Posted by
Reeson on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 3:23:37 PM
I think Mr. O'Sullivan misses one reason why the Dems won't put their money where their mouths are: they are posturing not only to preserve the gains made in Congress in the last election, but to win the White House as well. Excerpts from the Chicago Sun-Times:
"That is why the Democrats have been wriggling uncomfortably in their response to Bush's new approach. My colleague Rich Lowry on the National Review asks: 'Why don't the Democrats have the intellectual honesty to say that they think the war is lost and that we should get out of Iraq?'"
"So what holds them back? There are four reasons for their caution--three of which represent hangovers from Vietnam:
First, they fear being blamed for the consequences that might flow from a U.S. withdrawal. These could include massacres of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, ethnic cleansing, refugees flooding into Jordan and Saudi Arabia or Iran, the overthrow of friendly regimes in the region, a wider war, and so on. After Vietnam we forgot about the region for two decades. That helped the doves of both parties to avoid responsibility for the Cambodian genocide and the Vietnamese boat people. The Middle East is too important to be neglected in this way. Similar disasters would be widely debated -- and maybe laid at their door.
Second, Bush's new policy might succeed and make the Democrats' defeatism look foolish and unpatriotic. Admittedly, this is unlikely -- the odds are now against the president -- but it is not impossible. If it were to happen, Bush might be hailed in the Middle East as a liberator.
Third, Democrats could seem to be weak on national security even if the public agrees with them on withdrawal. Most Americans were against continued U.S. participation in the Vietnam War by 1970, but they wanted neither an American defeat nor a North Vietnamese victory. By cutting off all support to the South Vietnamese, the Democrats gave the impression of not really caring about the U.S. defeat and even welcoming it as a punishment for American arrogance. Under President Jimmy Carter, they went further and embraced the post-Vietnam Syndrome of reluctance to get involved abroad. When this led to the worldwide depiction of the U.S. as a "pitiful, helpless giant," Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets and American diplomats were held hostage in Tehran. It has taken 15 years for the Democrats to shake off the reputation as weak on national security that they then gained. They won't risk regaining it over Iraq.
Finally, the Democrats are rationally nervous of being too closely identified with their grass-roots extremists and the "politics of anger" they embody. In an important new book, A Bee in the Mouth, (Encounter Books, N.Y.), Peter Wood points out that the expression of self-righteous anger has become mainstream on the Internet and that some of its harshest practitioners, such as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Web site Daily Kos, have become influential inside the Democratic establishment and with figures such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The latter believe they are tapping into a reservoir of public anti-Bush anger via these intermediaries. But Zuniga has expressed such harsh sentiments as "I feel nothing. . . . Screw them" about the four American contractors who were lynched in Iraq. If the Democrats hew too closely to the "angry left" today, they risk suffering the same taint of extremism marked their association with the anti-war movement in the 1970s."