Outflanked in Iraq

[babylonsister]

Outflanked in Iraq

Posted September 22, 2007 | 12:43 PM (EST)


In a press conference Thursday, the president labeled MoveOn's recent ad in the New York Times "disgusting" and questioned the patriotism of Democrats who refused to repudiate it. Those were disingenuous words from a president who was either silent or complicit in the whisper campaign against John McCain in the 2000 primary election (which suggested that McCain's years as a prisoner of war had left him a little unbalanced) and who said nothing as an "independent" organization attacked the metals of a decorated war veteran, John Kerry, in the 2004 election while American boots were on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rather than calling attention to the president's faux outrage at attacks on a military man and the fact that the real outrage is his steadfast refusal to stop playing Russian Roulette with other people's children without a clear exit strategy or even a realistic definition any more of "success" that doesn't shift like the sand depending on which guidepost is no longer even visible in the desert, Senate Democrats took the bait. The same Congress that has never held anyone accountable for the policy that has left 30,000 American soldiers dead or wounded, largely by incendiary devices, suddenly mustered a rousing 72-vote majority to condemn an incendiary turn of phrase.

In a scene that is now all too familiar, Democrats were once again outflanked, playing checkers while the other side played chess, worrying about the next move ("They'll say we don't support our troops") while Republicans were thinking several moves ahead. For years they had allowed Republicans to elide the war on al Qaeda with the war in Iraq with the carefully crafted phrase, "the war on terror"--and they allowed them yet again to reinforce the association between the two by permitting General Petraeus to testify about Iraq on September 11. For years they have allowed the Republicans to blur the distinction between supporting our men and women in uniform and deploying them to referee a civil war in the desert with the phrase, "support our troops.'

Now, in hastily supporting a Republican-crafted resolution just like the ones used while the Republicans were in the majority to trap Democrats into unpopular stands readily taken out of context for campaign ads, Democrats yet again allowed Republicans to mix and match messages that have no logical relation to one another, eliding respect for Petraeus as a general, support for his conclusions, and support for our men and women in uniform: "To express the sense of the Senate that General David II. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces."

If the Democrats in the Senate were worried about the impact of the headline of the MoveOn ad, which attacked the general's recounting of the facts on the ground less effectively than the text of the ad, they have just amplified it by reinforcing that the central theme of the Republican message on Iraq from the start: that opposition to the war is an attack on the military, when in fact the Iraq war, by all accounts, has done nothing but weaken our military, strengthen the foothold of terrorists abroad, and undermine our national security. And they have done nothing but to reinforce the message that people who question administration policy on matters of war and peace are traitors. For the record, Americans have died for over 200 years defending, not passing resolutions against, free speech.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/outflanked-in-iraq_b_65436.html

[rodeodance]

1. UNfortuately, the razor sharp rhetoric ("They'll say we don't support our troops") WORKS and

at some level I have empathy with the Dems on this point.