Outflanked in Iraq

In a press conference Thursday, the president labeled MoveOn's recent ad in the New York Times "disgusting" and questioned the patriotism of Democrats who refused to repudiate it. Those were disingenuous words from a president who was either silent or complicit in the whisper campaign against John McCain in the 2000 primary election (which suggested that McCain's years as a prisoner of war had left him a little unbalanced) and who said nothing as an "independent" organization attacked the metals of a decorated war veteran, John Kerry, in the 2004 election while American boots were on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rather than calling attention to the president's faux outrage at attacks on a military man and the fact that the real outrage is his steadfast refusal to stop playing Russian Roulette with other people's children without a clear exit strategy or even a realistic definition any more of "success" that doesn't shift like the sand depending on which guidepost is no longer even visible in the desert, Senate Democrats took the bait. The same Congress that has never held anyone accountable for the policy that has left 30,000 American soldiers dead or wounded, largely by incendiary devices, suddenly mustered a rousing 72-vote majority to condemn an incendiary turn of phrase.

In a scene that is now all too familiar, Democrats were once again outflanked, playing checkers while the other side played chess, worrying about the next move ("They'll say we don't support our troops") while Republicans were thinking several moves ahead. For years they had allowed Republicans to elide the war on al Qaeda with the war in Iraq with the carefully crafted phrase, "the war on terror"--and they allowed them yet again to reinforce the association between the two by permitting General Petraeus to testify about Iraq on September 11. For years they have allowed the Republicans to blur the distinction between supporting our men and women in uniform and deploying them to referee a civil war in the desert with the phrase, "support our troops.'

Now, in hastily supporting a Republican-crafted resolution just like the ones used while the Republicans were in the majority to trap Democrats into unpopular stands readily taken out of context for campaign ads, Democrats yet again allowed Republicans to mix and match messages that have no logical relation to one another, eliding respect for Petraeus as a general, support for his conclusions, and support for our men and women in uniform: "To express the sense of the Senate that General David II. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces."

If the Democrats in the Senate were worried about the impact of the headline of the MoveOn ad, which attacked the general's recounting of the facts on the ground less effectively than the text of the ad, they have just amplified it by reinforcing that the central theme of the Republican message on Iraq from the start: that opposition to the war is an attack on the military, when in fact the Iraq war, by all accounts, has done nothing but weaken our military, strengthen the foothold of terrorists abroad, and undermine our national security. And they have done nothing but to reinforce the message that people who question administration policy on matters of war and peace are traitors. For the record, Americans have died for over 200 years defending, not passing resolutions against, free speech.

No matter that Petraeus had in fact taken the highly political step of publishing an op-ed piece just prior to the 2004 election designed to support the re-election of George W. Bush. No matter that the carefully sourced criticism of Petraeus' depiction of the Iraq War in the MoveOn ad has gone unchallenged, while its questionable headline has been seized upon by Republicans looking to reinforce their branding of Democrats as anti-military and un-American--and now by Democrats, who have lent the imprimatur of the United States Senate to the Republicans' branding campaign. No matter that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid himself had had to offer a convoluted message to describe the Democrats' response to Petraeus' purportedly independent testimony (which sounded eerily similar to the president's recent message on Iraq, including a similar number of troops dangled as potentially returning home at some indeterminate date): "I have every belief that this good man, General Petraeus, will give us what he feels is the right thing to do in this report, that is now not his report...It's President Bush's report. President Bush took final ownership of this when he landed in Anbar Province just a few days ago." After suffering one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Republican minority, the Democrats had to prove they could pass something, even if it was their own epitaph.

Last November, the electorate was angry but hopeful. When the Democratic Congress surrendered to the president in late May in an attempt to "support the troops before Memorial Day," however, they were surprised that the outrage had now turned on them. Within a week they found their performance rated unfavorably not only by Democrats but by the Independents who had swept them into power. That should have been a wake-up call that their strategic calculations were miscalculations, and that their attempt to craft a "middle ground" that would appeal to moderate Republicans in the Congress--and in the process make Democrats appear, as they had been for the last five years, like supplicants to their Republican colleagues, begging for crumbs and pleading for them to be reasonable--was not winning the middle in Middle America. After repeating the same strategy, punctuated by public hand-wringing and protestations of impotence (justified in terms of rules about cloture and filibusters arcane to the average citizen), they find themselves today with an approval rating at 11 percent.

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.

If Democrats really want to end the war, and to carry out the job the people sent them to do in November of last year, they need to tell the kinds of stories I'm hearing when I talk to servicemen and women every time I go to the airport, like the 23-year old mother of two who just got sent back for her second tour of duty, who had tears in her eyes as she described what it's like to abandon her three-month old baby and how her older child didn't recognize her when she returned home from her last deployment. If they want to end the war, they should put forward the most responsible bill they can propose, with whatever guidelines or timetables they believe are truly in the best interest of our nation and our soldiers, and if the Republicans filibuster, let them filibuster, and attach the names and faces of every soldier killed or maimed in the meantime to those who are obstructing the will of the people. That's supporting our troops, and that's what will bring this terrible chapter in American history to a close, as Americans start to see on television, live and on camera, who is supporting our troops and who is sending them to their graves while happily spending time with their own families or planning lavish White House weddings for their own children when we are allegedly engaged in a battle for our freedom and civilization.

If Democrats really want to end this war, they should make clear that our troops won this war valiantly and with remarkable efficiency in a matter of weeks in 2006, when they toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein, but that they have no business fighting in someone else's civil war, created by an administration that at every step mishandled the plans for peace and continually changed the definitions of victory when they needed to lower expectations. If Democrats really want to end this war, they will make clear to parents of teenagers that an indefinite presence in Iraq will likely require reinstatement of the draft, so that next time they vote with a realistic concern for the lives and well-being of their teenagers. And they should demand that the president and those who support what is now unambiguously a Republican war pay for their war and tell us whose taxes they are going to raise to pay not only for the next appropriation but for the last half a trillion dollars they spent while the Republicans in Congress charged the costs of their miscalculations to our children and grandchildren and generations yet unborn. If Democrats want to end this war that has for four years required no sacrifice from anyone but our troops and their families, they will refuse to appropriate another penny from our children's piggy-banks so voters can decide if they really think it's worth it when they feel it in their paychecks or portfolios. Perhaps then Republicans will decide it's time to bring our troops home--or the voters will bring them home in 2008.

Drew Westen, Ph.D., is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and founder of Westen Strategies. He is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

Comments

[coolkraft]

excellent observatio­n....accur­ate, truthful and shameful for the democrats

[CaveatMagnusFrater]

More good PR for the Republicans.

mike

[wmfor]

"If Democrats really want to end this war, they should make clear that our troops won this war valiantly and with remarkable efficiency in a matter of weeks in 2006, when they toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein"

Shouldn't that be 2003?

[coloneblog]

There's a solid block of Democrats that are in deep with Cheney/bush on this stupid war. They all represent rich constituents who are pulling their chains. There's not going to be much that's going to change in Iraq for many years to come; the rich are in this Iraq mess for the long pull; and they see similar money making potential in Iran.

[Dansden]

To turn a phrase, isn't Bushy's complaint about the MoveOn article sort of like 'the hog trough calling pig pen nasty'....­?!?!!

What IS fascinating is that the AMERICAN MEDIA doesn't call the President on his obvious lies...the SURGE that the MEDIA is concerned about is the SURGE in the Stock Market and thereby they do NOT question the SURGE of deaths of American troops in Iraq-
despicable, Un-American and Un-Christian!

[OckhamsElectricRazor]

We need to clean house in BOTH parties! A good start would be a commitment now by the Democratic leadership to step aside in the new Congress and allow new blood to lead. After this commitment has been made, stop the self flagellation, and move on to electing Dems to office.

[bujinin]

for Mr Westin: left 30,000 American soldiers dead or wounded, largely by incendiary devices, " the devices used to attack our troops aboard vehicles are explosive devices and only incidentally "incendiary" the intent is to destroy the target by detonation which is much quicker and usually more effective than just setting it on fire.
pete saussy
pawleys island sc

[bujinin]

"attacked the metals of a decorated war veteran, is, i hope, just a typo or false trust in the spellchecker. I doubt Sen. Kerry suffers from any elevated levels of heavy metals; lead, cadmium, mercury etc. He does have some MEDALs or better, Meritorious Citations and his METTLE has certainly been tested in the election of the idiot-in-charge.
pete saussy
pawleys island, sc

[GF646]

The Democrats in Congress are not being outflanked. They are doing exactly what they want to do. Democratic voters are under the impression that Democratic Senators are interested in doing what these Democratic voters want. Wrong!!! If they do something you don't like, what are you going to do? Vote for a Republican? As far as Democratic Senators are concerned, America doesn't exist outside of Washington DC. See the current article about Diane Feinstein in Salon. Look at Kerry's performance while a student got tasered at the Unversity of Florida. Consider why Harry Reid seems like the poster boy for political weakness. They all blame the Republicans. It's a covenient excuse. But the fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party is financially bankrolled by big corporations via K Street and by other powerful lobbying groups, all flush with money. That's why the DNC is strongly influened by corporation friendly Republican Lites and NeoCons who are more interested transforming the Middle East than in helping Middle America. As far as they are all concerned, Middle American doesn't exist. And if it doesn, it certainly isn't important as the Middle East and emerging markets around the world that have to be exploited.

[veracity]

(comment continued)


Actually, the Dems have been institutionally full of it for decades now. Every year the big Democrat hoe-down is called "the Jefferson-Jackson dinner," in honor of the two US president who are regarded as founding the Democratic Party. But at the same time that Jefferson and Jackson were advocating "democracy" and increased enfranchisement for white male property owners (especially those, often poor farmers, on the frontier who embodied Jefferson and Jackson's ideal of "the independent self-made man") - they were profiting from an economic system based on applied violence and terror - chattel slavery - that was worse than all but the most abusive cases of ancient European feudalism!
Forcing African-American Democrats to attend the "Jefferson-Jackson" dinner (if they want to hob-nob with Dem pooh-bahs and power-brokers) every year is just one example of how haughty and imperialistic the Dem party can be. I don't know what the solution to this dilemma is - maybe the "Jefferson­-Jackson-M­L King dinner"?
If I was an African-American working to get Democratic candidates elected every two years, I would be affronted by having to attend a "Jefferson-Jackson" dinner as my party's annual big night. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of Democratic party arrogance and aloofness, that translates to into subservience to the Right-Wing agenda.

[realpolitic]

Yes, Republicans support the troops: they veto pay raises for the troops, deny them adequate home leave between deployments, let the hospitals which care for the wounded fall into disrepair, and hide behind them after making unpopular policy decisions. Bush has still never been to a military funeral and images of the fallen are not allowed.

Democrats, on the other hand, don't support the troops because they want to end an unjust, immoral war. The situation is more complicated being played out as it is in the long shadow of the Vietnam war. However, the troop's feelings of the war reportedly mirror those of the public at large. Let's bring 'em home!

[veracity]

Great commentary by Drew Westen!! He really hits the mark when he writes that Dems FAIL TO CALL ATTENTION to the gross wrongs and abuses (if not criminal conduct) of the Bush-Cheney administration. The Democrats have SURRENDERED he need to CONTROL THE MEDIA MESSAGE in America over the past decade.

Here's a hint, Dems: SUBPOENA Rupert Murdoch before Congress, and ask him "HOW MANY LABOR LEADERS HAVE YOU DERIDED AS being 'COMMUNIST'?" Then ask Mr. Murdoch "How many COMMUNIST OFFICIALS in China have you befriended, and signed lucrative business deals with their families?" Dems should haul the Chairman, CEO, and Board of Directors of GENERAL ELECTRIC before Congress, and ask them, "DO YOU SUPPORT THE WEAPONIZATION OF SPACE, the UNILATERAL abrogation of the ABM treaty, and why doesn't your NBC news network cover this American TEARING UP OF A SIGNED TREATY in more depth?" "And how many BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of TAXPAYER MONEY does GE expect to make over the next decade, helping Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney PUT WEAPONS IN SPACE?"

[skepticfromschenectady]

Now the NYT is pathetically saying that giving MoveOn a discount on the ad was a "mistake". Kudos to Dan Rather for suing his former bosses for firing him over the story on Bush's National Guard "service" during the Vietnam War. I send letters about Iraq to my representative, Pelosi, Clinton, etc. and never hear back from them. Don't these people have staffers to answer letters anymore, or is it just not that important?

[grandmanuk]

I strongly believe that the current Republican Congress has stuck together to continually vote against any bi-partisan bills to force the Democracts into a situation where withdrawing funding is the only alternative. The Republicans will then be the "winners" in the withdrawal debate, making the Democrats the "bad guys" for not supporting the troops. This strategy might look good, but I believe the depth of the anger at this administration for the "dump it on the next president" attitude is lost on the pundits. Americans on both sides of the debate are fed up with this disastrous experiment in "democracy" for the rest of the world.

[mamalou14]

Excellent post, but forwarding it to Washington will, alas, accomplish only more of the same ol', same ol'. Want a more effective protest? FLY THE STARS AND STRIPES UPSIDE DOWN TO SYMBOLIZE OUR NATION'S DISTRESS. Then, alongside, place a sign saying SAVE US, (Senators' names, Reps' names, party leadership names), OR WE WILL SURELY PERISH (alternate phrasing: OR YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB)! Contact every like-minded person you know across the country to do the same, then contact the media to publicize your protest. The threat of having the rest of the world view the depth of American despair will (hopefully) provoke long-overdue action from those we elected in 2006 to change our noxious status quo.