Other People's Children
The world we once knew did not end on September 11, 2001. That happened 18 months later when President Bush, to the dismay of nearly the entire international community, made war on Iraq, a country in the thrall of a loutish dictator, but that had played no part in the mass murders of 9/11, harbored no weapons of mass destruction and represented no threat to the U.S. or its allies.
America had rallied after the al-Quaeda attacks on New York and Washington and was up on its feet. And even though Bush, who strove to identify with President Roosevelt's historic call on the people to face down fear in the Great Depression, would prove somewhat undersized for the mantle of great leadership, somebody fed him the right words: "Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called 'the warm courage of national unity.'"
It was true: a wave of ardent solidarity was sweeping across the land; there was an outpouring of affection for the stricken cities, even from the red states, where Washington had once been the locus of their woes and New York was sin city. From abroad came expressions of shock and sympathy. "Today," headlined Le Monde, France's most respected newspaper, "we are all Americans."
And then that splendid unity, the only good thing to come out of the horror, began to splinter under the incessant hammering for war by the White House philosophers of chaos, and finally shattered altogether on March 19, 2003 when, overriding objections in the UN Security Council and the antipathy of most of the civilized world, Bush gave the fateful order for the invasion of Iraq.
That was the day our world changed.
Now we are rounding out four years in the consequent morass, at ruinous cost in human life and money that should have served better causes. Fifty thousand Iraqi non-combatants have been killed and very soon the 3000th American soldier will die in what everyone but George W. Bush now knows is a civil war, and his calling it a terrorist insurgency only confounds serious search for a way out. To millions of Muslims the war has been stoked into a clash between Islamic society and the West, while to much of the rest of the world, the U.S., for half a century a leader of the great Western alliance, now seems a thwarted giant, itself a menace to the peace.
But Bush tells us we are engaged in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century." To fight such a war, he gives the Justice Department authority to spy on the public without warrants and the military license to torture prisoners, to hold them indefinitely without a trial or a hearing, without even naming their crime -- all in violation of rights enshrined in international law and the statutes of civilized nations.
In light of the president's grave assessment of the crisis, a reporter asks what sacrifices he expects to ask of the American people. He replies, "Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatever."
He was as good as his word. Through all those first days and weeks when people were aching to do something, to contribute, he made no call on them -- not to ask that they temper their insatiable appetite for energy, to share rides or take the bus; he didn't go on television to entreat young Americans to volunteer for the overtaxed ranks of the beleaguered military. Nothing.
Nor did he ask for a tax increase to help pay for the 175 million-dollars-a-day cost of the war. Instead, taxes were cut, again and again, and the rich and super-rich grew richer while the deficit deepened and the gap between the affluent and the needy widened. SUVs remained best-sellers in auto showrooms, gas went to nearly $4 a gallon, and Mobil proudly announced that in 2005 it banked the highest net profit in its history. Between them Halliburton, Bechtel and Parsons -- all closely associated with fearmonger-in-chief Dick Cheney -- collected $20 billion for reconstruction work in Iraq. Although by then they had been "reconstructing" for more than three years, Baghdad could still count on only six hours of electricity a day, and much of the population was living with untreated sewage and unclean water.
This, then, was the new world that dawned in 2003 under the presidency of George W. Bush. One has to wonder how many, even among those who voted to return him to office in 2004, think it is a better world. Certainly he gave us all good reason to fear for the future. But is it terrorists we should most fear? Or is it the palace guard, all of whom seem to share a Louis XV disdain for the day after tomorrow -- "Après moi, le déluge" -- with no noticeable concern for what might happen beyond their life spans.
The dollar sign is their icon. They never heard of a pristine tundra they didn't want to drill for oil or a virgin forest they didn't want to cut down and sell; they abetted fellow dollar worshippers in the oil, timber and automotive industries by embedding ideologues and incompetents in the bureaucracies where critical decrees about the environment are laid down, and where endless innovative ways to plunder the land and poison the seas were made legal.
Face them with absolute scientific unity on greenhouse gases as a terminal threat to great sweeps of our planet and they shudder -- with the painful thought of how much regulation would cost -- and call for further study. The departing Republican majority in Congress, which the New York Times calls "the grand enabler of record debt and deficits," dumps the bill on generations yet unborn and leaves town.
And the example set by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle circle of fire-eaters, not one of whom ever stepped forward to stand in harm's way for his country, has stood the test of time: neither have any of their sons or daughters. It is somebody else's children who will have to fight the war in Iraq to its bitter conclusion, and somebody else's children who will have to pay for it.
I have come a long way to my summation: that nothing in the above is to say that a new and better world is guaranteed for January 20, 2007, the day Democrats take over Congress. This is not, as right-wing spin doctors hold, because the freshmen Democrats are essentially a conservative bunch. "Republicans may have lost," proclaimed neo-con Lawrence Ludlow in the National Review, "but the conservative ascendancy is alive and well."
That's a catchy tagline but it's simply not true. Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker's scrupulously circumspect political analyst, points out that "in every case (the election's) Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them." Furthermore, in 2000, when this year's 33 Senate seats were last contested, the Democratic plurality in the 50 states, like Al Gore's, was around 500,000 votes; this year, although there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than 7 million.
But an election victory, even a big one, is not a permanent gift of the voters; it is a mandate, good for two years, renewable only in recognition of achievement. Nancy Boyda, who won a Kansas district that Bush had carried by 20 points in 2004, summed up what she considered her charge: "Stop the gridlock, stop the nastiness. People are sick of excuses. Get something done."
In the weeks running up to their taking office, Congressional newcomers have been expressing a keenly-felt understanding of this moment in history and their role in it. They are well-aware that independents and disillusioned Republicans helped elect them and now, they say, they have to produce. They may not have answers yet but they see core problems that have festered while time and money and political energy were squandered on conjured up issues like flag-burning and gay marriage. They tick off wounds in the body politic in urgent need of attention: eight million children without health insurance; the untrammeled access of K Street lobbyists to the innermost sanctums of Congress and their malign influence there; the wildly disproportionate share of the national wealth that goes to two percent of the population at the expense of everyone else; the erosion of manufacturing jobs, a core of the middle class; the miserly minimum wage; our languishing environment. And Iraq -- the millstone dragging everything else down.
Nancy Boyda, the newly-elected Representative from Kansas, worries that the presidential campaign will dominate politics in the next two years. "If that happens and Democrats can't get anything done, we'll get kicked out of office just the way the Republicans were."
Our best hope is that a majority in the 110th Congress is aware of this, too, because there is little to expect from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the next two years. The White House will still be occupied by George W. Bush who, as Maureen Dowd so deftly put it, continues to suffer delusions of adequacy.
-- Larry Elliott
America had rallied after the al-Quaeda attacks on New York and Washington and was up on its feet. And even though Bush, who strove to identify with President Roosevelt's historic call on the people to face down fear in the Great Depression, would prove somewhat undersized for the mantle of great leadership, somebody fed him the right words: "Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called 'the warm courage of national unity.'"
It was true: a wave of ardent solidarity was sweeping across the land; there was an outpouring of affection for the stricken cities, even from the red states, where Washington had once been the locus of their woes and New York was sin city. From abroad came expressions of shock and sympathy. "Today," headlined Le Monde, France's most respected newspaper, "we are all Americans."
And then that splendid unity, the only good thing to come out of the horror, began to splinter under the incessant hammering for war by the White House philosophers of chaos, and finally shattered altogether on March 19, 2003 when, overriding objections in the UN Security Council and the antipathy of most of the civilized world, Bush gave the fateful order for the invasion of Iraq.
That was the day our world changed.
Now we are rounding out four years in the consequent morass, at ruinous cost in human life and money that should have served better causes. Fifty thousand Iraqi non-combatants have been killed and very soon the 3000th American soldier will die in what everyone but George W. Bush now knows is a civil war, and his calling it a terrorist insurgency only confounds serious search for a way out. To millions of Muslims the war has been stoked into a clash between Islamic society and the West, while to much of the rest of the world, the U.S., for half a century a leader of the great Western alliance, now seems a thwarted giant, itself a menace to the peace.
But Bush tells us we are engaged in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century." To fight such a war, he gives the Justice Department authority to spy on the public without warrants and the military license to torture prisoners, to hold them indefinitely without a trial or a hearing, without even naming their crime -- all in violation of rights enshrined in international law and the statutes of civilized nations.
In light of the president's grave assessment of the crisis, a reporter asks what sacrifices he expects to ask of the American people. He replies, "Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatever."
He was as good as his word. Through all those first days and weeks when people were aching to do something, to contribute, he made no call on them -- not to ask that they temper their insatiable appetite for energy, to share rides or take the bus; he didn't go on television to entreat young Americans to volunteer for the overtaxed ranks of the beleaguered military. Nothing.
Nor did he ask for a tax increase to help pay for the 175 million-dollars-a-day cost of the war. Instead, taxes were cut, again and again, and the rich and super-rich grew richer while the deficit deepened and the gap between the affluent and the needy widened. SUVs remained best-sellers in auto showrooms, gas went to nearly $4 a gallon, and Mobil proudly announced that in 2005 it banked the highest net profit in its history. Between them Halliburton, Bechtel and Parsons -- all closely associated with fearmonger-in-chief Dick Cheney -- collected $20 billion for reconstruction work in Iraq. Although by then they had been "reconstructing" for more than three years, Baghdad could still count on only six hours of electricity a day, and much of the population was living with untreated sewage and unclean water.
This, then, was the new world that dawned in 2003 under the presidency of George W. Bush. One has to wonder how many, even among those who voted to return him to office in 2004, think it is a better world. Certainly he gave us all good reason to fear for the future. But is it terrorists we should most fear? Or is it the palace guard, all of whom seem to share a Louis XV disdain for the day after tomorrow -- "Après moi, le déluge" -- with no noticeable concern for what might happen beyond their life spans.
The dollar sign is their icon. They never heard of a pristine tundra they didn't want to drill for oil or a virgin forest they didn't want to cut down and sell; they abetted fellow dollar worshippers in the oil, timber and automotive industries by embedding ideologues and incompetents in the bureaucracies where critical decrees about the environment are laid down, and where endless innovative ways to plunder the land and poison the seas were made legal.
Face them with absolute scientific unity on greenhouse gases as a terminal threat to great sweeps of our planet and they shudder -- with the painful thought of how much regulation would cost -- and call for further study. The departing Republican majority in Congress, which the New York Times calls "the grand enabler of record debt and deficits," dumps the bill on generations yet unborn and leaves town.
And the example set by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle circle of fire-eaters, not one of whom ever stepped forward to stand in harm's way for his country, has stood the test of time: neither have any of their sons or daughters. It is somebody else's children who will have to fight the war in Iraq to its bitter conclusion, and somebody else's children who will have to pay for it.
I have come a long way to my summation: that nothing in the above is to say that a new and better world is guaranteed for January 20, 2007, the day Democrats take over Congress. This is not, as right-wing spin doctors hold, because the freshmen Democrats are essentially a conservative bunch. "Republicans may have lost," proclaimed neo-con Lawrence Ludlow in the National Review, "but the conservative ascendancy is alive and well."
That's a catchy tagline but it's simply not true. Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker's scrupulously circumspect political analyst, points out that "in every case (the election's) Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them." Furthermore, in 2000, when this year's 33 Senate seats were last contested, the Democratic plurality in the 50 states, like Al Gore's, was around 500,000 votes; this year, although there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than 7 million.
But an election victory, even a big one, is not a permanent gift of the voters; it is a mandate, good for two years, renewable only in recognition of achievement. Nancy Boyda, who won a Kansas district that Bush had carried by 20 points in 2004, summed up what she considered her charge: "Stop the gridlock, stop the nastiness. People are sick of excuses. Get something done."
In the weeks running up to their taking office, Congressional newcomers have been expressing a keenly-felt understanding of this moment in history and their role in it. They are well-aware that independents and disillusioned Republicans helped elect them and now, they say, they have to produce. They may not have answers yet but they see core problems that have festered while time and money and political energy were squandered on conjured up issues like flag-burning and gay marriage. They tick off wounds in the body politic in urgent need of attention: eight million children without health insurance; the untrammeled access of K Street lobbyists to the innermost sanctums of Congress and their malign influence there; the wildly disproportionate share of the national wealth that goes to two percent of the population at the expense of everyone else; the erosion of manufacturing jobs, a core of the middle class; the miserly minimum wage; our languishing environment. And Iraq -- the millstone dragging everything else down.
Nancy Boyda, the newly-elected Representative from Kansas, worries that the presidential campaign will dominate politics in the next two years. "If that happens and Democrats can't get anything done, we'll get kicked out of office just the way the Republicans were."
Our best hope is that a majority in the 110th Congress is aware of this, too, because there is little to expect from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the next two years. The White House will still be occupied by George W. Bush who, as Maureen Dowd so deftly put it, continues to suffer delusions of adequacy.
-- Larry Elliott
posted by Larry Elliott at 1:45 PM
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