John Kerry was just on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition on CNN, and gave a comprehensive view of the dynamics in the Middle East and Iraq and what needs to be done, which will be of a political and diplomatic nature. He also reiterated that getting Iraq right involves bringing our troops home by setting a date. But I was particularly struck when he responded to a question about John McCain's preposterous idea of sending more troops into Iraq.
More at the flip
This was a down and dirty policy discussion (very refreshing from the normal silliness in the MSM), and then Wolf mentions McCain:
BLITZER: Well, John McCain, I'll read to you what he says. In fact, I'll let you listen to what he says. You know John McCain quite well. He totally disagrees. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
U.S. SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN, R-ARIZONA: The number of attacks are up. The number of bodies found in the street in Baghdad is up. All the indicators are that it's going in the wrong direction. So to say that we have enough troops there simply does not comport with the facts on the ground.
As Robert Reich wrote about last week, this nonstarter idea would allow him to say "if the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened." In other words, John McCain isn't remotely interested in solving the problems in Iraq; rather, he is only interested in gaining power by positioning himself for 2008 with an untenable idea that will resonate with the Right. With that background, check out Kerry's response:
My friend John McCain has frankly said a lot of surprising things lately . . .
Let me stop his answer for a second, so I can give you my loose translation of the above statement: "My friend John McCain has frankly been a bit of an ass lately". I don't think I need to remind everyone of how McCain quickly and gleefully threw his friend under the bus in the name of scoring political points, even if it involved blatantly lying about how his friend feels about the troops. You don't serve on the POW/MIA committee together and not know that your friend cares a great deal about the troops, but I digress . . .
KERRY: My friend John McCain has frankly said a lot of surprising things lately, but perhaps the most significant of them is the call for more troops to solve the problem in Iraq. The fact is that more troops in Iraq will not solve the problem. It will worsen the problem.
It will contort the United States of America itself. It will invite more attacks. And it simply won't get the job done. It will invite greater jihadism that will provide a larger target in the region, and it runs contrary to everything our own military folks have told us.
We put an additional 15,000 troops in Baghdad. And what happened? The violence went up. That mistake is to make the mistake of Vietnam all over again. It's to believe that somehow you can resolve through the military and a gun barrel what is ideologically and politically necessary to resolve.
And unless you get the stakeholders in Iraq to end this squabbling -- this is a struggle for power, Wolf. And unless the people involved in the struggle for power can be brought to resolve the difference, no number of American troops will resolve that.
We will make matters worse, and we will become even more embroiled in a worse situation. And I think, you know, this notion of more troops is a way to say, well, if we put more troops in, we would have won, and we won't have the argument over who lost China, who lost Vietnam, who lost Iraq. Iraq has to be involved politically, and that's what's absent.
Now if that ain't a statement of beauty I don't know what is. This is not just a full dressing down of the Right's ridiculous notion that if only we had a few more troops in Iraq we would win. No, it's more -- it is an exposure of the Right Wing's long term "Stabbed in the Back" meme of why we lost Vietnam. This Harper's article starts at the beginning, and I mean the very beginning of how this argument came into being:
The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, "As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.’"
I don't think I need to get into any more detail as to how badly that poor remembering of history led to disaster for Germany.
But going back to what Senator Kerry said about "who lost China, who lost Vietnam, who lost Iraq", I was stunned to read how far back this "stabbed in the back" notion went in America, this time by the American Right Wing.:
Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang's defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know "Who lost China?" and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to "keep talking and if one case doesn't work out, he should proceed with another." Yet it would take another hot war—and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende—to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.
And then the ugly strategy used against those who were opposed to the Vietnam War:
Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or simply "bums"—the last epithet from Nixon's own lips. The large percentage of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious, ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire authored speeches, as "nattering nabobs of negativity," and, unforgettably, as "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label of "intellectual," and what the vice president was really calling them was fags.
All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests "lent comfort and aid" to the North Vietnamese, and that "some American will die tonight because of the activity in our streets."
The Nixon Administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the death of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions, construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up peaceful demonstrators. The effete protesters had been shown up by real working-class Americans—and their class allies in the police force eagerly closed ranks.
They had to employ this strategy because they had no real strategy to win the war. After all, our soldiers in Vietnam won every battle on the battlefield, as the article details.
We all know how dissenters of the Iraq War have been called traitors. But this idea that more troops will solve the problem has its roots in cold war history and a rabid right wing, that is looking for someone to blame for their mistakes. Senator Kerry is right to call them on their denialist history. And don't forget that the guy in charge, President Bush, having just recently been to Vietnam, is still bringing up the myth:
Today, during his first visit to Vietnam, President Bush was "asked about the war here over three decades ago and the comparisons to the war in Iraq today." Bush said there was a comparison: As in Vietnam, "We’ll succeed unless we quit."
John McCain has decided to use "Stab in the Back" as the reason why the Iraq War was lost. It is up to us to debunk this myth over and over again as the lie that it is.