Thanks For Losing Iraq, Guy In The Street

The latest blame-shifting theory favored by Bush and his defenders for the war in Iraq is that they were stabbed in the back by a public who refused to clap loud enough, and summarily let Tinkerbell die. Digby has a great post about this, which shows just how craven these guys in power are, so unwilling to admit a mistake that they would rather blame the people they sold this war to than the salesmen themselves. The argument goes like this, articulated by some apologist named Stanley Kurtz:

"The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and "nation building" plans around those political constraints, crafting a "light footprint" military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq."

War should be waged under domestic political constraints. It's the worst thing you can do, to send fellow compatriots off to die in service to country. It ought not to be done without reasons compelling enough to break past those constraints. The Founding Fathers put the task of declaring war in the hands of the legislative body for a reason; it meant that to wage war you would need majority support from legislators across the country, a good facsimile for the will of the people. They did not want to vest that power in the hands of one ideologue who could make decisions about war and peace for more inscrutable reasons.

The assessment of how large a military the public would support was in direct proportion to the relative definitiveness of the evidence that Iraq had WMD. I remember watching Colin Powell at the UN and laughing out loud at the paucity of real information he gave there. Anybody who was paying attention could see that this threat was neither imminent nor gathering. But if the cost in lives and treasure and numbers of troops in harm's way was low, the Administration figured, their burden of proof could be sufficiently low as well. And so you had this absurd situation where armchair generals would get on television and say that the war would be a cakewalk because the Iraqi army represented no real threat, yet nobody would ask the followup question.

Q: Well, why do we have to disarm them, then?

A: Because Iraq poses a dangerous threat to the world...

Q: You just said they're no threat.

A: Not to the American military, no, but...

Q: Then why fight a war against a country who represents no threat to us?

(Armchair general's head explodes)

It is not the ordinary American's fault that there was no good reason to go into Iraq. Kurtz and the other Bush defenders are trying to make it sound like the people held a straw poll and decided they could only stomach a number of troops too few to get the job done. "Transformation" and a quick-strike military was Rumsfeld's baby. He was the one who shot down calls for additional troops at every turn. He was the one who threatened to fire anyone who asked for a postwar plan. This line of reasoning (coupled with blaming Iraqis for not getting their act together, and blaming the Iraqi Prime Minister for, get this, receiving information from only a small circle of advisers which skews his perception of reality - how novel) completely turns history on its head. Here's Digby:

But if the current stab-in-the-back argument is that the American people should have supported the war more, perhaps the people who are making that argument should go back and look at what the American people actually thought at the time we went in. It's not something that couldn't have been anticipated. A majority backed the war if the US could get an international coalition together. Throughout the run-up polls said over and over again that Americans expected Bush to get UN backing. He did not feel he needed to do that, he lied repeatedly, invaded anyway and once the invasion began most Americans rallied because they felt they had no choice. They hung in longer than they had any reason to.

So Kurtz is essentially right. The public had never fully approved of the war in the first place. But I don't know why this translates to some sort of failure on the part of the public. It's Bush's fault for going ahead anyway and then making the whole mid-east FUBAR. His job --- and the job of his followers -- was to get the public on-board. They didn't make an honest case and now they have to deal with the consequences.

I'm sorry that these starry-eyed neocons who looked at George Bush and saw a genius are disappointed that the rest of the country didn't support their vision. They were given more of a chance to prove themselves than dreamers and fools usually are --- and they failed on a grand scale. This is what the Bushites deserve and what they should expect for ram-rodding through a war without real public support and then screwing it up royally. The families of all these dead and wounded soldiers, unfortunately, didn't deserve this and neither did the poor Iraqis who didn't know they were going to be guinea pigs in a 7th grade neocon thought experiment based on cartoons and psycho-babble.

I guess the Iraq Study Group is going to ask in vain for a total pullout of combat troops within a little over a year. Surely the President will fight them and all the other underlying pressures on this until his last breath. But you can always see a step ahead of these guys by reading into these stupid justifications. They're revving up the "stabbed in the back" mythology machine, and when they're finally forced to leave, they'll find a convenient scapegoat - you and me. That gets it wrong. Presidents make the decisions and the public accepts or rejects them. The public doesn't get to make the decision first. But by all means, go ahead and try to pin it on them, guys. I'm sure voters in this country will be thrilled with being blamed for losing the Iraq war. They certainly would have an opportunity to act out on that delight at the ballot box.