Your war, not mine!

Townhall ^ | May 10, 2007 | Victor David Hanson

[Kaslin]

This war is lost," Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid recently proclaimed.

That pessimism about Iraq is now widely shared by his Democratic colleagues. But many of these converted doves aren't being quite honest about why they've radically changed their views of the war. Most of the serious Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, and former Sen. Jonathan Edwards -- once voted, along with Reid, to authorize the war. Sen. Barack Obama didn't. But, then, he wasn't in the Senate at the time.

Now these former supporters of Iraq find themselves under assault by a Democratic base that demands apologies. Only Edwards has said he is sorry for his vote of support.

But if the Democratic Party is now almost uniformly anti-war, it is also understandable why it can't field a single major presidential candidate who was in Congress when it counted and tried to stop the invasion.

After all, responsible Democrats in national office had been convinced by Bill Clinton for eight years and then George W. Bush for two that Saddam's Iraq was both a conventional and terrorist threat to the United States and its regional allies.

Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan.

In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMD. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam.

When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false.

But we no longer hear much about these various reasons why the Democrats understandably supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they now most often plead they were hoodwinked by sneaky warmongering neocons or sexed-up partisan intelligence reports.

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind, especially in matters as serious as war -- but the public at least deserves a sincere explanation for this radical about-face.

o why not come clean about their changes of heart?

Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front.

Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad.

Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently.

In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line -- whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence -- they either lost confidence in the United States' very ability to stabilize Iraq, or felt that even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure.

That confession could, of course, be nuanced with exculpatory arguments about the mistakes made by those in the Bush administration, such as: "Our necessary war that I voted for to remove Saddam worked; your optional one to stay on to promote democracy didn't."

Such an explanation of turnabout would be transparent and invite a public discussion. And it would certainly be more legitimate that the current protestations of "the neo-cons made me do it."

With America still engaged in a tough war, that kind of excuse-making just doesn't cut it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

[wizr]

Please, Master, explain your accreditation. Not that I don’t believe your wonderful knowledge, just whence it came, that I may be scholarly as you are.

[Billthedrill]

So why not come clean about their changes of heart?

There was no change of heart - the heart was not the organ involved. What evolved was a war so nearly won that an adversarial position became safe enough and politically advantageous for certain of the Dems to adopt. It did, after all, help win a majority in Congress.

The question now is having attained majority status, what to do with it? The safety of the adversarial position depended greatly on being in minority; that is, on being able to criticize without bearing a responsibility for the outcome. That is gone now, although the more strident of the antiwar faction seems particularly slow in realizing the potential cost of being held responsible for what the country in general regards as a negative outcome, but that they do not. In short, losing the war or the appearance of loss was an acceptable outcome so long as it resulted in a gain of political power. The latter has changed.

That accounts for an achingly unsuccessful and obvious attempt to rewrite the history of the war's antecedents. There never was a Kuwait invasion, Saddam was an enlightened leader, women had great rights in Iraq, there were never any WMD's, etc, etc - this sort of silly revisionism is the only way the antiwar faction of the Dems can maintain its sense of rectitude but it cuts out anyone on record as knowing better. That would include Kerry and Clinton, and if they now feel a little abused by this determined denial of historical fact that is perfectly understandable (and their just dessert, but that is another issue). Hence the antiwar faction's enthusiasm for Obama, who is relatively immune from criticism from that point of view.

This is simply the logical conclusion of a determined refusal to accept responsibility, a determined clinging to minority status and the freedom of criticism that is derived from that. The antiwar faction wants to have its cake and eat it too - it wants to propose radical solutions and blame any negative results on Bush, who, since any Democratic culpability is ignored or defined away, now bears the sole responsibility for getting everyone in the situation in the first place. And that is simply not going to do, and the wiser heads in the Democratic leadership know it. Those of lesser wisdom are happily leading the party toward a precipice, and unfortunately as the majority they will be leading the country there as well.