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Finding Wisdom in the Wreckage ( Now is the Republican's Time to Learn)
The American Thinker ^ | 11/09/2006 | J. Peter Mulhern

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.


TOPICS: Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: learn; wisdom; wreckage
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To: SirLinksalot

Read this article and Hugh Hewitt's article in Townhall today and you will have all the information you need to know what happened on Tuesday.
Now we need to work to correct these flaws.


41 posted on 11/09/2006 10:41:22 AM PST by oldtimer2 (I have seen THE VILLAGE and I don't want it raising my child)
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To: Kenny Bunk
The RNC absolutely torpedoed two good candidates ... Harris in GFL, and Graf in AZ.

Harris wasn't a good candidate and was up against a smooth Dim. (On election day, I saw her out on a freeway, waving signs. Sad.) And Graf was running on border issues in a very liberal district. The RCCC intervening hurt him but I'm not sure it defeated him. Boy, are those Graf supporters mad at the RNC. But the perps have left the RCCC.

Not sure either was ever electable unless we were having a very good year.
42 posted on 11/09/2006 10:41:24 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: Kenny Bunk
Compassionate conservative = big spender from Texas

Yup!

43 posted on 11/09/2006 10:47:09 AM PST by Regulator
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To: Kenny Bunk
note polite placement of the "f"

Also note the yiddish definition of Schmuck: as in the nickname Schmucky Chucky

44 posted on 11/09/2006 10:47:23 AM PST by oldtimer2 (I have seen THE VILLAGE and I don't want it raising my child)
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To: Kenny Bunk
Why was Republican turnout higher in 2006 than in 2004?

It would be an easy analysis if the Rs had stayed home. But they didn't. They voted D.

45 posted on 11/09/2006 11:03:27 AM PST by LS
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To: LS
They voted D

Source please ...
46 posted on 11/09/2006 11:11:58 AM PST by SirLinksalot
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To: George W. Bush
Harris wasn't a good candidate and was up against a smooth Dim

She was plenty good enough. And, this was a very important seat. The very least they could have done is back her up. Naive old me. I thought the point of belonging to a political party was that they supported candidates who came up through the party process.

The BushBots were down on this candidate from day 1. Hanging is too good for Mehlman.

47 posted on 11/09/2006 11:20:09 AM PST by Kenny Bunk (The GOP, party of the businessman, simply knows very little about the business of marketing)
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To: SirLinksalot
... a dangerously narrow reelection victory against an inept candidate... who should have been buried under a landslide that would have mmade 1972 look like a squeaker.

A sterling example of vintage Rove handiwork ... turning a humdrum landslide into an exciting nail-biter, which we almost lost, at phenomenal expense.

48 posted on 11/09/2006 11:23:53 AM PST by Kenny Bunk (The GOP, party of the businessman, simply knows very little about the business of marketing)
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To: SirLinksalot

Uh, obvious? Since R turnout was higher than 2002, and since D turnout wasn't higher, seems reasonable. The discussion point was that they "stayed home." We DEFINITELY know they did not.


49 posted on 11/09/2006 11:26:00 AM PST by LS
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To: LS
They voted D.

Perhaps the idiot-savant Rove and his rat pack of the leading gay thinkers in the Republican Party finally managed to drive the Reagan Democrats back to the Democrat Party.

50 posted on 11/09/2006 11:29:09 AM PST by Kenny Bunk (The GOP, party of the businessman, simply knows very little about the business of marketing)
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To: Kenny Bunk
She was plenty good enough. And, this was a very important seat. The very least they could have done is back her up. Naive old me. I thought the point of belonging to a political party was that they supported candidates who came up through the party process.

In a good year, they would have. And she would have won, I think. They knew it was tough and they worked on races they thought they could win. They lost all those races so the point has probably become moot.

I'm not saying they did the right thing by dissing her and intervening against Graf. It was just wrong and they get no money from me, in part because of this. But in an election that was such a disaster for us, it's hard to say that anything could have won those two races for us.

It's not so much their lack of support for Harris and Graf that is damning. It's their public rejection of them and disrespecting their state party and nomination process that really should make people mad at Mehlman and the GOP. They had no right to use GOP money and power like that. Nothing entitles them to that. Chairment like Haley Barbour would never have pulled this crap on the state parties.
51 posted on 11/09/2006 11:31:22 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: Kenny Bunk
Perhaps the idiot-savant Rove and his rat pack of the leading gay thinkers in the Republican Party finally managed to drive the Reagan Democrats back to the Democrat Party.


52 posted on 11/09/2006 11:33:07 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: George W. Bush
"Compassionate conservative = big spender from Texas."

Here we are 6-years-later and look where compassionate Conservatism has got us.

This Magoo threw money around like a drunken sailor and has left future generations with the bill.

53 posted on 11/09/2006 11:34:32 AM PST by 4Freedom (America is no longer the 'Land of Opportunity'. It's the 'Land of Illegal Alien Opportunists'!!!)
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To: SirLinksalot

"Voters didn’t like events in Iraq two years ago and they put President Bush on probation."


True. To those who disagree, can you name me one MOH winner from this war? One Silver Star winner? Too many in this country believed we would wade through Iraq within a year or two. For whatever reason, they believed that. I personally have seen no forward movement since the elections of the current Iraqi government. Not saying there isn't any, just saying that in America 2006, perception IS reality.


54 posted on 11/09/2006 11:38:08 AM PST by BLS (If it breathes, tax it, and if it stops breathing, find its children and tax them (DNC))
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To: LS
Uh, obvious? Since R turnout was higher than 2002, and since D turnout wasn't higher, seems reasonable. The discussion point was that they "stayed home." We DEFINITELY know they did not.

What about this --- Republicans came out in force and still voted GOP but were overwhelmed by INDEPENDENTS plus DEMOCRATS.

I think this is even more plausible.
55 posted on 11/09/2006 11:38:22 AM PST by SirLinksalot
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To: 4Freedom
This Magoo threw money around like a drunken sailor and has left future generations with the bill.

Politically, he's left our claim to be the grownups on fiscal conservatism to be laughable. We can claim it. The voter only has to point at the debt. And we didn't spend that much on Iraq.

So much of it was pointless spending: got us no votes, didn't help the economy much, corrupted our party, made the observant voters cynical about us. Heck, I'm cynical about us on spending now.
56 posted on 11/09/2006 11:38:37 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: BLS
To those who disagree, can you name me one MOH winner from this war? One Silver Star winner?

And no military funerals. Hiding the bodies that come back, sometimes failing to ensure they receive their due honors. And no video of 9/11 on TV or anywhere else.

They did their best to make it an invisible guns-and-butter war. It's bad. Always bad. Bad, bad, bad.

When you fight, fight to win. Go all the way.
57 posted on 11/09/2006 11:41:55 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: SirLinksalot; LS
What about this --- Republicans came out in force and still voted GOP but were overwhelmed by INDEPENDENTS plus DEMOCRATS.

I heard on TV that somebody did a big stats study over the last fifty years on this election already. Their early results were significant: many old-time Dims from the South who hadn't voted since '90 came out and voted.

I think they elected those Blue Dogs. I've been waiting to see more info from this study. The South's realignment to the GOP can no longer be taken for granted. They never really did like the Yankee GOP, as we well know.
58 posted on 11/09/2006 11:44:43 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: BeHoldAPaleHorse
OK, step one: after the next attack, assuming that America survives it, we need to shoot every registered Democrat in this country before we do anything else.

I really really hope that you are joking. If not, the way you are taking this is extremely unhealthy.

59 posted on 11/09/2006 12:05:16 PM PST by jmc813 (.)(.)
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To: jmc813
I really really hope that you are joking.

Son, the folks who threw baggies full of s*** at me when I got back to The World are now running Capitol Hill.

We cannot fight an external enemy unless our house is already in order. Allowing Democrats to run around loose during this war has, as it did in Vietnam, proven to be akin to allowing the German-American Bund and the Silvershirts to run around loose in 1942.

If not, the way you are taking this is extremely unhealthy.

What this country did is extremely unhealthy. Suicide is generally bad for your health.

60 posted on 11/09/2006 12:09:37 PM PST by BeHoldAPaleHorse (I dare call it treason.)
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