Quitters (Part II)

the job our troops were sent to Iraq to do is done. After nearly five years of a failed policy in Iraq, we have a duty. . . to end the war.

--Speaker Nancy Pelosi

As Victor Davis Hanson noted, initial supporters of the Iraq war included both houses of Congress, 70 percent of the American public in April 2003, the majority of NATO members, and a coalition with more participants than the United Nations alliance had in the Korean War. On the other hand, the media emerged early as leading skeptics, suspecting they were about to see a re-run of their generation’s war: Vietnam. If Bush succeeded, well, that would be fine; we’d have a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East. But if Iraq went bad and American casualties mounted, the media would play out the parallels to Vietnam. The reporters’ script throughout was, “we’ve seen this tragedy before.”

Reporters believe Bush is a fool. In the 1960’s, the media had helped America realize that fighting Vietnamese nationalism was a disaster. Vietnam was also a disaster for Democrats, costing them the White House and their domestic program. If Bush wanted to wade his way into an unnecessary war, the media have been only too happy to help Republicans draw electoral defeat from the misadventure. Throughout 2004, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, suppressed photographs of flag-draped coffins, and reports of torture all helped undermine support for the war, along with daily or weekly body counts, often including photographs, of dead Americans. War coverage excludes mention of any living heroes, unless they emerge severely wounded.

But Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, which of course had nothing to do with Iraq, turned out to provide the knockout blow to Bush’s popularity. As Nina Easton, then the Boston Globe’s Washington bureau chief, put it six months after the devastating hurricane, “Katrina is the gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats, absolutely.” That and the sectarian war that engulfed Iraq in March 2006 after al-Qaeda destroyed the Golden Mosque at Samara.

Writing just before his untimely death in April, David Halberstam, the reporter most responsible for ending American involvement in Vietnam, in a wide-ranging attack for the August Vanity Fair unsparingly denounced Bush for his “wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.” Here’s an example that shows how Halberstam saw Bush as a latter-day Lyndon Johnson:

One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity

Halberstam was saying that as with Vietnam, the U.S. in Iraq is fighting a colonial war disguised as a war for democracy, and the non-Western world gets it. Yet in fact, most every (non-Western) dictator is alarmed by the precedent Bush threatens to establish of crossing an international frontier to replace a tyrant with democracy, and these dictators will be exceptionally alarmed if Bush succeeds. So in truth Halberstam aligned himself with the (non-Western) world's despots, and against those of their subjects who want democracy.

It’s where we are today. Bush and his dwindling band of supporters are the Wilsonian idealists (the people to whom this blog is dedicated) who believe democracy is the best system of government for everyone. And the media, Democrats, and Halberstam represent a currently growing body of realists who want America watching out for its own interests at home, abstaining from foreign ventures.

One sees the emerging intellectual underpinnings for a quitter foreign policy in Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz’s Foreign Affairs piece grandly titled, “Grand Strategy for a Divided America.” The article denounces Bush for “pursuing a foreign policy of excessive and unsustainable ambition.” The authors worry about idealism in the Republican Party, much as Roosevelt worried in 1941 about isolationism in the Republican Party:

One CNN poll recorded that after four years of occupying [sic] Iraq, only 24 percent of Republicans oppose the war, compared with more than 90 percent of Democrats. As for exporting American ideals, a June 2006 German Marshall Fund study found that only 35 percent of Democrats believed the United States should "help establish democracy in other countries," compared with 64 percent of Republicans. Similarly, a December 2006 CBS News poll found that two-thirds of Democrats believed the United States should "mind its own business internationally," whereas only one-third of Republicans held that view.

What’s wrong with Republicans that they just won’t quit? Well, Peggy Noonan, Reagan's brilliant former speechwriter, is one Republican who's quit, and is now siding with the realists.