I’ll come right out and say it: I am a liberal and I detest George Bush. If the right-wing blathersphere is any indication, I therefore want America to fail in Iraq. It means that stories like this leave me unmoved, and that I’m oblivious to this (not that Bill O’Reilly cares either). Of course, the right is unwilling to consider that liberals abhor Bush and Bushism in large part because Iraq is already a failure and because he has ruined the reputation of our country in the process.
The idea that liberals yearn for the death and dismemberment of more Americans because it’s bad for Bush is at the same time repellent and ridiculous. Opposing Bush does not mean that liberals don’t support our troops; it means that we don’t support his disastrous policy. Conflating the president with the morale of the troops is another refuge for scoundrels. That these aren’t the same thing should by now be clear to virtually anyone. In fact, evidence suggests that soldiers feel more undermined by the president than dissenters. Anyway, how can asserting that the war is a failure undermine the troops? If it is a failure, they know it without liberals telling them. If it’s not, then anything liberals say is unlikely to affect them.
One time, I railed against Bush to a conservative friend. She shrugged. Now, she claimed, I understood how she felt about Bill Clinton. While I may have felt the same way towards Bush as she did to Clinton, I’m no closer to understanding the right’s crazed vendetta against him. With Clinton it was personal: They didn’t like him. Some may think it odd that exact things the right held against Clinton (draft evasion, shady business deals) are unquestionably true of Bush, and yet they stand with the president as the truest of believers.
The liberal abhorrence of Bush is different: We despise his policies. For six years, we’ve watched the president ruin the international reputation of our country, identifying America with military adventurism and indifference to its own citizens. We’ve seen him preside over a party that seeks and wields power for its own sake, not to advance any particular good. He has discarded science in favor of political expediency. He has cynically exploited 9/11 to demonize dissent and to justify -- well -- just about anything.
None of which means that anyone is happy about the failure in Iraq. Nor does it mean that recognizing the failure and pushing for a way out somehow shows a lack of support for the troops. We just don’t want to see any more of them die for no good reason.