The anti-Bush Left’s ploy to avoid defending Saddam’s Iraq.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
When last we noted CBS News, it was trying to topple the Bush administration in the 2004 campaign, courtesy of Dan Rather’s ham-handed document fraud. If you want to indulge a fiction, you can attribute the consequent firings to corporate embarrassment over Rather’s arrant partisanship. I’m sticking with corporate outrage over the scheme’s inept execution, “progressive” causes — such as cashiering a Republican administration — being de rigueur among the dying paleo-media.
Yet, for some reason, President Bush decided it would be in his interest to make 60 Minutes, CBS’s miso-Bush news magazine, the first media filter for his personal defense of the new Iraq strategy announced last week.
The result was predictable. Gobbling the spin, er, I mean the “excerpts” CBS “emailed to reporters” a day-and-a-half before the Bush interview aired, Bloomberg News rushed to publish a bombshell confession: The president had admitted that Iraq is “Now More Unstable Than Under Saddam.” The Drudge Report, similarly, broke the story that Bush believes his “Decisions Have Made Iraq More Unstable.”
These breathless assertions turn out to be slippery in the signature CBS fashion. As John Podhoretz pointed out on NRO, the president, in fact, had not conceded that Iraq is now “more unstable” due to his policies. To the contrary, though 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley tried his level best to put these words in the president’s mouth, Bush had not taken the bait:
Pelley: But wasn't it your administration that created the instability in Iraq?
Bush: Our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran... He was a significant source of instability.
Pelley: It's much more unstable now, Mr. President.
Bush: Well, no question, decisions have made things unstable.
The president flatly rejected the suggestion that his policies had “created the instability in Iraq.” Moreover, while he did not deny that his decisions had made some things unstable, neither did he agree that things were “more unstable now.” Quite obviously, whatever is newly unstable has to be weighed against Saddam Hussein, “a significant source of instability” now removed. That this somehow becomes another misleading episode of Not-So-True Confessions says a lot more about the media than it does about Bush.
Still, the media hyperventilating raises several worthy points.
First, let’s play the Left’s game and grant, at least for argument’s sake, that Iraq is now less stable than it was under Saddam. What exactly does that prove?
Let’s say a tyrant maintains order by resort to barbarism, and his overthrow results in instability, even violent instability, on the hoped-for road to a better future. How does the instability make the overthrow a bad thing? Does the fact that there was more instability in revolutionary America than there had been in colonial America mean the Revolution was a bad thing?
Second, if, as the Left and its media enablers maintain, the president is a blithering idiot, why should it matter so much to them whether, in his judgment, Iraq’s instability was greater before or after March 2003?
Objectively, Iraq either is or isn’t more unstable now than it was before. One person’s subjective take on that — even if that person happens to be the president of the United States — is not dispositive. After all, did the media accept that we were winning the war until recently just because the president said so? When did he suddenly become their compass?
The game behind the game is nevertheless worth exploring. The president’s critics are suddenly manic about Iraq’s comparative stability. Why?
Because the Left is always two steps ahead of the Right when it comes to the power of language.
In framing a debate, the well-chosen label often obscures blood-and-guts reality in a fog of airy abstraction — especially when the public is weary or prefers to look away from life’s grimness. The creepy gore of “abortion” gives way to the humanist majesty of “choice”; the pervasive criminality of “illegal aliens” melts with the plight of “undocumented workers”; “terrorists” are “freedom fighters,” and their “apologists,” “civil rights organizations.” On it goes.
No matter how ugly Iraq has gotten through the last four years, the Left has always gotten its clock cleaned, and its momentum stalled, by a single, show-stopper: “So, you’re saying we’d be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power?”
It has cost them one election, and they’ll be damned if it’s going to happen again.
So now, the antiwar intelligentsia has decided that stable will be its euphemism du jour. Let’s not talk better; let’s talk stable. Let’s not speak of depravity when we can dwell on stability.
Leftists are too embarrassed to say, “Iraq was better under Saddam,” or that they’d be content with him still at the helm. If Saddam is the litmus test, they are too easily forced to agree that he was a sadistic mass-murderer, too easily forced to concede his monstrousness. They must acknowledge that Bush’s cause is noble — the kind of cause they love when a Democrat is in command.
But what if they can get people thinking that better is really just a reflection Iraq’s relative stability? Then the current violence effectively cancels out Saddam's depravity. Then they are relieved of what would otherwise be the burden of defending that depravity as preferable to today’s chaos.
They oughtn’t be let off the hook so easily.
Claiming the Iraq invasion was a mistake is a respectable position. But one who takes it should at least be forced to admit he believes that the torture, repression, terrorism, murder, systematic rape, and mass killings by ghastly weapons were preferable to today's terrorism and savage sectarian infighting. The Left shouldn’t be permitted to escape the moral dilemma by brow-knitting over comparative “stability.”
This doesn’t let the war’s supporters off the hook either. Surely, none of us is claiming the United States should overthrow barbaric tyrants wherever we find them. Saddam’s atrocities take us only so far if they cannot be connected to an authentic threat against American national security. I believe they can, but that’s an argument for another day.
The point for now is that we shouldn’t let the antiwar crowd hide behind such dodges as “stability.” If you want to trash the war because the aftermath is worse than Saddam, fine. But then you have to defend Saddam as what you prefer.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.