Guest essay: Democrats have been too quiet about Iraq war
publicopiniononline.com
Political observers from both parties wonder about the Democratic Party and its responses to the Iraq war.
The war in Iraq, all credible evidence now reveals, was unjustified aggression on behalf of major economic and strategic interests, not for national security, as was alleged in justification. It was all a lie, in which most in the administration willingly participated, in which Secretary of State Colin Powell unwillingly participated.
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, the war appears as on a moral plane with Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, though without the vast military consequences of that invasion.
As the opposition party, what has the Democratic Party said or done about the war? Very little. Instead of a massive attack upon the Bush administration and its war policy, we see skirmishing and courteous criticism by leading Democratic spokesmen in and out of Congress.
Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a decorated war veteran, has been outspoken in opposition to the continuing American occupation of Iraq, but the party as a whole has not done what it might do, like trying to block further funding for the war.
Ordinarily vocal Democratic senators like Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) have objected to the war with muted voices. The strongest and most intense opposition has come from those out of power, e.g., Al Gore, and Cindy Sheehan, who gave her son to the Bush war.
Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor, has publicly asserted that the Bush administration has conducted a criminal conspiracy against the American people and that President Bush has committed impeachable offenses (The Nation, Nov. 14, 2005).
But the Democrats in Congress and the Democratic National Committee have been hesitant, tentative, subdued in protesting and acting against a war that should never have happened, a moral atrocity.
Many Germans during the Third Reich, and many in the German military, aggressively attacked the war policies of Hitler, even plotting to depose him, but they had to act clandestinely. In America, with a potentially powerful opposition party that can act openly, there is no comparable effectual movement against the war policy of President Bush. Why not?
Several reasons can be proposed. First, it is traditional in America that foreign policy, especially during war, is bipartisan. Second, the imputation of being unpatriotic is a fearsome specter for most politicians. A more basic reason is that the American political center has moved to the right so as to include offensive militarism.
Before World War II, America was not a militarist nation. The Navy was enlarged in the first two Roosevelt administrations, properly so for a nation with shorelines on two oceans (and to increase employment in a Depression). But the Army was a small force with obsolete weaponry and most Americans wanted nothing to do with war. They'd had enough in World War I.
With the outbreak of World War II and the defeat of French and British forces in 1940, Roosevelt moved toward American involvement. Long before Pearl Harbor, the United States was engaged in virtual acts of war in the Atlantic, and since Pearl Harbor, 65 years ago, we have been continually at war.
War, even offensive war, has come to be part of the American ethos, part of the American way of life, and the political center includes it.
Even those who oppose the present conduct of the Iraq war and the occupation of Iraq, even many who disapprove the initial waging of the war (the "incursion," as President Bush calls it), still can accept the premise of justifiable military action whenever and wherever a current administration de-cides. As the 2004 elections confirmed, in America war is no longer a moral anomaly.
And so the leaders of the Democratic Party, observing the invariable rule that it is politically suicidal to go too far from the political center, are reluctant to move away from the center into bold, open, uncompromising attack upon the Bush administration as an enemy of world peace and of the American people.
Will Democrats move more forcefully by November and in 2008? Probably only if the perceived American political center shifts to the left and away from militarism. For political survival, political leaders tend to be followers.
#
John Illo is a resident of Shippensburg.
Originally published February 11, 2006 |
