[NYTr] Frank Rich: Will the Democrats Betray Us?
All the News That Doesn't Fit
[Isn't the question "Why did the Democrats Betray Us?" or "How Much
Longer Will We Let the Democrats Betray Us?" (That wouldn't spoil
MoveAlong's dumb pun (or, as Rich calls it, juvenile name-calling that
accomplishes only distraction), and OF COURSE the Demopublicans have
already betrayed -- not us, but their oath to protect, preserve and
defend the Constitution of the United States. NATURALLY Petraeus is a
"Betrayer." He's just following orders, covering his ass. Why is stupid
Move On even acting like there was ever any other possibility -- even
to make their dumb pun? Damnable smug Liberals with their big fat porky
ultra-comfortable budgets. -NYTr]
The New York Times - Sep 16, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/opinion/16rich.html
Will the Democrats Betray Us?
By FRANK RICH
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be withdrawn by April anyway.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 b 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
b are we safer? b 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 b dare one say it? b 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.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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