John Kerry on the “Surge”: When Resolve Turns Reckless
December 23rd, 2006 @ 6:02 pm
In the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post, John Kerry writes about the case for flip-flopping in a well thought out and presented case about the much discussed concept of the “surge.” Kerry makes it clear that Bush’s policies on Iraq have been a series of flops and yet Bush refuses to “flip” and change course. Since the release of the Iraq Study Group report, Bush has done nothing but play politics on the lowest possible level that any president can play at politics. It’s what Bush does best, in fact, play politics, and John Kerry points out that “Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous — it is immoral.”
The constant flip-flopping from the Bush administration on Iraq has led to the slinging of “Barbed words,” that “can make for great politics,” or as John Kerry knows first hand political fodder. But, Kerry eloquently makes the case that he would “rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.” What part of that don’t the Bush administration or the war hanger-on’ers get? For truly, as Kerry says, “No one should be looking for vindication in what is happening in Iraq today.”
The lesson here is not that some of us were right about Iraq or that some of us were wrong. The lesson is simply that we need to change course rapidly rather than perversely use mistakes already made and lives already given as an excuse to make more mistakes and lose even more lives.
When young Americans are being killed and maimed, when the Middle East is on the brink of three civil wars, even the most vaunted “steadfastness” morphs pretty quickly into stubbornness, and resolve becomes recklessness. Changing tactics in the face of changing conditions on the ground, developing new strategies because the old ones don’t work, is a hell of a lot smarter than the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again with the same tragic results.
Again, John Kerry reminds us all that, as he has so many times over the past year or more (see here and here), that “Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial died after America’s leaders knew that our strategy in that war was not working.” He asks the question…
Was then-secretary of defense Robert McNamara steadfast as he continued to send American troops to die for a war he knew privately could not be won?
And he reminds us all that “History does not remember his resolve — it remembers his refusal to confront reality.” And, Kerry points out that “Clark Clifford, the man who succeeded McNamara in 1968, was handpicked by President Lyndon B. Johnson because he was a renowned hawk.”
But the new defense secretary reviewed the Vietnam policy and concluded that “we cannot realistically expect to achieve anything more through our military force, and the time has come to begin to disengage.” By the time he left office, he had refused to endorse a further military buildup, supported the halt in our bombing, and urged negotiation and gradual disengagement. Was Clifford a flip-flopper of historic proportions, or did he in fact demonstrate the courage of his convictions?
It is simple now, really, because in truth, “We cannot afford to waste time being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory.” And time is what the Bush administration keeps wasting over and over again, with their refusal to change course…
We’ve already lost years being told that we have no choice but to stay the course of a failed policy.
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http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=4991
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