The Politics of Responsibility
Well, I’m back a day early from my quick visit to the Golden State – about which more later. The other night in a hotel room in Medford, Oregon, I caught some of the President’s speech on rebuilding Iraq and this morning was catching up on the Monday morning quarterbacking.
Some have suggested that the Democrats hold Bush’s request for untold billions hostage to some domestic political demands. Though I am sympathetic to the impulse, this is both bad policy and bad politics. The decision to invade and conquer Iraq was a calamitous mistake predicated on faulty assumptions, if not outright lies. Hundreds of American service personnel who were alive and whole in March are now dead or crippled for nothing, with no end in sight. The reputation of the United States is in tatters, our historical allies and enemies alike are gleefully delighting in our misfortune, and generations of Americans will have to work harder and be taxed more heavily to pay for services and infrastructure in a foreign land that we can’t afford to invest in here in our own country. And, of course, we are no safer from attack than we were on September 10, 2001 – indeed, we have even more of a target painted on us as we have given the world much more to hate and fear about American power and arrogance since that day.
This is the policy that Bush has committed us to. This is his legacy. And unfortunately, there is far more harm to be done by backing out now than in seeing it through.
The $87 billion that Bush asked for, which even the White House acknowledges is only the first installment on what is likely to be the better part of $1 trillion before we’re through, will not go to improve conditions in Iraq, but to prevent travesty from becoming catastrophe. This is money to salvage the results of a spectacularly failed policy, to buy off mutually homicidal internal factions in Iraq long enough for us to make an honorable exit, to restore the miserable populace of that country to the standard of living they enjoyed under a heinous and corrupt dictator, and to ensure that the loyal backers of Bush and Cheney are not cheated out of their rightful share of the spoils by the hideous incompetence of their Administration water-carriers. As anyone paying attention understands by now, the sacrifice Bush spoke of on Sunday night is meant to be bourn only by average Americans, Iraqis, and our allies (whose populations almost unanimously opposed the invasion for what turned out to be perfectly sensible reasons).
And bear it we must. This is the punishment our country must endure for allowing Bush and his gang to steal the election and for blindly trusting them to see to our security after the 9/11 tragedy. The American public and the Democratic party in particular abdicated responsibility in the face of the clear evidence of poor judgment, mixed motives, ideological fanaticism and cronyism practiced by the Bush Administration. We trusted that the mantle of leadership would somehow mystically confer the qualities of leadership – wisdom, responsibility, forthrightness – upon a man manifestly unsuited to the job. We pushed away those who asked troubling questions and silenced voices of dissent. And, to this day, we refuse to hold anyone accountable for the growing mountain of mistakes, miscalculations, deceptions and outright lies told in our name.
The costs of the Iraq war and its aftermath must be paid in full. There’s little to be gained and much to be lost by trying to make an issue of it this late in the day. Democrats who insist that Iraq money be offset by repeals in the Bush tax cuts or in other unrelated political reparations are only compounding their complicity in the original failure and unnecessarily implicating their own policy objectives with a set of problems they did not directly cause and whose outcome they cannot directly affect.
Bush took our country into an unnecessary war against the advice of many well-informed, well-intentioned people and in contravention of a heaping mound of factual evidence. He pissed off the allies and the United Nations, his policies are making our soldiers convenient targets and trophies for hateful fanatics, his shifty prevarications are committing increasing amounts of American resources to a remote and hostile part of the world. Most of all, he has proven himself utterly incorrigible. To this day, there is no evidence that George W. Bush accepts any responsibility for the consequences his actions and decisions have had on the country and the world, and no sign that reality has penetrated the shell of self-righteous ignorance and arrogance that has characterized his approach to every situation since he took office.
Give the man his money, and give his people support. Let him do what he can to repair the damage he caused, and pray that he is successful. Don’t give the hateful attack dogs cause to question our support for the troops or our patriotism, and most of all, don’t endanger even the remote chance of success in something this important by causing delays or attaching irrelevant conditions. Then, when the time comes, demand accountability for the lies, the blunders, the lives lost, the dollars wasted and the nation’s honor dragged through the mud by the staggering and insistent incompetence of our country’s worst President.
10:30:09 AM 
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