milk of mythology in a Washington suite and spitting up the fur balls of neoconservative nonsense.
McCain will hinge his entire campaign on defending his support of "the decision to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime" and a policy that will allow the United States to leave Iraq "with our country's interest secure and our honor intact." Whatever the hell that means.
After five years and costs soaring to $3 trillion, a nation destroyed, nearly 4,000 Americans killed and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, McCain wants to stay the disastrous course Bush has set and Springsteen describes so well:
We don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore,
We just stack the bodies outside the door.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 11 2008 |