Senator Olympia Snowe has been receiving much praise for reportedly "breaking" from the Republican Party, and supporting a Democratic measure last month that would have set a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
As part of a series on how Congress is dealing with the Iraq War, The Washington Post, today, ran an article on the reactions – and attitudes – regarding the Iraq War that Snowe is facing among the Maine public. The article is interesting in and of itself. However, in what was, perhaps, an "off hand" remark, Snowe managed to raise a great deal of anger in me – as well as a great deal of concern about how this country’s descent into its current situation in Iraq will be portrayed in coming decades.
In the second page of the Post article, Snowe expresses some of her thoughts on the war, after having had a discussion with Jennifer James, an Iraq War veteran with a negative opinion on progress there. According to the article:
Initially, [Snowe] backed the war, "because we were there. It did appear at the time that we were making military progress," and there was a need to rebuild and put a democratic government in place.
But, she said, "who could imagine that the war would last 4 1/2 years?"
Who could imagine? Who could imagine!?!
Senator Snowe must be angling for a "most oblivious U.S. Senator" award. One hardly had to look very far during the run up to the Iraq War to find people who were cautioning us against going in, out of the very concern that we might end up stuck there for an extended period of time. There were experts who cautioned us about the possibility, both prior to, and after, the invasion. There was an existing historical record from the Gulf War, when George H.W. Bush – and even Dick Cheney – cautioned about how a full-scale invasion would have led to a bloody and prolonged occupation. And, more importantly, there was a wide swath of average citizens who actively spoke out against the war – who tried to warn of the possible dire consequences of such an invasion, but who were dismissed and mocked as being "spineless" and "unpatriotic."
Any elected official – Republican or otherwise – who would try to tell us, today, that there was somehow "no warning" that we could end up in the situation we’re in now, is simply undeserving of their elected position. At best, they are oblivious of what people are saying around them. At worst, they are being disingenuous, and trying to retroactively find a way of defending their unwise decisions.
It is the latter scenario that has me concerned. While I suppose it is possible that Senator Snowe really was oblivious to the real concerns of a wide swath of the public, both prior to and immediately after the invasion, I am left with an uncomfortable feeling that Senator Snowe – along with many other Republicans, and a large number of "commentators" in the main stream media who were "wrong" on Iraq – may be already trying to revise the history of the Iraq War, as U.S. withdrawal becomes inevitable.
I’m hardly the only one to have the thought. In a front-page diary on No End in Sight, Meteor Blades discussed the problem of the "great idea, flawed execution" line of thought that is increasingly seen in regard to the Iraq War. According to this view, the invasion itself – no matter what those "nay-sayers" who tried to dissuade us from it from the beginning might say – was a good idea, but one that simply fell victim to the cronyism, corruption, and incompetence of the Bush administration.
Such an idea is convenient for early supporters of the war, on both the right, and the spineless left. It effectively allows them to wash from their hands the blood of thousands of U.S. troops, and an even larger number of innocent Iraqi civilians. It also allows them to maintain their credibility on foreign policy issues, despite a screw up of such proportions that, in a rational world, we’d have seen them fired from their jobs, and locked out of politics and political commentary for the rest of their lives.
Senator Snowe’s comment, whether she intended it or not, fits all too perfectly with the strategy of minimizing the warnings we had heard about going to war with Iraq at all. Despite the fact that Snowe – and every other Senator, Congressman, and U.S. politician – had ample warning, she claims ignorance as to the idea that we could have somehow ended up in our current situation. The implication, of course, is that the war itself was "such a good and necessary idea" that there was "no way" for any "rational" politician to realize what would ultimately happen. "It’s not our fault. We had a good idea. It’s President Bush’s fault for not executing the war properly. Who’d have thought we’d be there for 4 ½ years? We wouldn’t if the war had been run well."
Such an attempt at minimizing early concerns about the war is little more than an attempt by those responsible for the Iraq quagmire to weasel out of their responsibility. That alone is unacceptable: Those who advocated the war in Iraq should take full responsibility for the end results.
Worse, however, is what promoting such a line of thought could do for our country in the future. The Iraq War, if it has done anything, has confirmed the lesson that we learned in places such as Vietnam and Somalia: While the United States military works well when it comes to pushing a conventional military force out of an area, it performs much more poorly when it comes to occupying, and fostering long term stability in, an area where it has little in the way of local support. A failure to learn this lesson after our most recent disaster can only lead to future disasters in other areas of the globe. If not in the near future, in Iran, then, perhaps, in some other nation, twenty, or thirty, or forty years from now.
The neo-cons and warmongers of Washington remain unwilling to accept that lesson, as they will always be. I would, however, expect so called "moderates," such as Senator Snowe - especially if they claim to have "converted" on the war in general - to be more open to accepting reality, and more willing to accept responsibility for their own fundamentally flawed decisions.
If they are not, it will be our jobs, as citizens – and voters – to remind them of the real history of Iraq. And to hold them accountable if they are unwilling to accept it.
Senator Snowe is up for re-election in 2012. Let the accountability begin.