Decision ‘08

Difficult Does Not Mean Impossible…

…and pessimism tends to be self-fulfilling. God knows I’ve had my share of doubts and pessimism about Iraq, but it’s reaching levels that go beyond what the facts warrant. Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, looks at the current culture of rampant pessimism, and goes digging for causes:

Its causes are multiple, but here are several:

• Bush schadenfreude. Partisan pleasure in George Bush’s pain dates to the anguish of the contested 2000 election loss. The Democrats have run against something called “Bush” for so long that this sentiment is now bound up in any act or policy remotely attached to the president. Iraq’s troubles, or Iran or North Korea, are merely an artifact of crushing this one guy.

• The Iraq Study Group. The ISG report wasn’t defeatist, but it enabled the vocabulary of defeat. Its warning of a “slide toward chaos” was re-defined as the current Iraqi status quo. They called their bipartisan solution “phased withdrawal,” but it was a euphemism for defeat. Momentum was already building in this direction, and the ISG propelled it.

• The leadership vacuum. The administration never rallied the nation behind the war in a concrete way. A young Marine officer recently returned from combat in Iraq told me this week he is taken aback at how disassociated the American people seem from Iraq, no matter how constantly it’s in the news. He says it’s as if the problem is not so much what is actually happening in Iraq but that the war is “annoying” to Americans, as if to say: Can’t it just go away or not be on the front page all the time? Rallying a nation at war is a president’s job.

• The opposition vacuum. One reason the negative mood in politics is so disconcerting is that the opposition’s alternative vision is nonexistent. On joining the opposition recently, GOP Sen. Norm Coleman announced, “I can’t tell you what the path to success is.” Joe Biden says the “primary” Iraq strategy should be to force its leaders to make the political compromises necessary to “end the violence.”

As a political strategy, unremitting opposition has worked. Approval for the president and the war is low. The GOP lost sight of its ideological lodestars and so control of Congress. But the U.S. still occupies a unique position of power in the world, and we are putting that status at risk by playing politics without a net.

On the “Charlie Rose Show” this month, former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, who supports the counterinsurgency plan being undertaken by Gen. David Petraeus, said in exasperation: “My God, this is the United States. We are the world’s No. 1 superpower. This isn’t about arrogance. This is about capability and applying ourselves to a problem that is at its essence a human problem.”

At our current juncture, Gen. Keane’s words probably rub many the wrong way. But there’s a Cassandra-like warning implicit in them. The mood of mass resignation spreading through the body politic is toxic. It is uncharacteristic of Americans under stress. Some might call it realism, but it looks closer to the fatalism of elderly Europe, overwhelmed and exhausted by its burdens, than to the American tradition.

In 1966, Sen. George Aiken delivered a speech on Vietnam famously translated for history as “declare victory and go home.’ ” On current course, it looks like we may declare defeat and go home.

Food for thought - when presented with a problem, you either solve it or push it under the rug - and the latter always results in its returning larger than ever. We move forward in Iraq because we have no choice in the matter. It’s our obligation, and we’ll prevail, eventually, with or with Maliki…or we’ll fail - but if we do so, let’s do so knowing that we did not defeat ourselves…

17 Responses to “Difficult Does Not Mean Impossible…”

1 Fargus Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Two things, if I can remember them.

1) The first point on that list is just a compressed version of your last post, but the fallacy in it is that it assumes that Bush has proposed a whole slate of compromise policies that Democrats shouldn’t have been able to pass up in good conscience. From where I’m sitting, that’s not true in the slightest.

2) When does defeatism shift to pragmatism? When it’s politically convenient for those elements keeping us mired in the money pit that Iraq’s become? When their political costs outweigh their political benefits?
2 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Again, Fargus, I refer you to the reaction to Bush’s health proposal - as Ruth Marcus said, it should have been manna from heaven to Democrats, but instead they declared it “dead on arrival” - a most unfortunate choice of words. Is Bush partisan? Of course - but the Democrats campaigned on, and spoke much of in the early post-victory days, of a new way of doing things…and that has proven to be a completely hollow promise.

You can look back at the archives of this very blog and see that I was more than willing to take the Democrats at their word, and I still am…but I’m not seeing any bipartisanship at all…nor am I seeing any attempt at meaningful ethics reform, nor am I hearing anything that remotely sounds like a coherent policy for Iraq…
3 Fargus Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 8:55 am
And I refer you to my, and AL’s, responses to your defense of Ruth Marcus’s slur against the Democrats. To people who have actually looked at the health care proposal brought forth by President Bush, there’s a lot to oppose. To say that it should be “manna from heaven” is untrue the first time, and borders on willfully ignorant to keep asserting the second and third and fourth times.

If what you’re concerned about is the timing, I knew enough details about the plan a couple of days before the State of the Union (details which were confirmed by the speech) to know that it wasn’t anything that I personally would have any trouble opposing straight out of the gate.
4 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Look, if the objection is that the plan would hit the middle class harder than the upper class, I’m not concerned with that. With health care, we should be more worried about the uninsured and the truly poor. I’m not interested in class politics, now or ever…
5 Peter Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Not to reprise a previous thread, but in my opinion it is abundantly clear that we have already failed in Iraq. It is not defeatist to recognize failure and call it for what it is.

Re Bush schadenfreude: Henninger leaves out the part where those who were prescient enough to oppose the war from the beginning were called Defeatocrats, pacifists, and terrorist sympathizers. After being told that a vote for Democrats is a vote for terrorists — and then having been vindicated and proved right — it’s something more than schadenfreude. Henninger implies that the door to bipartisanship was open by the Bush administration all along, and it was the stubbornness of those Bush-haters which is to blame.

The statement that “the opposition’s alternative vision is nonexistent” is equally silly. John Murtha, Joe Biden, Jim Webb, the Baker Commission, and many others have plans. Henninger may not agree with the plans — however he can’t credibly deny their existence.
6 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Interesting that you link ‘the Iraq Study Group’ to the opposition…I thought it was bipartisan…but you reveal more than you intend to, perhaps?…
7 Fargus Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Objection to the plan is well-detailed, and it’s not simply the knee-jerk thing you’re seeking to class it as. It’s out there, in all kinds of quarters.
8 mikebdot Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Mark: It’s also interesting that you link “opposition” to partisanship…
9 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Not at all, it just shows I understand what the two words mean…
10 peter Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I’m not linking the Iraq Study Group to the opposition — Ed Meese and Allen Simpson are somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney — Sandra Day O’Connor was responsible for Bush getting his job — only pointing out that the meme that the administration is the only one with a plan for Iraq is ludicrous.
11 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Well, it’s not enough to have a plan - it has to be a plan that can work. It amazes me that people say Bush’s plan is unworkable, yet smart people such as yourself bring up the Iraq Study Group, whose report suggests linking the Iraq conflict to the 60-year Israeli/Palestinian disaster - explicitly!

Yeah, that’ll work…
12 peter Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
There are a lot of peripheral suggestions in the ISG report which fall in the pie-in-the-sky category — but the central thesis that we should disengage from Iraq is a serious and workable plan.

This would not be my suggestion — I favor a referendum on whether we should stay or go — but nonetheless I wouldn’t dismiss the entire report because some of the 75 or so suggestions they made are questionable.
13 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Disengagement is not a workable plan: it presumes we can just leave and let Iraq go to seed, with no consequences. If we leave today, we’ll be back, and if it’s hard now, it’s going to be hell then…
14 peter Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Well, we don’t know that. Unless your suggestion is that we remain in Iraq for perpetuity, there is likely to be a bloodbath whenever we decide to go. It only makes sense to remain there if our presence will reduce the intensity of violence which will ineluctably follow our exit. Given the fact that our presence has not stopped the violence yet – in fact, the violence continually worsens, despite our presence – it is by no means a certainty that things will get worse if we leave. It is at least equally plausible that neither foreign troops nor anything else can stop the bloodshed until the warring parties simply get too exhausted by it. Perhaps Iraq will continue to “go to seed” regardless of what anyone does, or perhaps the departure of foreign troops will cause a de facto partition of the country where the three main groups control three separate areas. I think it is starry-eyed to predict that the vacuum caused by our departure will force the factions to compromise, but it is at least possible. However, to dismiss disengagement as unworkable not only makes assumptions which may well be unwarranted, but it ignores the fact that the current strategy has already proven itself to be unworkable.
15 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
No, the past strategy proved to be unworkable, and we adjusted - the troops aren’t even deployed yet on the current strategy, it’s still in in the initial stages…
16 peter Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I would argue that the “augmentation” is only an incremental change to the existing policy, and to expect significantly different results from the addition of 21,500 troops is an exercise in optimism. But for the sake of argument, let’s call it a new and different strategy. If we send the additional troops, and things haven’t changed within a reasonable time frame – let’s say six months – would you then call for disengagement?
17 Mark Says:
January 25th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
No, I wouldn’t…I think we need to make a commitment to stay in Iraq for many, many years…and depressing as that may sound, it’s exactly what we’re doing or have done in the past in the Balkans, South Korea, Germany, Japan, etc., etc. Now what the troop profile will look like, where the bases will be, whether we’ll still be in the Green Zone, etc., I frankly don’t have the expertise to recommend.

However, my wishes are moot - if there is not progress with this latest plan, withdrawal will begin, if not before the end of the Bush administration, certainly after - and it will be dictated by domestic politics, for better or worse…