Strong and Wrong
How obvious was it that George Bush was playing Congressional Democrats for patsies when it came to invading Iraq? Obvious enough that Lincoln Chafee, not known for being the brightest bulb in the Senate light show, though that it was obvious.
Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. :The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were," writes Chafee. "They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.
"Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish," writes Chafee. "That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over."
Chafee writes of his surprise at "how quickly key Democrats crumbled." Democratic senators, Chafee writes, "went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration's nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?"
Congressional Democrats forgot two things. They forgot the difference between Saddam Hussein's febrile ambitions and his actual deeds. And they forgot the difference between the relative ease of a military invasion of Iraq and the interminable morass of a military occupation of Iraq.
And they fell into the trap that hawks have set for generations, the idea that being "strong on defense" is somehow the intellectually responsible position. Never mind that being "strong on defense" has so often wasted thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, whether in Vietnam or Iraq or Cuba or Afghanistan or Nicaragua or Guatemala.
The fact remains that ideological opponents often have good reason to trade with one another, to learn from one another, and even to steal political ideas from one another. While few would have believed in 1975 that Communist Vietnam would be an important trading partner of the United States by 2000, this sort of thing should have informed those making decisions in 2001.
Labels: Congressional Democrats, Lincoln Chafee, strong and wrong
