David Broder talks to Republican bigs who are afraid that this fall could be a replay of the 1974 midterms, in which disgust with Watergate led the Dems to a massive Congressional sweep. Well, news like this is not helping: More IEDs have been planted in Iraq than ever before, and the insurgency is stronger than it's ever been -- this according to a classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was reported on in today's New York Times. The question -- "Did Iraq produce Saddam, or did Saddam produce Iraq?" -- is a hard one to answer. But there's no question that preventable US errors, particularly in the White House and the Pentagon, are heavily responsible for this Vietnam-like quagmire.
But what to do about it? The Dems have no answer at all, and the Republicans have an answer that fewer and fewer people believe in.
1974, all over again?
Thursday August 17, 2006
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Couple of correx/clarify:
2,600 is the figure for all deaths -- including accidents (common in a battlefield environment), suicides, etc.). Just more than 2,000 have been killed by hostile action.
On the post at my site that I linked to, I mentioned 1,100 as the death toll for the Tet offensive. But that was just a single month. The US death toll was close to 1,600 over the entire offensive.
Neither of these correx affects my general point, of course.>
I thought after 9/11 that there were two broad choices of action. One, find and deport every Muslim male whose immigration status was at all questionable and keep a close eye on the rest, then start sealing the borders and withdrawing from the region as much as possible, which would involve getting extremely (read painfully) serious about kicking our dependence on its oil.
Or, two, go in and try to fix the place. Bush & Co. chose the latter. I wanted it to work but there is very little reason to hope anymore that it will.
Victor, I think it's now a "quagmire" in the sense that neither leaving nor staying seems likely to produce a good outcome.>
Yeah Victor, I don't think it makes much sense to define "quagmire" by the body count. When I say Iraq's a quagmire, I mean that we've gotten stuck in a situation that we can't control ... and we can't easily get out of it.>
I'm starting to think that Iraq had the leader they deserved in Saddam Hussein.>
To put it bluntly, if we consider two soldiers a day a "quagmire," we are paper tigers unworthy of being a great power.
I think you are correct. We have not deserved to be considered a Great Power for some time now. We have made it clear that we want to have the perks of being a Great Power but are unwilling to pay the costs.
What really showed me this was all that "No blood for oil" nonsense. Oil is literally the lifeblood of our economy and our entire way of life. If we aren't willing to expend blood and treasure for it, then we don't deserve to get it. I would have had a lot more respect for this administration (well, OK, it's not difficult to get more than zero) if they had just come out and said, "We need to fight in Iraq to ensure the stability of the oil supply." At least that would have been honest. I mean, for decades the Royal Navy enforced freedom of the seas because free trade was essential to the well-being of Britain and its empire. Well, access to oil is essential to ours. If we're not willing to fight for it -- or undertake a large-scale national effort to find an alternative -- then the days of our civilization, in a form in which we would recognize it, are numbered.>
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