[Mb-civic] We're Past Politics With Iraq - William Raspberry - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

We're Past Politics With Iraq

By William Raspberry
Monday, November 28, 2005; A21

When it comes to Iraq, are the congressional Democrats chicken-hearted 
flip-floppers, merely clueless critics with no ideas of their own -- or 
are they Karl Rove cunning?

It's clear enough what the administration would have you believe: that 
congressional Democrats, privy to the same information then possessed by 
the administration, voted to go to war in Iraq. Now that the war has 
proved difficult and unpopular, they want to lay the whole burden for it 
on the president -- a latter-day version of John Kerry's "I voted for it 
before I voted against it."

The characterization seems wrong on virtually every count. Congress 
didn't have the same information the administration had; it had the 
information -- and the analysis of that information -- that the 
administration opted to share. The choices, really, were to share the 
administration's conclusion that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of 
mass destruction or to accuse it of cooking the evidence.

But when events suggested just such culinary hanky-panky, how can it be 
considered inconstant or duplicitous to second-guess the earlier pro-war 
vote?

Colin Powell, who -- unwittingly, I believe -- passed along some of the 
cooked evidence, is on record as having changed his mind. As Powell told 
Barbara Walters in September, when he made his dramatic show-and-tell 
presentation before the U.N. Security Council, there were "people in the 
intelligence community who knew at the time that some of these sources 
were not good and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. 
That devastated me. . . . It's a blot . . . [that] will always be a part 
of my record."

Powell is nobody's flip-flopper. People who wanted a certain conclusion 
gave him bad information and he passed it on -- to his regret. Can't 
members of Congress who believed the bad evidence enough to vote us into 
war also experience regret?

Except they didn't really vote us into war. As I recall, that vote 
authorizing the president to use force against Iraq was analogous to a 
trade union's strike vote. When negotiations bog down, union leaders 
often will ask their members for a resolution authorizing a strike. For 
members to refuse such a vote would cripple their own leadership. But to 
grant it is not the same as ending negotiations and launching a strike. 
It is a way of steeling the leadership, giving it a powerful negotiating 
tool.

Since there was no about-to-explode crisis, the president could have 
asked Congress for a declaration of war. Would it have been granted? Who 
knows? Apparently the administration didn't want to chance it.

Now several things have the administration lashing out in all directions 
in an attempt at political salvage. Public opinion polls show both the 
popularity of the president and confidence that the war in Iraq was 
justified at a low ebb. The war itself is going badly, with our forces 
apparently spending the bulk of their effort to protect themselves 
against the insurgents, and with more people -- ours and Iraq's -- dying 
every week.

And Rep. John P. Murtha, a pro-military Democrat and decorated Vietnam 
veteran, has called unequivocally for the allied forces to quit Iraq.

So how do the Republicans respond? Sometimes by direct attack, as when 
they tried to discredit Murtha as a coward. But given a president whose 
National Guard service was suspect at best and a vice president who was 
garnering draft deferments while Murtha served, that couldn't work.

And sometimes by simply noting that the Democrats don't have an exit 
strategy, either.

Of course they don't.

If the Democrats had their own Karl Rove, he'd probably tell them not to 
even try to come up with one. If a sound exit plan means getting out 
without leaving Iraq less stable than it is now, and with a reasonable 
chance of becoming an American-style democracy, nobody has one.

If Iraq is most likely to implode into civil war, leaving it a far more 
dangerous hotbed of terrorism than it was before our invasion, wouldn't 
the Democrats be smart to let it happen without interference? That isn't 
to say the Democrats yearn for failure -- but it's a cinch they don't 
want to be blamed for it.

It would be a no-lose position, politically, for the Democrats to sit 
back and watch the catastrophe happen.

But the quagmire in Iraq involves much more than politics. It involves 
national honor, the undiminished threat of international terrorism -- 
and the lives of too many people who deserve better.

It's hardly the time for clever politics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/27/AR2005112700663.html?nav=hcmodule
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