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Keeyth
12-21-2005, 08:03 PM
Bob Shrum

Forty years ago Wednesday - Dec. 21, 1965 -- on CBS's "Town Meeting of the World," a live satellite link up between New York and London featured a debate between Harvard and Oxford on the Vietnam War. It was relatively early in the escalation of that conflict; hardly anyone in this country was against the war yet, including Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, and virtually no one was in favor of immediate withdraw. So contrary to the received stereotypes about the sixties, the Harvard team was defending American military intervention in Vietnam it was lively, sometimes biting even bitter exchange. The Harvard debaters -- then modestly known professor named Henry Kissinger the two students, Larry Tribe and Bob Shrum -- evoked the cause of freedom and the threat of encouraging aggression elsewhere if the United States failed to stay the course.

Professor Kissinger went on to become Secretary of State and the architect of a protracted war in Vietnam, while Larry and I moved by 1967 -- into the anti-war opposition. In fact, neither of us has talked much about that Harvard-Oxford debate since then. But I thought of it again Sunday night as I listened to President Bush defend the Iraq war with the recycled, post-Cold War versions of arguments that were as wrong forty years ago as they are today.

The first is that an election is the political elixir that will extricate us from a military quagmire (though this time, maybe it would have if Kerry had won in 2004; allies who have become bystanders or adversaries might have agreed to help in Iraq, so we could draw down the U.S. troop presence which our military leaders now say fuels rather than suppresses the insurgency). We saw election after election in Vietnam and, as is now the case in Iraq, they were all successfully hailed as "turning points," so many in fact that we just found ourselves trapped in a circle of self-delusion.

Now the preliminary results of the Iraqi election appear to confound the Presidents assurance that while he -- belatedly -- recognizes where we went wrong in this war, we're finally on the right track. We've turned the corner: just look at all those happy voters with purple ink of their fingers. Well, it actually looks like they voted in not the secular but the religious Shiites, who have fundamental differences with the once dominant Sunni minority about regional power and oil revenues (the Sunni's maybe left with almost none). The Pentagon's pet candidate, the secular Shiite Ahmad Chalabi, got less than one half of one percent of the in Baghdad.

At the same time, the Sunni Party that is leading represents the extremists who support violence against our forces that demand U.S. withdraw. The administration celebrated the Sunni's for not boycotting the election this time. But it turns out that the extremist maybe the Sunni mainstream. They voted, but it was tactical voting, aimed not at ending the insurgency but at advancing its objectives. The US favored among the secular Sunni's, former Prime Minister Allawi, the man we virtually installed in that office, is running so far behind, even where he was favored to do well, that his party is crying electoral fraud and asking the United States to intervene. Unfortunately, Jeb Bush isn't available to rig the results. Maybe the Bush Administration should have run General Thieu. But Allawi, like Chalabi -- and Thieu, was a bad bet precisely because he was seen as the American choice.

Not long from now, the memory although not the consequences of this month's election will have faded. What will matter is the level of violence next month and next year. In fact, the suicide bombings resume the next day, a continuation of the rising violence of the past eighteen months, which is likely to be intensified by the election results. So the Administration recycles another argument from the Vietnam era: despite what the media are reporting, despite the explosions you see on the evening news with your own lying eyes, we really are making progress on the ground. To drive home the point, the Administration excused Dick Cheney from seclusion and flew him to Baghdad for a photo-op Q & A with the troops. This time, the misuse of the military agitprop visual flopped. One of the soldiers told Cheney what Bush's advisors apparently never tell the President: things aren't getting better in Iraq. The Vice President promptly scampered off to Afghanistan -- the war we should have fought, where the Taliban are regaining ground while we're bogged down in Iraq -- to applaud the installation of the new Parliament there. Thus the pattern repeats itself in Iraq as in Vietnam: administration officials offer selective "facts" about an improving situation and the belatedly alert news media then reports the omissions and errors.

To overcome this, Bush, once more repeating Vietnam pattern, adopts the tactic of bypassing the media with a series of speeches direct to the American people that has supposedly raised his approval rating to about... 40 percent. Watching the Bush partisan spin it, you would think this was astronomically high. In plain truth, it is no basis for sustaining a war. The frequency of Bush's speeches is a sign of weakness, not strength. When John Kennedy was urged to go directly to the country far more often, he responded that "FDR's Fireside Chats" were relatively rare; but if a President went to the country more and more, the effect would be less and less. That's what's happening to Bush. Reality is a stubborn thing and eventually rhetoric fails.

So the real General in the Iraq war may now be Karl Rove -- his strategy to withdraw some U.S. forces, just enough to get by the next election where the Administration really does seem headed for defeat, the 2006 mid-terms here at home. But that won't redeem a conflict of choice that was fought on false pretenses; it may not even reduce American causalities if a somewhat smaller U.S. force faces escalating attacks. John Murtha, John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Joe Biden --not to mention Ted Kennedy, who was right on Iraq from the beginning -- have proposed alternative policies. Whatever their differences, they all begin with the truth that an indefinite U.S. military presences, with no benchmarks to measure progress or no target date for withdraw, will bring the final failure of a failed policy by prolonging not preventing the insurgency. As in Vietnam, the present U.S. policy in Iraq is a triumph of hope over experience.

There are some Democrats, a dimensioning number, who believe it is dangerous to dissent; last week Al From of the triangulating Democratic Leadership Council and Clinton pollster Mark Penn wrote a memo arguing that the party had to be cautious about "reinforcing" an image that Democrats are weak on defense. How can you justify loosing more American and Iraqi lives to sure up a party's image? And Democrats would have been stronger in 2002, for example, if they had forthrightly opposed what was wrong with the Bush policy instead of crouching down in political fear and coming across as a pale carbon copy of the Republicans. I don't think Mark Penn, who is the new CEO of Burson-Marsteller, could sell the Iraq war to Democratic primary voters. Instead there is a powerful case to be made that perpetuating this mistake and war actually weakens our national security.

Forty years ago today, I argued the wrong side of the Vietnam War. Now I hear the same flawed arguments trotted out to justify what's happening in Iraq. We are even hearing that old Nixonian standby: the disaster should be blamed on those who criticized the conflict, not those who created and continue it. In our hearts, we all know how this story ends; we just don't yet know when.

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FORD
12-21-2005, 08:58 PM
If Bob Shrum really wants to keep this country out of illegal wars in the future, he'll stay the fuck away from Presidential campaigns so we can win.

Keeyth
12-22-2005, 12:10 PM
That WOULD help actually...

ELVIS
12-22-2005, 01:21 PM
We who ??

Warham
12-22-2005, 03:07 PM
Howard Dean.

Keeyth
12-22-2005, 05:11 PM
Go bang your cowbell.