I don't know many Republicans. One, a friend, is really an up-by-the- bootstraps Democrat but remains in deep denial. The thing is, he lives in Ohio, a swing state, so off and on through several elections I have taken him on as a reclamation project. A while ago I wrote to ask whether he was among the 35-or-so percent of Americans who still shelter behind George "Mission Accomplished" Bush. The short answer was yes; the longer version sizzled on for paragraphs, mostly to do with Iraq and the pusillanimous response of Democrats to Islamic jihadists who were, he said, "the ultimate test for the existence of the Western world as we now know it,"
Wow.
Gently as I could, I reminded him that, when it came to Iraq, he was working with a clouded crystal ball. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, he had e-mailed me, as follows: "The Iraq war is a non-issue and will grow more favorable to the president in the coming months. Rumsfeld is holding back on the weapons of mass destruction and will lay the evidence on the line just in time to affect the election."
You will recognize here a certain Tory detachment from reality, a reverence for their own mistakes, the vision of things, not as they are, but as they would be in a world without Democrats.
I decided to try another tack. I said I didn't know if he lived in former Representative Bob Ney's congressional district in Ohio, but if he did, and if Ney hadn't been obliged to resign because of those troublesome dealings with Jack Abramoff, would he be planning to vote for him? Because Ney, in addition to being open-minded about bribery, had done some interesting things in Congress.
I particularly remembered him back in the days when the French were stepping on Rumsfeld's timetable for taking out Saddam Hussein's famous weapons of mass destruction before he turned them on us, and how Ney, then chairman of the House Administration committee, banged down on his lectern and decreed that thenceforth, by God, all French fries served in the cafeterias of the House of Representatives would be known as Freedom fries. What a shot in the arm! The members – grown men, all – promptly adjourned and went home, confident that their constituents, when they heard this exhilarating news, would start breathing easier.
But they didn't. And they aren't. Three and a half years on -- longer than American forces fought in World War II -- the gratuitous and botched war in Iraq has left that country in chaos and ferment and cost ours 2700 young lives and counting, and treasure by the hundreds of billions. It is not our defense against the radicalization of the Arab world but the cause of it; it has become a recruiting poster and training ground for al Qaeda and terrorist rabble of like mind and leaves us not safer but ever more exposed to extremist Islam's random wrath. It is the answer to bin Laden's prayers.
And buried in Iraq is the good name of the United States. In the eyes of much of the world, the nation that nurtured and sustained the great Western alliance for a half century now ranks with Iran and North Korea as a threat to the peace; crucially undermined is its competence as an honest broker in the Middle East. The American Constitution, a beacon of liberty to humankind for more than 200 years, has been subverted to accommodate torture and secret trials, and trivialized to placate the rabid right wing of the Republican Party. Did my friend cheer the Administration's proposed Constitutional amendments to forbid same-sex marriage and desecration of the American flag? Those solutions in search of a problem? That quintessentially Republican summoning to worship at smoke and mirrors?
What constitutional issue is involved in the union of two women or two men? Are there hordes out there – is there anyone out there – desecrating the flag? The flag is an abstraction, an idea. If you burn or trample or spit on the flag do you harm the nation for which it stands? If you burn the Constitution do you destroy the concepts it embodies?
But if you make war without just cause, if you spy on your countrymen without legal sanction -- if you torture prisoners and hold them indefinitely without trial, hearing, counsel or the right to appeal -- then you are desecrating the Constitution. And rejecting 300 years of Anglo-American jurisprudence, according to Ronald Sokol, an international lawyer and legal scholar. "These abuses," he wrote in the International Herald Tribune last month, "would have caused no notice in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union but have never before been put forth in America."
Public protests against such transgressions of our laws and traditions are likely to touch off choruses of outrage from the administration camp, their adversaries labeled backbiters -- simple, confused, faint-hearted in the face of a dire threat to our way of life. And it's getting worse. Campaign 2006 is under way and for the Republican Party fear has become its sine qua non. Fear is what they have to sell. Last week, at a convention of the American Legion, in whose eyes Republicans walk on water, the president said, "If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities."
But of course the Republicans' most poignant fear is that the Democrats will take back one or both houses of Congress on November 7th, and in the struggle to ward off such a calamity, demonization is the fallback position. Recent examples abound:
The Republican National Committee, on Democrats: "Defeatocrats."
Karl Rove, on Democrats: "Obstacles to national security."
Senator Orrin Hatch, Utah, whose stump speeches regularly decry the bitter partisanship in Washington: "Middle East terrorists are waiting for the Democrats here to take control, let things cool off and then strike again."
Cheney, commenting on Ned Lamont's primary election victory over Joseph Leiberman, the Republicans' most empathetic Democrat: "It gives comfort to al Qaeda types."
Rumsfeld, raising goose bumps at the Legion convention with his invocation of fascism's 1938 "appeasers" (oh, freighted word!), then linking them with today's critics of the Iraq war. "Now we face a new type of fascism," he said, and neatly spliced the word "fascism" to "terrorists," so that, next day, the two together sprouted like grass seed in April all over the Washington Times and Fox News.
He did not say that there were also American appeasers in the late 1930s, and that nearly all of them were members of the Grand Old Party, and that they voted overwhelmingly against every single measure to support our European allies against Hitler, or that would help the U.S. prepare for the coming struggle.
Today's disconnect from reality seems to emanate straight from the White House. Americans are coming to see that the main occupation in all those bustling west wing offices is spinning the Iraqi crisis, not dealing with it. We keep hearing that Nuri al-Maliki and his government and army are moving steadily toward assuming full responsibility for the defense of their country. But after the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there and the helping hand Saddam Hussein gave Osama bin Laden on 9/11 that never happened, there is a certain skepticism abroad in the land. (It seems especially to have affected Republican congressional candidates in tight races; they're falling away from the party line in clusters). Maliki governs -- if one can use the word -- only with the support of a Shiite militia which last week was in open warfare with the national army -- yes, the very one trained and funded by the U.S., and which, in some units, has desertion rates of 40 percent.
Okay, if that daydream won't fly, what about Iraq as "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century," as Bush put it to the legionnaires? It is, he went on, war against "a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology." Into the same pot went the battles in Lebanon between Hezbollah and the Israelis and the nuclear threat from Iran.
But that doesn't seem to have gained much traction either. Where is there even a shred of evidence that there is a worldwide network of Islamic radicals out there on the scale of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union? As the Boston Globe put it, "Al Qaeda….may be capable of mass killings….but inflating the danger from jihadi terrorists into an existential threat and invoking a grandiose third world war….only plays into the hands of bin Laden and the other deluded megalomaniacs hiding out with him." And if Armageddon is upon us, where is our leader's call on the people to join the struggle, to sacrifice for the common cause -- say a dollar a gallon hike in the price of gasoline, repeal of the fat tax cuts to all those people who don't need them, a summons to the sons and daughters of privilege to share the burden of military service with those who aren't sheltered by status and money?
Some things do change in Washington. Without fanfare, Congressional cafeterias have gone back to calling French fries French fries. It may be that the French embassy's graceful reaction to Chairman Ney's dictum about Freedom fries has belatedly registered. "These are serious moments and we are dealing with serious issues," said an embassy spokeswoman. "We are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes."
Some might say that that sent a whiff of reality into the Capitol's hallowed halls, that with Ney gone the Administration committee is more sensible about intergovernmental affairs and cafeteria management. But don't count on it.
So I am left, finally, with three questions for my Republican friend in Ohio, only one of which I can answer with any assurance. Why, in the face of many real and some desperate needs facing our country, did we go to war against a gasbag of a tyrant and a ragtag army that presented no real threat to our people or our vital interests? I don't know.What is the administration's strategy for withdrawing our forces from Iraq? I don't know. The last question is really my friend's. "Like the war or not," he now says, "Iraq is the key issue." Then he elegiacally notes the approaching end of Bush's term and lists all the likely -- and some unlikely -- Democratic possibilities to succeed him. Who, he disparagingly asks, could do better? And that's the question I can answer. Anyone.
-- Larry Elliott
