George Will speaks at Colgate University in March. (Photo: Barrett Brassfield / Colgate University)With Friends Like TheseBy William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Sunday 06 September 2009
But you know, regime change didn't just arise as a subject recently. We did it in Grenada, Panama, Serbia. Would the world be better off if Milosevic were back in Serbia? Noriega in Panama? I don't think so. - George Will, 08 October 2002
People like George Will make this world a very weird place to be sometimes. Will, the conservative Washington Post columnist who appears to actually get paid twenty five cents for every twenty-five cent word he uses in his op-eds, has been the go-to guy for the ever-dwindling cerebral set of the GOP for quite a long time now. His chief skill over the years has been to disguise what has often been boilerplate support for all things Republican - including the Clinton impeachment, the election of George W. Bush and the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq - behind a fusillade of convoluted verbiage. It sounds good most of the time, but in the end carries about the same intellectual weight as the arguments put forth by Will's mouth-breathing colleagues in the right-wing press.
Which is what makes the developments of the last several days so interesting. On September 1st, The Washington Post carried an article by George Will titled "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." Three days later, Will published a second article titled "Time to Leave Iraq."
Yes, this actually happened.
In his out-of-Afghanistan article, Will argued, "America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters." This should be done, he concluded, so no more valorous American soldiers die over there.
In his out-of-Iraq piece, Will contends that, "Nations which suffer civil wars as large as Iraq's was between 2004 and 2006 have 'a terrifyingly high rate of recidivism.' Two more years of US military presence cannot control whether that is in Iraq's future. Some people believe the war in Iraq was not only 'won' but vindicated by the success of the 2007 US troop surge. Yet as Iraqi violence is resurgent, the logic of triumphalism leads here: If, in spite of contrary evidence, the US surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all US forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, US forces must come home sooner."
It's enough to make any left-leaning opponents of the Iraq and Afghan wars want to re-think their position on the whole thing. It is refreshing to see so blunt an assessment regarding military withdrawal appear in The Washington Post, one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for both Bush-era boondoggles, but coming from Will it all rings more than a little hollow.
First of all, if Will is to be taken at his word that he is a born-again anti-war Republican, it is a transformation that happened very recently. An article Will wrote in 2006 shilling for Sen. John McCain made the exact opposite argument he has recently delivered. Titled "America's Moral Duty in Iraq," he wrote, "The national government is gossamer, but subgroups are solid. They are in an intensifying melee that has, according to Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, 'genocidal stakes.' Writing in the National Interest, Biddle says that 'the downside risks' for any group that is party to a power-sharing deal include extermination by mass violence from rival groups. America cannot now credibly promise protection commensurate with that risk. And absent adoption of the McCain policy - a substantial increase in forces - America's waning influence on events may derive from the increasing likelihood that the scant protection that American forces now provide will be withdrawn."
Hm.
There are many such examples of Will's strong stance in favor of both wars, and bizarrely, an almost equal number of examples of his vacillations on the issue. Peter Wehner, writing for the conservative magazine Commentary, recently took his erstwhile compatriot to task. "Mr. Will's shifting stands on these wars is vertigo-inducing," wrote Wehner. "To understand just how much this is so, consider Iraq. Once upon a time, supporting the Iraq war was fashionable; large majorities of the public were behind it. So was most of the political class. And so was George Will. Yet that understates things quite a lot. Will was not just in favor of the war; he was as passionate and articulate champion of it as you could possibly find."
"On Afghanistan," continued Wehner, "Mr. Will's record follows a similar pattern. He, like almost every American, supported Operation Enduring Freedom. Will was overflowing with praise for the Bush administration - except when he was counseling it that 'US Strategy should maximize fatalities among the enemy rather than expedite the quickest possible cessation of hostilities.' Mr. Will has earned the reputation as one of the finest columnists alive, and one of the better ones our country has ever produced. I have admired him in the past, and I learn from him still. But on Iraq and Afghanistan, he has been wrong, unreliable, and unsteady."
The question of what exactly motivated Will to go sideways on Afghanistan and Iraq again can only be answered by the author himself, but a few guesses could be hazarded. He could have genuinely come to believe withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq is the best option. He could be trying to foment political trouble for President Obama by attempting to incite the vehemently anti-war base of the Democratic Party, a base that has been increasingly at loggerheads with the Obama administration over a variety of pressing issues. Or maybe he just felt like throwing a little dynamite into the GOP's pond to make a splash and confound the far-right cabal of anti-intellectuals controlling the party who don't read him anyway.
It really doesn't matter in the end. George Will was for these wars before he was against them before he was for them, and now he's against them again. His eloquent voice could have been a big help eight years ago if it had been used to stop the calamitous course of these wars instead of championing them and the president who created them. On paper, the ranks of anti-war activists have swelled by one, but with friends like this, who needs friends.
http://www.truthout.org/090609A
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