Missing the point

Arthur Silber writes in WHY FRANK RICH AND MANY DEMOCRATS ARE SO BADLY WRONG:

Over the past year or so, I have linked to Frank Rich’s columns fairly regularly. I find Rich to be dependably perceptive on many cultural and political issues. When Rich wrote a twice-weekly op-ed column for the Times some years ago, I thought that he had lost his unique voice for the most part, for reasons that I never understood. He seemed largely adrift intellectually. When he returned to writing less often, he seemed to rediscover himself, and I was very glad about that.

However, Rich’s latest column was very seriously in error. His title was, “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” I noted with some disappointment that a number of liberals I often like and agree with linked to the piece very favorably. What in the world are these people thinking, I wondered? I linked to Rich’s column at the beginning of this entry, but without comment—and the subject of my post was only a very minor one in the context of Rich’s column.

Now Norman Solomon explains what was so seriously off-key in Rich’s analysis. Taking his cue from Rich, Solomon titles his response: “Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over.” You should read Solomon’s entire article, but here are a few key excerpts:

[...]

I will be blunt: Rich’s analysis was hopelessly superficial and completely unserious. More than anything else, it conveyed only that the writer wanted to strike out at Bush in as lacerating a manner as possible—but without any consideration for the monumental problems that remain, and without being willing to face the demanding work that must be done if we are indeed to be "outta there." And given the fact that many more people will die before we ever leave Iraq or even significantly reduce the number of U.S. troops there, such a lack of seriousness is close to unforgivable.

I almost always enjoy, and generally agree with, Arthur's posts. However, on this point he's completely off base. IMO, Rich's point in his recent column was that the public opinion has surpassed the tipping point on the war in Iraq, not that we are literally "outta there" or that the battle to convince the war criminals in the administration that we've had enough is over.

There is little doubt, as I pointed out in my previous post on this matter, that our kids will be dying in Iraq for some time to come, not unlike the case in Vietnam 30+ years ago. However, when 62% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, when 54% believe that the administration lied about the threat posed by Saddam and Iraq in the run-up to war (both with trend lines that run steadily upward on a weekly basis) and when the president's approval ratings are as low as Nixon's at this same point in the second term, then it is clear to all but the president and those in his administration that, as far as American public opinion is concerned, any support they might have had for the war, and for the president's handling of same, is long over.

Bush's incessant reiteration of the same tired, mendacious, and misleading talking points that we are "making progress" in "this noble cause" to "fight terrorism over there, so we don't have to fight it over here", will increasingly sound, to even his staunchest supporters, like Michael Palin's store clerk in the "Dead Parrot Sketch".

Quoting Rich's column yet again, to reinforce that the whole premise of the piece was to make it clear that we had reached the tipping point:

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

To Arthur's point that the Democratic leadership is guilty of enabling the administration, I think that is a little unfair. Could they have done more? Possibly, but it isn't abundantly clear exactly what they could have done. They were played just like the rest of the nation with the lies and deceptions that the administration used to make the case for war. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, those who argued vociferously against a pre-emptive war of aggression were painted as unpatriotic at best and unbalanced at worst. Remember Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio? It would be nearly impossible to vote against the supplimental budget items that the administration has floated to pay for its snafu in Iraq without being painted with the inevitable "X doesn't support our troops" smear that Rove and company would unleash in the 2006 elections. Let us remember that the Republicans are firmly in control of all three branches of government. Rep. Conyers has been trying to get hearings on many of the relevant issues such as the DSM and prisoner abuse, but without cooperation from the Republican leadership, there is absolutely nothing he or the Democrats can do officially other than to continue to press the issue as best they can.

The real enablers have been the Republican majority leadership in both houses, because they abdicated their constitutional responsibility of oversight of the executive branch.

Bottom line for me, is that Rich's column was indeed intended to "strike out at Bush in as lacerating a manner as possible", not to be a serious analysis of the trouble that inevitably lies ahead (to which Rich clearly points out in the above quote). The whole point was to make the case we have surpassed the tipping point such that even the Republican leadership is starting to read the writing on the wall. Yet, the war criminals in the White House haven't bothered to read the memo (once again).

The whole point was that without both public opinion and Republican support, there had been little that the Democrats could do on their own. The reason that this column was so positively received by the left hemisphere of the blogosphere is that it heralded the prospect of hope to end Bush's war of aggression, where little or none had existed before.