I'll try this again. Maybe it'll make some sense.
http://libwocyn.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_libwocyn_archive.html"As a digression, I want to make a distinction here between the situation now and the situation a year ago. All through 2004 I argued, and still maintain, that we should have run cleanly against the war. Berman, for instance, is absolutely right that Kerry's middle-ground position on Iraq, while basically consistent and even responsible, was too complicated and looked too qualified for the public to either grasp or trust. But the error of the campaign's hedging was bigger than just tactics: it represented a fundamental misreading of the political era. The Iraq War has been the great radicalizer, the political awakening, for a whole generation of young people, myself included. It was why turnout in the 2004 election hit levels not seen since... Vietnam. It's why Kerry's only major demographic gain came among men age 18-29 where he achieved a whopping 10% improvement over the 2000 result, mainly by warning young audiences that Bush might reinstate the draft if re-elected (highly unlikely, but politically effective, judging by the spluttering of conservatives and an Annenburg survey that found 53% of men under 25 feared a draft reinstatement if Bush won.)
Yet at the same time, the Dems didn't need to fear Iraq being the political minefield that Vietnam was or opposing it being the kiss of death that opposing Vietnam was. The tale of Iraq and its discontents carries none of the Vietnam era's cultural, generational overtones. For all the Republican demagoguery, Howard Dean, and John Kerry who usurped him, was no George McGovern. Today's protesters aren't as scary to middle America as those who rioted at the '68 convention (Cindy Shaheen hardly conjures images of the Weather Underground). Plus, when these "what to do" issues are debated on the center-left, it always seems to go unmentioned that the Democrats who attained the most foreign policy cred, and power, within the party in the 80s and 90s had all been overt, passionate opponents of the Vietnam War, and used their youthful prudence vis-a-vis that disaster as a context for their later-period hawkery. Similarly, the next generation of hawkish Dems -- assuming they were smart enough to shun the Iraq bandwagon -- could have gotten a similar amount of mileage out of refusing to succumb to "Iraq syndrome" when debating future foreign policy challenges.
So Kerry -- who's honourable biography and voting history made him an ideal candidate to assume the mantle of opposition to preemptive war -- should have opposed the war flat out as the calamity it was always going to be. Even had he lost the election, the party would be in far better shape than it is right now, and on top of that, he would have been right. Even having voted for the IWR because of White House misdirection, he could have saved himself by renouncing his vote as the product of misdirection, taken the lumps, then moved on to force Bush to defend it in principle.
So what's changed? Why isn't what would have good for Kerry then bad for Biden now?
The answer is roughly that the situation right now is more like it was just before the IWR vote in October 2002 than like the run-up to the election in 2004. By doing now what Kerry ought to have done in 2004, HRC and Biden wouldn't avoid his mistake but, actually, would set themselves up to repeat it.
First, there's the problem of the interaction between the (complex) policy with the (inevitably bone-stupid) politics of withdrawal: how fast, whether the US should provide air support to the Iraqi forces after the troops have left etc. These aren't soundbite, pep rally issues. Like in 2002 and 2004 when the issue was popularly understood as "for the war" vs. "against the war", the issue as it plays out in the popular understanding over the next few months is likely to take the simple form of "out now" vs. "stay the course". No matter how substantive and responsible HRC and Biden's withdrawal plans are, they'll come through in the popular conciousness as "let's cut and run". And given their past statements and votes in favour of the war, that's going to look to the press an the public like the same kind of hypocritical reversal Kerry was unfairly but inevitably hammered for when criticized a war he voted in favour of on the campaign trail.
Secondly, regardless of Biden and HRC's stances, cut-and-run is likely to become the dominant political position soon anyway. I'd say it's basically inevitable at this point. Not only is the occupation an abject failure, but the public increasingly knows that it is. Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet and the midterms are only 16 months away. Pretty soon, the GOP congress, at least those in insecure districts, will start to smell the flopsweat, have nightmares about Paul Hackett coming to their district, and scuttle back to their Realist roots. Some will say God told them to do it; others will say that we've done all we can but Iraqis just won't help themselves; some might even argue that withdrawing is necessary to lower gas prices. And when the White House feels it can't hold the squirming GOP congressmen in line anymore, it too will switch to a full-on advocation of withdrawal.
And when it does, the Bushies and the Congressional GOP -- not the liberal hawks -- will be the ones making the policy, getting the coverage, sharing the credit and the blame. HRC and Biden, if they join the homecoming bandwagon, even if they issued the inital call to the bandwagon as liberals wish they would, aren't going to be relevant in how the whole thing plays out. They'll just be part of the chorus, vaguely on the same page as the White House, just like they were as Bush took the nation to war in the first place. Being the first to take a popular position is hardly an advantage when you don't control what actually happens when the position is implemented.
Which brings me to the third reason why calling for withdrawal is a bad idea. Not only will it look impotent, but, like last time, it will also end up looking foolish. This isn't because some form of withdrawal is necessarily a bad idea; plenty of smart people think the US ought to get out of Iraq asap. It's because the withdrawal we get is almost certainly going to be an incompetent, callous, cut-your-losses-for-the-midterms disaster. And as the region descends into outright civil war; if people start being ethnically cleansed; as the US abandons the Kurds and the geurrilla-owned towns and dooms the region to more economic misery for the second time since 1990, the liberal hawks who shared in the cheering for withdrawal will be stuck doing exactly what they did last time: striking politically meaningless distinctions between principle and practice and arguing that We Would Have Done It Better. And that will ring as hollow as before because, just like they were always getting Bush-Rumsfeld's war, they were also going to get Bush-Rumsfeld's withdrawal. And if they if they're on record supporting it, they'll be reduced to demoralizing retrospective carping yet again.
If instead, HRC, Bayh, Biden etc. oppose the troop drawdown they'll probably be proved right for practical-political purposes. Since their bleating is impotent given the GOP hold on government, they hurt nobody in demanding we stay the course, and they gain a measure of consistency given their past support for the war effort. And, most important by far, come 2007, they can get up there and lambaste Bush and his congressional enablers (some of whom will be running to replace him) for getting into a war they didn't intend to finish, and for putting the polls ahead of the policy when the going got tough. That is, they can turn the focus onto what's awful about the GOP rather than having to explain their own enabling of the awfulness.
Maybe all this sounds like crass politics. But as a simple moral issue, Americans should have a choice about the defining controversial issues of our time, like preemptive war and empire and the US role in world peace. The parties should not march in lockstep when it comes to controversial questions of war and peace, even if one of them has to assume an unpopular position. The Dems fucked up badly in not providing that choice to their voters in 2002 and 2004. I hope at least one Dem who opposed the debacle from the start mounts a credible challenge for the 2008 nomination. But failing that, I'd rather support a Dem candidate whose position on the war was consistent and didn't float around with the polls, happening to more or less coincide with the White House's position over the course of the entire debacle. For the Senate hawkery to go cut-and-run now would risk confirming that very bad pattern if, as I predict, the GOP follows suit. And I think it'll end up biting us in the ass."
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