http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/opinion/16rich.html?th&emc=th
Will the Democrats Betray Us?
By FRANK RICH
NY Times: September 16, 2007
"SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander
in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making
America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities
in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin
and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.
Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the
White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely
shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only
troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush's
troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April
anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet
again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.
On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General
Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday,
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.'s Osama bin Laden unit,
explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto
protection of Pervez Musharraf, is "on balance" more threatening today that
it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just
as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban
camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we
installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.
Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and
the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10
mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland
security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in
charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press
conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports
envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the
Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.
This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more
accurate than Mr. Bush's recent false analogies, can take us only so far.
Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam.
Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's sales
pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William
Westmoreland's similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967.
Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a
civil war. He spoke as well of the "repeated successes" of the
American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number
of combat-ready battalions. "The strategy we're following at this time is
the proper one," the general assured America, and "is producing results."
Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another
eight years - just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said
may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there's a crucial
difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by
General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full
and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in
Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress,
regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming
for Westmoreland's Congressional appearance.
Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated
Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans
believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap
opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with
Britney Spears's latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann,
our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime
television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where
Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of
merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox
titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial
promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.
Even if military "victory" were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a
war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was
ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the
"surge." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely
abandoned the war; they don't want to hear anything that might remind them
of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric's much-promoted weeklong visit to
the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast's all-time low.
Angelina Jolie's movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint
Eastwood's wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its
latest season, "24" lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did
between January's prime-time address and last week's.
You can't blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the
president's real "plan for victory" is to let his successor clean up the
mess. They don't want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what
can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear
majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every
day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often
resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds
that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for
the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an
almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence.
Last week Democrats often earned that rating, especially those running for
president. It is true that they do not have the votes to overcome a Bush
veto of any war legislation. But that doesn't mean the Democrats have to go
on holiday. Few used their time to cross-examine General Petraeus and
Ambassador Crocker on their disingenuous talking points, choosing instead to
regurgitate stump sentiments or ask uncoordinated, redundant questions. It's
telling that the one question that drew blood - are we safer? - was asked by
a Republican, John Warner, who is retiring from the Senate.
Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of
the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly
slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The
Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing
brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut
and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious
charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those
charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to
hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a
furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting
both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting
America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far
created.
It's also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop
getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for
withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is
academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America
is more important - dare one say it? - than trying to outpander one another
in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and
focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the
two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's essential to turn
up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock
to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or
frightened Republicans to endorse.
They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus's
boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly
concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond
Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals
who turned down the White House post of "war czar" last fall? The war should
be front and center in Congress every day.
Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt
policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night,
is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the
road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more
to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent
reality. We can't afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each
day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can't be
held hostage indefinitely to a president's narcissistic need to compound his
errors rather than admit them.
The enemy votes, too. Cataclysmic events on the ground in Iraq, including
Thursday's murder of the Sunni tribal leader Mr. Bush embraced two weeks ago
as a symbol of hope, have never arrived according to this administration's
optimistic timetable. Nor have major Qaeda attacks in the West. It's
national suicide to entertain the daydream that they will start doing so
now.
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