Reality in the Rear-View Mirror

Congressman Murtha's remarks this week created more of a commotion than usual and the replies to criticism of the war are getting more and more heated (and irrational), too. As Yogi Berra said, "It's deja vu all over again." War critics are once again appeasers, cowards, cut-and-run defeatists, anti-American, anti-freedom, and we have to stay the course or else, etc. In short, every argument trotted out today we've all heard before in the late 1960s, and those very same arguments ensured we'd stay in Viet Nam long after withdrawal was inevitable. The US and Viet Nam suffered thousands of casualties and yes, they were unnecessary. My heart goes out to those families who lost loved ones, and I can understand why it is such a comfort to believe your sons and daughters died for a purpose, but the fact is that leaders make mistakes, wrong decisions are made, and people die needlessly; it is an ugly truth of history. Such errors in judgment and policy continue until the description of the situation differs from the reality to a point where it becomes impossible to pretend otherwise. At the last stages of this process, the justifications by those in power become become more and more bizarre, and the response to their critics becomes more bitterly personal.

This is what we're witnessing now. Popular support for the war is at an all-time low and Bush's ratings are the worst of his presidency. The administration and its supporters have stopped making anything but token arguments justifying the war on a military basis and are now concentrating on personal attacks on critics, and asserting that lives will have been wasted in Iraq unless we continue (to waste lives).

It will get nastier, if history is any guide. We can expect the administration's and its supporters' responses to become more shrill and ad hominem. And here the similarities with the Viet Nam war become political as well as military. At the lead-up to withdrawal of troops from Viet Nam, conservative critics of the anti-war movement unloaded every rhetorical device on the Left: innuendo, slander, guilt by association (usually by being tarred as communists), name-calling, muck-raking, all of it. When their hero Richard Nixon bowed finally to the inevitable and began withdrawing troops, he was in the middle of the Watergate scandal, and the Right was able to train their guns on the Left on that basis, in a last-ditch attempt to be on the winning side of history. When we withdrew from Viet Nam and Nixon resigned, they were publically and historically humiliated. Politics turned more personal and bitter then, but the Right only had to wait six years before extracting revenge with the election of Ronald Reagan, whose campaign was marked by, you guessed it, folksy innuendo, down-home slander and plain old-fashioned falsehoods. With the election of the crop of conservative Senators and Representatives in the early 1980s heralding the "Reagan Revolution", the debate in Congress took an immediate and marked turn toward incivility from which it has never recovered. Led by Newt Gingrich, politics became personal and exceedingly nasty. It reached its nadir during the failed attempts to destroy the Clintons with Travelgate, Fostergate, White Watergate, Monica Gate, and all the other campaigns, including the failed impeachment. Although the level of debate had improved since those days, it is now starting to descend to those depths again, most notably with Vice President Cheney's statement to Senator Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, to "F*ck off", and most recently with the Indiana Representative's calling Rep. Murtha, a Marine Colonel who earned Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts during his service in Viet Nam, a "coward" by proxy.

The watershed moment during the Viet Nam era was Nixon's resignation in disgrace. The watershed moment during the Reagan years was the relevation of the Iran-Contra scandals. The watershed moment during the Bush I years was his jettisoning of his "No new taxes" promise. The watershed event of the Clinton years was the failed impeachment. In each case, reality caught up with the Right's description of reality. We are now heading for the watershed event of the Bush II years as this administration's description of the world becomes more difficult to reconcile with the unvarnished truth. It would be a pity if it were merely the 2006 election; that would just let them off the hook and give them political cover ("If Bush had only been able to continue with his policies..."). They deserve worse than that.