As is obvious from the title, this diary is NOT about education, even if it may be educational. It is the result of the daily email I receive from
The History News Network of the Center for History and Media of George Mason University. The full title of the relevant piece is
Why Republicans Are Desperate to Bait the Antiwar Left and was written by Jim Sleeper, a former New York Daily News columnist and the author of Liberal Racism, is a lecturer in political science at Yale.
(Those who would like to subscribe to the HNN email update can click here).
I am pressed for time this morning because of a crisis I cannot discuss. So let me suggest that the entire piece, which is brief, is worth reading. I will offer snippets to try to convince you of that fact.
The opening paragraph lays out the terrain:
The uproar in the House of Representatives on the Friday before Thanksgiving over the Republicans' phony proposal for "immediate withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Iraq revealed not just that their side of the aisle swarms with political reptiles and 40-year-old high-school debaters; that much isn't news, even to independents like me. What it really showed is that Republicans now desperately need the anti-war movement their Democratic colleagues refused to give them in the vote on the resolution.
Saying Republicans need an atni-war movment like that during the Vietnam era to cover their own "cut-and-run" strategy, Sleeper notes the sending of troops while taxes were cut that would have paid for things like armor, and while refusing to consider a draft. He links this to a supposedly Wilsonian strategy as one of the bases for their runs for reelection.
He offers the following blunt statement:
The warmakers' predicament has become all the more excruciating because it was so completely self-inflicted. Determined in 2003 to show that the Iraq war would be different from the one in Vietnam, they convincingly assailed "deja-vu" Democrats and other dissenters, who were predicting reruns of Vietnam's trumped-up pretexts, massive overkill, and bottomless quagmires.
Iraq is different, the warmakers insisted, but they were right in ways they never intended. They were so successful at deflecting and silencing every warning or doubt that they had no one to blame but themselves when, instead of being conveyed through grateful, flower-strewing throngs on June 30, 2004, Ambassador Paul Bremer III had to be rushed out of the Green Zone two days early, as his American successors may have to be with the desert equivalent of Vietnam "boat people" clinging to their heels.
Clearly part of the problem for Republicans has been the lack of an anti-war moevement like that of the 1960's - there was no equivalent of Jane Fonda to undercut American efforts to win hearts and minds, rather
The Iraq war masterminds have done all of that, all by themselves. It was they who insisted we wouldn't need more troops than we sent, let alone a draft or fewer tax cuts. It was they who developed the rules and rationales and "culture" that allowed the Abu Ghraib abuses and the systematic outsourcing of torture to gain ground.
He describes the current desperate situation as created by the "breathtaking incompetence" of the warmakers and their cheerleaders. He offers an extensive quote from Dexter Filkins (which I will not completely paste in) about what the opportunity was for democracy, led by Iraqis themselves, and what has been lost. Filkins describes the efforts by what could be called a political class to create a civil society. And what happened? They were killed, thrown in ditches, tortured .. you get the picture. Let me offer the end of the quote from Filkins, a rather grim assessment:
"As much as any single factor, the death of Iraq's political class explains the difficulties of the country's rebirth. The good guys are dead."
Sleeper's final paragraph, which comes immediately thereafter, represents his understanding of the current political status here at home. You may not agree, in part or in whole, but it is one you should consider:
By voting against the resolution for immediate withdrawal, House Democrats discredited what may well be Republicans' final effort to shift the blame. Efforts to tie Rep. John Murtha to Michael Moore and to get liberals on record calling for "immediate withdrawal" haven't worked any better than efforts to "swift-boat" Cindy Sheehan or Joseph Wilson or any other dissenter. Those who conceived and conducted this war so disingenuously, incompetently and corruptly can't cut and run from their responsibility for it by blaming anyone but themselves.