Hoping For Leadership

While the president remains incompetent when it comes to being direct and open about the war and its future (because it draws him uncomfortably close to discussing the method by which his administration went to war), critics of the war miss a golden opportunity to do something important and positive. They sink all their rhetorical stanchions into the partisan swamp of “the war was a mistake and was based on corrupted intelligence.” While true, in the sense that the administration set up an alternative intelligence-gathering-and-filtering system in order to ensure that only the juiciest bits of pro-war information made it to the President and Congress (see George Packer’s excellent The Assassins’ Gate), it is now dreadfully beside the point. The American public and (more urgently) our troops abroad are waiting for something more, and they won’t get it from this lame administration. Will anyone step up and take the kind of political risk that success demands? Hard choices? Everyone claims that they want to be trusted to make them, so who's willing to actually do it?

cont'd after link

A summary argument in the current Economist seems to me to be the most clear-headed piece out there this week. We can all be upset about how we got to Iraq (and there are certainly thousands of families around the country with more reason to be upset than most people reading this), but the party out of power, which has real grievances to air and a seemingly infinite number of problems to fix, must avoid being so easily dismissible in our current climate as “unpatriotic” or “not supporting the troops”. The pro-war Cheney Republicans rely on the American people buying that line and immediately abandoning all their critical faculties and their senses of decency, reason, and the possibility of progress. (Is Iraq the best of all possible Iraqs? Eh, Donald “Dr. Pangloss” Rumsfeld?) The Democrats, in turn, continue to be not quite smart enough to avoid opening themselves up to that childish attack. What is left over from all that silliness is nothing of any use to a large country with large problems, and a military in need of answers and a plan. It is time to put forward something that is not susceptible to such cheap, easy, and boldly dishonest attacks.

What Representative Murtha did took courage, and as a veteran with his kind of credentials, he absolutely should be out there standing up for the interests of the troops against the forces of perpetual commitment to a mostly-failed enterprise. I applaud him for it even as I wish he started a bit earlier. But his statement is being taken now as the only Democratic war policy. Murtha simply did not do or say enough to constitute anything resembling a Democratic stance on the war. Have you seen a comprehensive DNC war plan lately? Simple withdrawal is not a plan. Let’s say we do, just in time for the Republicans to salvage a respectable finish in the ‘06 cycle. What then? We will simply wash our hands of it? Unrealistic. American interest in the future of Iraq and the region will not cease--nor will Iraqi interest in America fulfilling the Geneva Convention-mandated responsibility we have to stabilize and secure a country we invaded and whose (awful) government we overthrew.

Rhetoric is important. And even if a plan is not forthcoming, the Democrats ought to be talking about the plan that doesn’t but should exist. Why is there, essentially, no one discussing the future of Iraq in any terms other than military involvement? Has our country completely given up, having botched it so badly so far? Yes--we must withdraw soon, and yes--the Iraqi military must take over, and yes--we must demand that a stable and non-tyrannical government succeed in Baghdad, and yes--the Bush administration will be blamed when the time comes for blame. All that seems painfully obvious. But does the acknowledgment of those facts constitute a plan? If the best Democrats can do is criticize the war and call for it to end, and the best Republicans can do is resort to childish name-calling, jingoism, and the nasty questioning of critics’ patriotism, then our country is failing miserably on all sides in one of the most important functions our government has, and one that we have often failed to execute properly: serving our troops abroad who are serving our country. They deserve a plan. And no one is giving it to them.

Even if a plan does exist or is being formulated, it is to our collective shame that it is not discussed publicly, openly, and frequently. We owe it to everyone to do that.

The Democratic party needs to offer a real strategy for Iraq. Waiting for the administration to make the calculation that their polling data (yes, they listen to polls) demands a course-correction is political suicide. It also lacks courage, and frankly, it is bad for the country. Talk about the war as a mistake might comfort us and fulfill our need to feel righteously indignant about getting steamrolled for the last 5 years, but it doesn’t help to address the real problem we now face. A viable opposition that puts forward ideas and argument is the crucial component to successful representative democracy.

Only when someone makes a sustained effort to bring this debate out of the partisan shadows and beyond questions of pure military involvement will a serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 emerge. Then, finally, will we find out if anyone in fact deserves to be nominated in either party. I’m not expecting any Republican to show that kind of leadership. I hope some Democrat can start doing it, and soon. When someone steps up with a plan, all the recriminations will seem like so much playground name-calling, and Americans might actually start demanding some responsibility from our “leaders” rather than arguing about who is to blame when that responsibility is so dramatically and catastrophically violated.