Posted on 11/09/2006 7:51:01 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Finding Wisdom in the Wreckage
November 9th, 2006
In retail the customer is always right; in politics the voters are never wrong. Republicans need to bear that in mind as they contemplate the wreckage left behind by Tuesday night’s Democrat tide. Defeat can be a great teacher and now is the Republican’s time to learn.
Waste no time grumbling about the irresponsibility of the voters who handed power to a party so fundamentally unserious that it has nothing useful to say about any of the principal issues with which our government must grapple. Democrats didn’t deserve to win, but Republicans deserved to lose. The voters plainly got that right.
For once the conventional wisdom forecast the election well. Conventional wisdom is also right about the primary basis for the voter discontent that left the GOP battered. Republicans have a lot to answer for but the war in Iraq is their only electorally significant political problem.
Voters didn’t like events in Iraq two years ago and they put President Bush on probation. They gave him a dangerously narrow reelection victory against an inept candidate with a long history of anti-American activism, a figure who should have been buried under a landslide that would make 1972 look like a squeaker. Two years later nothing had changed except that the voters were out of patience.
In the anticipation, I believed that voters, however disgruntled, would vote more or less as they did in 2004. We all knew they were exasperated about Iraq but the Democrats couldn’t propose anything other than defeat, either phased or immediate. The choice between an unsatisfactory status quo and an uncertain but plainly worse alternative seemed to me like a no-brainer.
The voters saw it differently and their judgment deserves respect. Republicans need to look back, consider where they went wrong and chart a new course for the future.
The Iraq PR Disaster
Why did Iraq become a public relations disaster? Answering this question has become an inside the beltway cottage industry. It was a disaster instead of a decisive victory, we are told, because the Bush administration committed this, that or the other blunder. It didn’t send enough troops, it disbanded the Iraqi army, it didn’t adopt just the right counter-insurgency tactics, and so on.
Critics of every stripe harp particularly on our troop commitment. There is now a bipartisan consensus that we are failing in Iraq because we never had enough Soldiers and Marines on the ground to succeed. In Washington there is no more reliable indicator of error than a bipartisan consensus.
The problem in Iraq is much larger than mere short-staffing and it isn’t a question of tactics. The problem in Iraq goes back to 1999 when Republicans, desperate for a presidential win, overlooked the intellectual incoherence of “compassionate conservatism” and embraced Governor Bush of Texas as their nominee.
George W. Bush is a genuinely decent man. The compassionate part of his approach to politics isn’t sales patter. It is a profound part of the man he is. Cold calculation doesn’t come naturally to him.
In domestic politics this means, for example, that he can’t even seem seriously to consider whether a Medicare prescription drug benefit will make our health care financing system better or worse. When someone is hurting the government must move because, well, because it must.
The same blinding compassion is disabling for Bush the war leader.
In the aftermath of 9/11 any minimally responsible American government would have had to topple Saddam Hussein. We were at war with Hussein (yes, a real shooting war) and we were losing. When the twin towers fell we all knew, at some level, that the Arab world had challenged us. We couldn’t respond to that challenge by losing a war to our most vocal and visible Arab enemy. We had to assert our dominance, and Iraq, a major, oil-producing enemy just above the Arabian Peninsula, was the logical place to do it.
George W. Bush was not the man for this job. Instead of pivoting out of Afghanistan and descending on Iraq like a biblical plague, he took a long detour through the United Nations to argue about flouted resolutions and weapons of mass destruction.
The Blunder
When we finally got around to an invasion we had to put a humanitarian gloss on an essential demonstration of our power. Instead of Operation Arab Smackdown we got Operation Iraqi Freedom. This was the true blunder that turned Iraq from a political asset into a liability. This blunder belongs to George W. Bush and George W. Bush alone, even though Don Rumsfeld has now paid for it with his job.
Most Americans intuitively understand that our survival depends on maintaining our dominant position in the world and that to do so we have to answer all challengers and leave no serious enemy standing. To be the World’s hyperpower is to wear a target. With technology threatening to make the power of extermination widely available at popular prices, we have to make certain that nobody feels lucky enough to hazard a shot at that target. Americans will fight and die and pay through the nose to intimidate our enemies.
But most of us wouldn’t cross the street to make a better life for Iraqis, or for any other largely Arab population. This indifference isn’t evidence of atavistic racism. We are indifferent to the welfare of Iraqis partly because, after 9/11, we can’t help noticing that Arabia is not, by and large, well-disposed toward us. Mostly, however, we aren’t motivated to help Iraqis because we have our own children, our own lives and our own culture to worry about. The brotherhood of man notwithstanding, the welfare of foreigners is never going to make the list of our top hundred concerns.
Pious Hope and Shallow Support
The President’s claim that benefiting Iraqis is really in our interest because a free and democratic Iraq would be a peaceful and friendly Iraq was never more than a pious hope. At least since the Peloponnesian War when Athens attacked Syracuse, it has been clear that democracies are quite capable of attacking one another.
We need a reliable client state in Iraq and fostering democracy in an alien and hostile culture is very unlikely to give us one. There was never any reason to suppose that democracy was our friend in Iraq any more than it proved to be our friend in, for example, Pakistan.
When President Bush cast the war in Iraq as a war for the benefit of Iraqis with vital collateral benefits for the U.S., sensible people recognized his argument for the nonsense it was and tuned him out. By choosing to cast it that way, President Bush guaranteed that the war would have shallow support at best. He also guaranteed that it would drag on long after that shallow support dried up entirely.
Needed: Leverage
When we tried to be liberating benefactors we gave up all the leverage we might otherwise have had over Iraq’s ethnic and religious factions. We couldn’t extort Shiite cooperation by threatening to replace Saddam with another Sunni dictator. We couldn’t threaten the Sunni tribal leaders with an Iraqi partition that would leave them cut off from any participation in the oil revenues of the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. We had guaranteed everyone a fair shake in the new Iraq. This had the effect of greatly reducing the downside risk of sectarian warfare and freeing everyone to fight for something more than their fair share.
Playing the good guys also cost us the advantage of our overwhelming power. We deliberately refrained from destroying the Iraqi army during our invasion even though we certainly had the tools to do so. Many thousands of men escaped to fight another day and another way. It wasn’t a lack of manpower that kept us from crushing Moqtada al Sadr’s militia and caused us to back away from Fallujah and other Sunni hot spots. From the beginning we were much less lethal than we should have been because we have been trying to fight without causing too many bad feelings that might get in the way of the effort to engineer a political settlement.
No matter how elusive such a settlement seems we keep groping for it because we can’t hand the terrorists a victory and the President has committed us to the goal of a free and democratic Iraq. But instead of looking resolute we increasingly look naïve, foolish and weak.
For two years Republicans have been free to speak their minds about Iraq without fear of hurting the President’s reelection campaign. Not one prominent Republican has made the case that American interests are ill-served by midwifing a democracy in Iraq. Not one prominent Republican has even tried to explore more practical routes to the only goal that matters – replacing Saddam’s Iraq with a reliable client state (or states).
Maybe we need to find an Iraqi version of Pervez Musharraf. Maybe we need martial law and an American military governor. Maybe we need a partition that rewards the Kurds and disappoints both the Sunnis and the Shiites. Maybe we need some combination of the above. In any case, we need to stop talking about how the war can serve Iraqi purposes and start talking about how it can serve ours. Republicans had their chance to do that and they squandered it.
No wonder the voters are disgusted with Republicans and prepared to tolerate Democrats. George W. Bush has managed the almost impossible feat of making anti-war politics respectable in wartime.
Here are the lessons Republicans should learn from the pasting they took in 2006: Be practical. Common sense wins elections, half-baked theories lose them. When your leader is in thrall to a half-baked theory, cut him loose.
Never play follow the leader over a cliff again.
J. Peter Mulhern is a frequent contributor to Anerican Thinker.
The RNC absolutely torpedoed two good candidates ... Harris in GFL, and Graf in AZ. Before we go into any more elections, we had better clean out the RNC.
BTW, Bush was very good at dealing with the opposition as a Governor. Soooo.....?
"With all this horses**t, there's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"
Corker in Tennessee was the only candidate I heard call this out about Ford. Something to the effect of "how hard it must be for Ford to get up everyday pretend to be me."
Time for the GOP to come up with some new ideas and clean up their act on character and integrity.
"Bush was very good at dealing with the opposition as a Governor"
... he was dealing with the remnants of the old Solid South conservative democrats here in Texas, not the San Fran variety controlling Washington.
I think you deal with them with garlic and a cross, not compromise
OK, let's talk abiout IRAQ.
The main thing we all agree with is we will leave when the mission is accomplished.
HOW DO YOU DEFINE THE MISSION ACCOMPLISHED ?
The problem as I see it is Bush keeps repeating this line without giving anyone an indication as to what state the country has to be in before we consider it stable.
Why can't we for instance give people a clear description of what Iraq should be like before we consider withdrawal ?
If they say have close to 400,000 in their army and 100,000 civilian police in Baghdad, would that be considered a good indicator that we can leave ?
To what level should we consider their army trained enough so that we can leave them to be able to defend themselves ?
THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS AMERICANS WANT ANSWERS TO. Unfortunately, Bush isn't doing a very good job communicating. Saying we will leave when the job is done is too vague, too general to give anyone solace.
As for the Dems, they're worse. All they're doing is giving the signal that they want to leave ASAP, leaving the country alone to fend for itself. Charles Rangel even threatens to withhold funds from Iraq leaving it similar to South Vietnam was in 1974.
So, to Bush --- TALK TO THE PEOPLE AND PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC ABOUT YOUR PLANS. Don't give us generalities and vague apropisms that will leave us trying to parse and dissect what you mean.
The federal portion of our National Debt is going to come near to doubling with a Republican president in office.
Read a Republican Party Platform from just a couple of decades ago and compare it to the Republican Party Platform of today.
The RNC is having an identity crisis and then they wonder why they lost.
Blind Eye Jones
Your assessment is part of the problem. But I already said that in the previous post -- Bush is a very poor communicator.
But more importantly, it is this -- Americans do not want to continue seeing soldiers dying without any being given ANY report that progress is going on.
And we HAVE TO DEFINE what progress is.
As the public sees it now, all they see are bombs exploding, over a hundred soldiers dying in a month, a civil war brewing, and NO DEFINITION OF HOW WE DEFINE THE JOB ACCOMPLISHED.
I have seen a lot of conservatives turned off by this. No matter how you support the war, people don't want to see our men dying for nothing.
Good analysis... WORSE....
Bush actually looks like Alfred E. Nueman..
America has become a Madd Madd place because of it..
Somebody someplace is laughing at us.. Can you hear them?...
Thanks for your post. Yes, I agree, President Bush has been much to vague and I really think that no one truly understood the nature of the mind set over there - the cultural memes. Freedom resonates with the Kurds and some of the Sunnis - not much with the Shia. It would have been better to respect the reality of where the Iraqis were in terms beliefs and attitudes instead of assuming that they wanted what we want.
I like what Jonah Goldberg suggested: make the Iraqis vote: do they want us to stay or to leave? If they vote that they want us out - we can set a date and request certain criteria be met by that date. If they vote that they want us to stay - that would help with the American people and we could then let the Iraqis know what we expect.
There is so much corruption over there that needs to be addressed. The Iraqis should be making billions in oil revenue - and having some money and some job prospects would make a lot of difference. People want meaningful work.
One thing that is helpful is that the Iraqis do love their children and care about their families [unlike the Palestinians]. That is something that we can work with - helping people to help themselves in terms of prosperity and meaningful work.
GW says that he has military, politcal and economic objectives that have to be met before we leave. As you say, they need to be clearly communicated [as best as GW can articulate :-) ] Tony Snow could help a lot.
And I think we have to be realistic. The Sunnis and the Shia hate each other. The Brits were so wrong to draw up the country of Iraq in the first place. The Kurds can do well on their own and we need to be honorable in making sure they are protected. If we can figure out what to do with Baghdad - having loosely autonomous states within a federal system in which each state is safe and protected makes quite a bit of sense.
When we leave - we need to leave a place that is not going to be a breeding ground for terrorists and is better than what was there when we invaded. We don't need to set our goals unrealistically high.
For a moment there, I had hopes that they would un-muzzle him. Why the hell are Republicans afraid to just say that "Islam is not the highjacked religion of peace? It is the creed of highjackers. We need to whack'em right now. They need it every few hundred years and it's just our turn."
"Folks, if we're dead, nothing much else matters, does it? Hold your nose. Vote for us and we'll handle it." Even Ed Koch had that figured out and we let him down.
Come on, LS, the base was leaving tracks like Bigfoot! The Republicans were not killed. It was clearly suicide.
food for thought
This advice was given to Bush I. It was also given to Bush II. The Prevailing theory was that we needed a unified and strong Iraq to counterbalance Iran.
It is far past time to take the advice - a unified Iraq is not realistic. We need to respect the mid set of the Iraqis and NOT expect them to want to be like us.
The federal portion of our National Debt is going to come near to doubling with a Republican Texan president in office.
There, that's actually more accurate.
The Republican Party in Texas is quite conservative. But Texas is not actually a conservative state. Hence, Bush sent Rove out to torpedo the conservative Republicans on the Texas state board of education. And he refused even to be seen with the Texas GOP at their conventions.
Why? Because they're conservative. And he's the Second Coming Of LBJ.
No mystery about it. It never made us popular but a lot of us have said this consistently since Bush first ran. Sadly, we've been proven right repeatedly. We'd rather have been wrong about it.
Compassionate conservative = big spender from Texas.
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