Can't Sell The Same Crap Anymore

What we're clearly seeing in the country, regardless of the cable news headlines of the Mark Foley scandal, is that the number one issue in this midterm election, as it should be, is Iraq. The American public is getting it right. And while in 2002 and 2004, a focus on foreign policy may have given a perceived advantage to the Republicans, this time around the curtain has been thrown open and the deceptions and half-truths are catching up to them:

Four months ago, the White House offered a set of clear political directions to Republicans heading into the midterm elections: embrace the war in Iraq as critical to the antiterrorism fight and belittle Democrats as advocates of a “cut and run” policy of weakness.

Even President Bush, continuing to attack Democrats for opposing the war, has largely dropped his call of “stay the course” and replaced it with a more nuanced promise of flexibility.

It is the Democrats who have seized on Iraq as a central issue. In debates and in speeches, candidates are pummeling Republicans with accusations of a failed war.

Funny how that goes when you create a civil war where none existed, kill hundreds of thousands of people and put your own soldiers in the crossfire with no sense of a mission or a strategy.

This is a national trend, reflected in this local story in the Philly suburbs. The debate is finally happening, three years too late, on the terms not of "How can we win" because we can't, but "How can we get out and minimize damage?" And by the way, if Democratic consultants had their way, their candidates wouldn't be talking about Iraq at all. They didn't see the mood of the country from their perches in Washington. Fortunately, the candidates did.

And this happened with virtually no vocal antiwar movement, with no nightly drumbeat of deaths on television screens (that's a myth for Bush press conferences), with very little for the public to sift through. They understood because it hit their communities, because they sought out the information, because they didn't understand why nothing ever improved, why 52 year-old reservists were being sent off to fight and die. The truth could not be held back any longer, an ugly truth of chaos, a ground zero in the Middle East that is delivering more death and suffering than anywhere else in the world. And suddenly the bullying of "cut and run," the stupid sloganeering meant to trash talk everyone out of reality, rang hollow.

The daily tragedy all over Iraq should make us all upset, and should make us understand that we are ALL responsible. I read with growing depression and even horror this post from Billmon, and I share his guilt. This deserves a long excerpt, and I urge you to go read the whole thing, but it's important to hammer home the fact that there is blood on all of our hands.

I've probably been as guilty as anyone of thinking of the war as some sort of strategy game, or a domestic political issue or a fascinating, if bloody, story -- a news junkie's next fix. When you're 8,000 miles and an existential light year away from the war, it's easy to distance yourself, intellectually and emotionally, from the stench of blood and the bloated corpses.

There's also a natural tendency, which I touched on yesterday, to make it all about us -- to consciously or unconsciously treat the Iraqis like extras (or worse, bloody mannequins) in a Mad Max remake produced and directed by Americans [...]

The point deserves frequent repetition: We did this. We caused it. We're not just callous bystanders to genocide, as in Rwanda, but the active ingredient that made it possible. We turned Iraq into a happy hunting ground for Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. If Iraq is now a failed state, it's because of our failures [...]

For someone in my shoes, though, hopelessness can become an excuse for not thinking about unpleasant truths. But there was something about Riverbend's quiet despair that forced me to think hard about my own moral responsibility as an American for a genocide caused by America -- because of a war started in my name, paid for with my taxes.

I've opposed this war since it was just a malignant smirk on George Bush's face. I've spoken against it, written against it, marched against it, supported and contributed to politicians I generally despise because I thought (wrongly) that they might do something to stop it. It's why I took up blogging, why I started this blog.

But the question Riverbend has forced me to ask myself is: Did I do enough? And the only honest answer is no.

I opposed the invasion -- and the regime that launched it -- but I didn't do everything I could have done. Very few did. We may have put our words and our wallets on the line, but not our bodies. Not when it might have made a difference. In the end, we were all good little Germans.

My question to myself, in other words, is like Thoreau's famous question to Ralph Waldo Emerson when Emerson came to visit him in jail after he was arrested for not paying his poll tax as a protest against slavery:

Emerson: What are you doing in there, Henry?
Thoreau: No, Waldo, the question is: What are you doing out there?

I remember the day that 15 million people worldwide turned out in the streets to protest this senseless war. I was in the midst of an unrelated personal crisis and still put it on hold to go and add my voice. But I knew we were spitting into the wind. I knew that I wasn't selling out and doing everything. Indeed we don't have a sense in this country that we can do anything. We have all achieved learned helplessness.

Generations will blame this country for destroying a country halfway around the world. We will never live down the fact that we watched as an attack on this country was manipulated and abused into setting on an imperial adventure, to teach brown people a lesson, regardless of their culpability. We gave up our agency to have an effect on the actions of our government, and we have profoundly damaged the safety of the world for our children and our children's children.

I am steadfast in my belief that we desperately need new leadership to extract our troops from an unmanageable situation and stop their slaughter. Clearly the American people are coming around to that same conclusion. But I know full well that nothing we do will stop the killing. Iraq is failed and nothing will fix it. And everybody in this country will have to live with that.