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Sunday, September 23, 2007

When morality means the courage to stand up to the cynicism of politics
Posted by Jill | 7:20 AM
We already know that when it comes to private sexual behavior, Republicans are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. But as those of us who aren't in thrall to the churches of the religious right know, morality isn't just about who's poking whom and where. In Newsweek, Michael Hirsh writes about the moral vacuum created by George W. Bush by his needless and pointless invasion and occupation of Iraq:

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like “1984,” or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

[snip]

As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the unspoken rule of Bush’s counterinsurgency efforts over the past four years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.


This is strong stuff for a mainstream publication. Of course this is Web-exclusive commentary, so no one will be reading it in the doctor's office. But until now, the idea that anyone associated with the United States could be behaving like outlaws was completely taboo in the mainstream press. Now a known writer for a weekly news magazine has come out and said that it is U.S. government policy that treats the Iraqis as subhuman, not just the actions of "a few bad apples."

It isn't much, but it's a start. The question is how long it's going to take, and how many more Americans have to die before the questions become louder than the shouting down of the kool-aid drinkers on the right.

Those of us who lived through the Vietnam years remember how difficult it was and how long it took for Americans to wrap their minds around the fact that sometimes America is wrong, and that our leaders are not infallible; that sometimes they make bad decisions, or make decisions based on motives that are less than pure. And now we have to do it again, only this time we've had the complication of the indelible images of an attack on American soil, images that at least for a short time, made all of us cleave to the sociopath who took the White House just a few months before. But the time is long past to cut this president any slack for the ineptitude and outright corruption that has characterized his conduct of the so-called "war on terror". It's time to acknowledge the clusterfuck he and his policies have created, aided and abetted by Republicans who seem to know nothing except how to march in lockstep with an authoritarian figurehead, and Democrats who are so afraid of being thought wimpy that they are flopping around like caught fish on the deck of a particularly creaky boat.

Generally accepted principles of morality (that is, morality outside the Republican Party and the Washington punditocracy) dictate that there be accountability -- accountability for even mistakes made from a place of good intentions; something it's becoming increasingly clear do NOT apply to the Bush Administration. If the Democrats want to do the moral thing, the right thing, they will forget about what Tucker Carlson is going to say and go about the business of ending this war.

Drew Westen in HuffPo has a must-read article on why the appalling capitulation by Democrats last week to Republican framing was precisely the WRONG thing to do:

The conclusion they should have drawn is that you can't project fear and have people trust you on national security. When voters perceive a mismatch between what their leaders say and what they do, they pay attention to what they do. And right now, they aren't listening to Democrats' positions on national security, which are difficult to discern (because they vary by the day, depending on whether they are preaching compromise, confrontation, or helplessness in the face of Republican intransigence). They're watching their posture, which seems anything but courageous and upright. They remember well how Republicans bullied the Democrats for five straight years in Congress and cowed them into relinquishing their right to use the same filibuster Republicans now threaten to use at every turn, and they get the message: that Democrats are weak in the face of aggression, and can barely put their hands in front of their faces to block the blows from a minority in Congress and from a bully sitting in his bully pulpit at 29 percent in the polls.

Since 2001, Democrats have repeatedly cast votes for things they didn't believe in because they don't trust the intelligence of the American people. They don't believe they can convey, or their constituents can grasp, the subtleties of the situation in Iraq, habeas corpus, torture and detention of foreign nationals (creating rules of the game that can be used against our troops and our children if the travel abroad), and warrantless wiretapping. But in so doing, they vastly underestimate the emotional intelligence of the electorate -- which happens to be a much better predictor of their voting behavior. People may not follow closely arguments about FISA courts, but they do follow the messages their elected representatives convey louder than words. They understood in 2006 what the Republican leadership really cared about when they discovered how long they'd known about Mark Foley's illicit interest in high school boys, and they understood what was happening in Iraq when George W. Bush was using the same words he'd used for the last three years as the situation visibly deteriorated.

Today, they understand that Democrats are afraid of taking a stand for fear of being branded. If Democrats really want to end the war, there is only one place to start: they need to stop repeating the Republican brand about what it means to "support the troops" and tell Americans what it really means to support the brave men and women who wear the uniform of the United States of America: to deploy every other weapon in our arsenal--including diplomacy--before we ask them to risk their lives; to enter into war only after an honest and judicious examination of the evidence, not to cherry-pick the data to justify a predetermined plan and demote and impugn any general who tells you that the plan offering the best opportunities for selling the war (i.e., no cost, no sacrifice) is not the plan offering the best possibility for success (as occurred with General Shinseki); to take care of our wounded soldiers when they return home, and to give them time with their families to recover, physically and psychologically, between tours of duty; to stop fighting at every turn increases in their combat pay and the survivor benefits to their loved ones should they perish in battle, and to shed a tear with their families at their funerals, so that they know our leaders are truly with them in their grief and so those who send them to war get a visceral feeling for the costs of war; to proudly display their flag-draped coffins when they return to shores they will never see, rather than to whisk their bodies into the country in the middle of the night and ban photographers from taking any pictures of them because it might be bad for "public relations"; and when it is clear that staying the course is no longer a viable option, to plan for their safe return to their country and loved ones rather than to justify further losses with past losses and to brand anyone who opposes an indefinite drain on our military as a traitor.


Doesn't seem like rocket science, does it? And that is why those of us who constitute the same base that the Democratic Party is spitting on and then expecting our votes next November are so enraged. The Bush Administration has made it so easy to stand up for what's right, to demonstrate how cavalier they have been with the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have chosen of their own free will to serve their country. It's so easy to demonstrate, whether via the Administration's determination to fight this war on the cheap, to cut funding for veterans' benefits, to fight a $40/month increase in survivor's benefits, that this president and his administration has absolutely zero "support" for the troops.

So why, when they've made it so easy, do the Democrats find it so difficult?

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