Editorial & Commentary

OPPOSITION TO IRAQ WAR ISN'T DEFEATISM

Editorial

Last week U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld launched a sharp attack on the news media and critics of the Bush administration's war and national security policies. "Any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere" he said.

     It was a telling moment. Once again the Bush administration found it necessary to imply that critics of the Iraq War are making Americans less safe. But it's the war policies of the White House that are causing damage. Currently the country is spending $250 million a day from the federal Treasury on the war. That could be used for many domestic concerns --especially in health care, education, and conversion to more efficient fuels.

     Although President Bush has backed away from hinting that critics of the Iraq War are unpatriotic, Vice-President Dick Cheney remarked last week that calling for a withdrawal timetable for Iraq is "self-defeating pessimism."

     But most Americans don't see it this way. A recent New York Times/CBS poll showed only 29 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the right direction. This has the White House on the defensive --and it's beginning to show.

     In the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections in November, the Bush administration will engage in all sorts of tactics to ensure the Republicans maintain a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate. The party's prospects look dim. That means the campaign will likely turn nasty.

     But what are we to make of the attacks by Rumsfeld and Cheney? Do they reveal something we should be debating more widely? It helps to place them in some historical context. Recently in The Nation magazine, Jonathan Schell writes that: "The lesson most of the country learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong." But Schell says that Dick Cheney (who was President Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff in the mid-1970s) drew an opposite lesson. He says Cheney believed "the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal."

     Schell says Cheney took the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale. "In doing so he brings an old theme back in a new guise --that American weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion --this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition-- is the country's problem" he writes.

     But recent opposition to the Iraq War is proving a hopeful sign, rather than any sort of weakening of America. In a Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut this past August, antiwar candidate Ned Lamont defeated Senator Joe Lieberman. It was a significant political moment, because Lieberman has repeatedly condemned critics of the Bush administration's mishandling of the war.

     Lamont had a clear message for voters: "Stay the course --that's not a winning strategy in Iraq, and it's not a winning strategy for America." That message resonated with voters in Connecticut, and is a serious challenge to potential Presidential candidates like Senator Hillary Clinton who hasn't been outspoken about the war.

     But will the result in Connecticut continue as a national trend? In many ways it's up to Democrats running against the war. They must continue to make a strong case for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. That will invite charges of defeatism. But their rebuttal must be immediate and clear. As Harvard University political scientist Stanley Hoffmann explains: "The argument about how much good we could do by staying is, to put it mildly, undermined by how little we have done to provide protection and essential services to a population that the U.S. invasion exposed to bitter violence and hardships."

     If the mid-term election campaign produces more serious debate on Bush administration's war policies (instead of smear tactics, mudslinging, and overheated rhetoric) we may see results that place a political check on the imperial presidency of George W. Bush. That's seriously overdue and badly needed.