Being at peace with Kerry's war vote
The primary season saw the Iraq War become the defining dynamic in the Democratic base that really divided the voters into two sides. And myself, being someone that, in the first few months of 2003, viewed the upcoming war in much the way someone watches a car accident unfold, I naturally tended to agree with a lot of what Howard Dean said. John Kerry looked a lot like Al Gore, the flip-flop accusation even seemed to stick at times. He voted for the war, but oftentimes came out and bashed it. Hypocritical? Seemingly, but I don't necessarily think that way any more.
Bill Clinton continues to defend the notion that war with Iraq may have been necessary. It shows that Clinton has, in some ways, transcended his political party and has just become a statesman. His words and thoughts should carry weight, simply because there are few Americans alive who've had deal as much with the Hussein government as Clinton has. I don't think his support of going to war was just inflated optimism of a better Middle East either, as it was with many pundits and journalists on the left that had allowed their own intimate knowledge of Saddam and his heinous regime to make the matter a personal one rather than a geopolitical one.
My displeasure with the war boils down to two things. One, we should've gone into this standoff with a very solid plan to make real changes to the Israeli-Palestinian situation first. There's no question that Saddam had been supporting the Palestinian terror groups in both money and influence. We had a potential moderate leader (Abu Abbas) for the first time in decades who had enough respect from the Israelis to start a new chapter in the talks. And we had a frustrated Israeli populace that just wanted to get the two state solution done, even by having to sacrifice some settlements if necessary. Ideally, it would've been nice for the Democratic Senators to tell Bush that the war vote doesn't pass unless there's a more concrete plan in place for the 'Road Map', but this is the Senate and I've gotten used to the fact that they are mostly useless. And that sentiment really does go for both parties. By having a plan in place that nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and others were beginning to feel more pressure to support after 9/11, anything Saddam would do to stand in the way would be more ammunition for those countries to support an overthrow, and possibly even get more popular support locally for doing so. This was the fundamental broken piece in the region and the people of the Arab world were a lot more willing to support a plan to fix both problems together than just a plan to get rid of Saddam alone. For many Muslims, going to war in Iraq to fix the problem with Israel (as Bush claimed would be the real effect) was like repainting a car with a broken transmission.
Two, and this is the one that really burns me, is that Bush never projected to the world that he understood the gravity of what he was doing. I've come to feel that I'm not so upset with the decision Bush made to go to war as much as I'm upset with the fact that he thought it was such an easy decision. I don't think that when John Kerry and others voted to authorize Bush to use force, that it was entirely wrong to give him that option, but Bush's lack of simple responsibility in making that decision without weighing the alternatives was what has really alienated the world and made this war the disaster it now is. In many ways, Bush is symbolic to me of the lack of personal responsibility that seems to have become an epidemic in our society.
Each of the past four Presidents in the generation before Bush, two Republican, two Democrat, made decisions based upon the best information available and made decisions that sometimes conflicted with the party line. And by most accounts, they wouldn't have had it any other way. Reagan and Bush Sr. were never averse choosing diplomacy over war when necessary. And Carter and Clinton were never averse to taking the fight to our enemies, whether they were Communists or terrorists. They knew that they were the President of the United States first, and a partisan second. Bush has no interest in leading like that. He leads from the right and even his former praisers like Tom Friedman have begun to admit that he cares more about votes these days than our real success in the War on Terror. Call it what you will, but it still looks like a blind man leading a country full of deaf people to me.
Bill Clinton continues to defend the notion that war with Iraq may have been necessary. It shows that Clinton has, in some ways, transcended his political party and has just become a statesman. His words and thoughts should carry weight, simply because there are few Americans alive who've had deal as much with the Hussein government as Clinton has. I don't think his support of going to war was just inflated optimism of a better Middle East either, as it was with many pundits and journalists on the left that had allowed their own intimate knowledge of Saddam and his heinous regime to make the matter a personal one rather than a geopolitical one.
My displeasure with the war boils down to two things. One, we should've gone into this standoff with a very solid plan to make real changes to the Israeli-Palestinian situation first. There's no question that Saddam had been supporting the Palestinian terror groups in both money and influence. We had a potential moderate leader (Abu Abbas) for the first time in decades who had enough respect from the Israelis to start a new chapter in the talks. And we had a frustrated Israeli populace that just wanted to get the two state solution done, even by having to sacrifice some settlements if necessary. Ideally, it would've been nice for the Democratic Senators to tell Bush that the war vote doesn't pass unless there's a more concrete plan in place for the 'Road Map', but this is the Senate and I've gotten used to the fact that they are mostly useless. And that sentiment really does go for both parties. By having a plan in place that nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and others were beginning to feel more pressure to support after 9/11, anything Saddam would do to stand in the way would be more ammunition for those countries to support an overthrow, and possibly even get more popular support locally for doing so. This was the fundamental broken piece in the region and the people of the Arab world were a lot more willing to support a plan to fix both problems together than just a plan to get rid of Saddam alone. For many Muslims, going to war in Iraq to fix the problem with Israel (as Bush claimed would be the real effect) was like repainting a car with a broken transmission.
Two, and this is the one that really burns me, is that Bush never projected to the world that he understood the gravity of what he was doing. I've come to feel that I'm not so upset with the decision Bush made to go to war as much as I'm upset with the fact that he thought it was such an easy decision. I don't think that when John Kerry and others voted to authorize Bush to use force, that it was entirely wrong to give him that option, but Bush's lack of simple responsibility in making that decision without weighing the alternatives was what has really alienated the world and made this war the disaster it now is. In many ways, Bush is symbolic to me of the lack of personal responsibility that seems to have become an epidemic in our society.
Each of the past four Presidents in the generation before Bush, two Republican, two Democrat, made decisions based upon the best information available and made decisions that sometimes conflicted with the party line. And by most accounts, they wouldn't have had it any other way. Reagan and Bush Sr. were never averse choosing diplomacy over war when necessary. And Carter and Clinton were never averse to taking the fight to our enemies, whether they were Communists or terrorists. They knew that they were the President of the United States first, and a partisan second. Bush has no interest in leading like that. He leads from the right and even his former praisers like Tom Friedman have begun to admit that he cares more about votes these days than our real success in the War on Terror. Call it what you will, but it still looks like a blind man leading a country full of deaf people to me.
posted by thehim at 6:41 PM
<< Home