Where's The Quail?
The quail.
The quail Dick would have bagged if Harry’s face hadn’t got in the way.
Harry owes Big Time big time.
One can sympathize with Cheney when he says it was the worst day of his life.
One can imagine how badly you and I would feel if we had accidentally sent somebody to the ICU with non-fatal injuries.
Imagine how we’d feel if we had sent almost 3000 troops and to their deaths on a military adventure that we pretended would be a combination crusade and cakewalk, but we knew ahead of time was actually a cynical, lazy, and flawed piece of geopolitical opportunism.
Wonder how Dick feels about that.
Now imagine how we’d feel if we’d gone along with a military campaign that had killed over 30,000 Iraqis. That our soldiers had inflicted collective punishment on Fallujah, using white phosphorous in the process. That we were dropping more bombs per capita on Iraq than we did on Vietnam. That our magic recipe for democracy in Iraq includes death squads and civil war. That we run an international network of torture cells.
That our dungeonmasters were violently force-feeding Gitmo hunger strikers in the name of humanitarianism, but doping the drip with laxatives so the detainees would soil themselves in the chairs they were strapped into.
Now there’s a great metaphor for American foreign policy.
What would we say?
We’d say Support Our Troops!
Of course!
They need our support! All this torture and killing and bombing and occupation stuff is wearing our folks out!
What we’re saying as a country is, We’re the victims here. We and our brave, suffering troops.
Just like Dick.
The world would be, quite frankly, a better place if, instead of repeating the Pentagon’s Support Our Troops mantra, we said:
Iraq is a war crime.
The war on terror is nonsense.
The national security agenda is totally bogus.
We’re increasing the world supply of anti-US terrorists with our policies in the Middle East — not exactly making us safer. Think of Iraq as a slow-motion 9/11 repeat, with our casualties inching up to the awful 3,000 figure.
And the idea of the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel crowd that the US military is going to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East is just ridiculous.
Military justice is to justice as military music is to music…well, I hope you get the idea.
The job of the armed forces is to kill people who the government wants them to kill, and use violence, intimidation deceit, and guile to destroy both the enemy and the physical and institutional environment the enemy operates in. Creating functioning nation-states, let alone world nirvana, isn’t on the armed forces task list.
It’s not an institution that you want to make custodian of America’s world moral standing, or the main arm of our foreign policy. But every sign points to the Pentagon becoming bigger, more intrusive, and less accountable, not only abroad but at home.
So all I can offer the US fighting man and woman is this: I don’t support what you’re doing.
I don’t support war crimes in Iraq. I don’t support a war-based anti-terrorism strategy. I believe a militarized national security policy is debasing our democracy. I want you guys to get totally disgusted with the Iraq mission and dubious about the war on terror. I want you to come home, return to nice, safe civilian jobs, and let the campaign against al Qaeda turn into a multilateral civilian police action.
Yellow ribbons are supposed to bring troops home and out of harm’s way. Not encourage them to stay in the kill zone.
If by telling you I don’t support you, so you don’t feel you’re getting pushed to keep up the fight because you’ve become the sacred repositories of our heroic and patriotic aspirations and you are unwilling to disappoint your cheerleaders at home, well…
…I think I’m doing you, our country, and the world a favor.
Of course, I’m speaking in the minority here.
I’m not speaking as a Democrat, a liberal, a progressive, a lefty.
I’m an anti-war type.
Anti-war, as in not just opposed to the Iraq war. Skeptical about wars in general, “good” as well as “bad”, “defensive” as well as “pre-emptive” and “preventive”, and distrustful of the “patriotic” mentality demanded by war rhetoric.
There aren’t many of us, I think.
The Democrats and most of the Left, it seems, has adopted the support our troops rhetoric.
Some of it is protective coloration. It’s easier to oppose the war and still dodge accusations of being unpatriotic if love for the troops is professed.
Some of it’s sincere.
But I think it’s profoundly misguided.
Supporting the troops hasn’t won Democrats a place at that lavish feast known as the national security debate.
The Democrats are still demonized as the party of peace-loving wusses, not just by Bush, Cheney, and Rove, and by the successor regime of McCain, George Allen, or whoever will be the next empty suit in the Republican parade.
The American people also suspect we’re not exactly gung-ho to remake the Middle East and the world through the multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar “Long War” the Pentagon is promising us.
Here’s a news flash.
I don’t think Support the Troops has done squat for the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are doing better at the polls because they are the default anti-war party while an extremely unpopular war is going on.
On a basic level, Support the Troops just makes Democrats look ridiculous.
It looks like we pretend that giving the troops better body armor is pretty much our magic bullet for fixing the mess in Iraq.
I hate to help spread the weak Democrat meme, but at the national level the Democrats are impotent. They couldn’t raise wood in a forest.
The Democrats have opted in on the national security framing, and I can’t see what that does except ensuring that we’ll just keep on plodding through the quagmire in the Middle East, maybe for another ten years because nobody has the courage to stand up and say let’s stop this stupid war right now, and to hell with the people who promoted it, excused it, and are trying to keep us in it.
We don’t need a new strategy in Iraq. We need a wholesale repudiation of the war-is-the-answer strategy that got us into Iraq, and the recognition that it was a criminal gang that got us into a criminal war.
But we’re not going to get it. Justice will not be served in the Capitol Hill cafeteria.
Not with the way the Republicans are efficiently closing ranks to protect the scandal-plagued Bush presidency crawling contemptibly into its fifth year.
I got a lot of (deserved) flack for pushing McCain as the core of some kind of anti-Bush national unity government.
I promoted it not because I loved McCain.
I did it because I believed that the GOP had been captured by a kleptocratic clique, that McCain was outside this clique, and our best shot at stopping Bush and Cheney would be by a revolt from within the Republican Party abetted by independents and Democrats.
Then the Democrats could have been part of the power structure.
Inside the tent pissing out, instead of outside the tent and getting pissed on.
One would think it wouldn’t be too hard, with our idiot prez supported only by the true believer 40% - who I think would abandon him in a heartbeat if an acceptable conservative alternative presented itself.
Didn’t happen.
In fact, as far as I can see, the battle’s over.
We’re already in the post-Bush years. Bush stopped himself in his tracks through his serial incompetence. Protecting the world from Bush is not a priority.
Certainly not for the Republicans.
Self-preservation for the Republicans is their highest priority.
At least the GOP is thinking ahead, even if the Democrats aren’t.
The Democrats think they can run against Bush, and wedge the Republicans.
I don’t think so.
The GOP, mindful that it’s better to hang together than hang separately, are determined to stay together for the 2006 elections as a way of winning the 2008 elections.
They don’t want to risk the Democrats gaining control of the Senate or House and cripple the Republican Party with a non-stop stream of investigations of The Worst Presidency Ever.
Better to look beyond Bush and accept some common ground that the post-Bush GOP elite can live with.
Specifically, that the continuation of Republican rule is more important than any single policy point.
So forget about Olympia Snowe doing our dirty work.
If America wants an alternative to George Bush, the GOP will be happy to provide it. Maybe McCain. Maybe George Allen. Maybe a charismatic sock puppet.
As long as the Democrats agree to contest elections as the “me-too” national security party, put your money on the sock puppet.
So the presidential campaign begins now, with the obligatory bashing of Hillary Clinton and angry Democrats and deranged leftists.
Ignore the war in Iraq and distract the masses with the planned war on Iran. Suppress the domestic surveillance scandal. Let Chertoff take the blame for Katrina. Pretend Abramoff never happened. Stonewall on Plamegate.
Pretend there’s nothing wrong with the country that another 8 years of Republican rule can’t cure.
And McCain buys in.
The intentionally contentious exchange of letters with Barack Obama was McCain’s whack-the-Negro moment, reassuring the GOP that he’s not squeamish about running white and to the right.
It’s also meant to show that, despite Kerry’s offering him the vice presidential slot in 2004, McCain’s not going to reach across the aisle for any national unity crap that might entail bringing Republicans to account for the shit-rain of King George.
Nothing like poisoning the well with some well-timed self-righteous invective to demonstrate that Democrats will be the excluded minority and not respected partners in any McCain presidency.
The White House rewards McCain’s demonstration of line-toeing with a leaked, if not sincere, endorsement.
Where’s that leave the Democrats?
Bashing a lame duck president after his own party has marginalized him into irrelevance and united behind a successor cadre.
Rejected from participation in some hoped-for “centrist” national security consensus.
Unable to confront the national security state. Afraid to challenge the knee-jerk assumptions that enable a bankrupt policy of not only of confrontation, but of war and occupation in the Middle East. Unwilling to resolutely and unapologetically represent an anti-war constituency. Defining itself not as a loyal and moral opposition, but as the irrelevant and resented fifth wheel in American foreign policy.
There should certainly be a political home for people — come on, there must be a few of you out there! - looking for a party that doesn’t subscribe to a doctrine of perpetual war as somehow being viable or morally acceptable policy.
Maybe the choice isn’t between winning national elections as the me-too war on terror party and losing as the anti-war party.
I think only an incompetent like George Bush could blow all that 9/11 political capital and make the 2004 election even look close. If the Republicans can keep the lid on in the 2006 elections and the 2008 elections are run on the national security issue between an anybody-but-Bush GOP candidate and a “we can do the war on terror too, but so much better” Democratic clone, I think the Democrats will get waxed.
Maybe the choice is between losing national elections as national security also-rans, or pushing the national debate to the left by giving a voice, legitimacy, and self-confidence to a genuine, reasoned, and impassioned consensus that the America and the world can only become better and safer if the bloated national security state is pushed from the center of the American stage.
Maybe the Democratic Party is too compromised by its history of accommodation to play this role, and a new successor movement is needed. Or maybe the Democratic Party can re-invent itself.
In either case, there has to be something better than playing the perpetual villain/victim in the Republicans’ national security passion play.
Let’s not be like Harry Whittington, the unlucky shmoe tagging along with Cheney on his shooting binge who gets shot in the face and then apologizes abjectly and absurdly for being in the wrong place and the wrong time.
Let’s be the quail that got away.
Or the dove.
Copyright 2006 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
