Saturday marks the first anniversary of what might be the single
most craven public statement by a wartime elected leader in the
history of the United States. Unfortunately, it stands as a symbol
of liberal Democratic cravenness, or worse, throughout this decade,
in a pattern of openly wishing for American failure in Iraq and in
other foreign affairs, and of characterizing our missions as not
just impractical but actually immoral.
The speaker was Harry Reid, majority leader of the U.S. Senate.
The subject was the war in Iraq, and the “surge” in American troops
there that had barely even begun and was still months away from
full deployment. What he said, in full, was this: “I believe myself
that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have
to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — this
war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as
indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.”
Not only was Reid wrong on the facts, but the potential damage
to American troop morale, and the potential morale boost for
terrorists worldwide, was unfathomably large. For the
fourth-ranking official in American government to say that troops
currently fighting on our behalf have already lost is to consign
them to a state somewhere between limbo and oblivion. He managed to
impugn the integrity and human decency of the Secretaries of State
and Defense as well, implying that they would continue to send
American soldiers abroad to fight and die for a mission they knew
was useless.
Four days later, even as many of his fellow Democrats joined
institutionalists such as columnist David Broder in tacitly or
openly criticizing Reid’s remarks (“amateurish,” Broder wrote in a
scathing column), Reid repeated himself: “I have no doubt the war
cannot be won militarily and that’s what I said last Thursday and I
stick with that.” Not content with undermining our troops, Reid
repeated an earlier contention that President Bush was “a
liar.”
But it was all of a piece with his party’s entire congressional
leadership. Ted Kennedy in 2003 called the war a “fraud” that had
been “made up in Texas” because it was “going to be good
politically,” and he accused Bush of “bribing” foreign officials.
Hillary Clinton last fall accused Gen. David Petraeus of asking
senators for a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Top Defense
appropriator John Murtha, D-Penn., falsely accused Marines of
“killing women and children” deliberately, “in cold blood.” Rep.
Jim McDermott, D-Wash., one of three congressmen who took a pre-war
trip to Iraq that was funded by Saddam Hussein, said that “the
president of the United States will lie to the American people in
order to get us into this war,” but moments later said the Iraqis
were believable: “I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face
value.” And Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., said the decision about war had
been hijacked: “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish
community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.”
Even in Afghanistan, just after the start of our air war there,
the sometimes-responsible Joe Biden, D-Del., said in a speech that
our bombings made us look like a “high-tech bully.”
(The leftist echo chamber in the establishment media has been
just as bad: Less than two months after 9/11, before the United
States had even sent in ground troops to Afghanistan, the New
York Times’ R.W. Apple already was writing that it was
decidedly not “unreasonable” to use what he called “the ominous
word ‘quagmire’” to describe the military efforts there, while
suggesting that “fighting a land war in Afghanistan would weaken
the broad coalition that has been assembled to fight terrorism.”
Four days earlier, the Times’ Frank Rich wrote that the
Taliban “are proving Viet Cong-like in their intractability” and
that “we’re losing that battle for Afghan hearts and minds.”)
BUT YOU WILL SEARCH in vain for anything but the most random
statement (if even that; I can’t find one) from any current
Democratic leader, at any time during our efforts in Iraq, to offer
support for the mission itself or — with the notable exception of
Biden’s thoughtful but ill-advised “partition” plan for Iraq — to
suggest any ways for our stated mission to achieve success. An
observer could easily be forgiven for suspecting that Reid, Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, and their entire leadership actually want the United
States to fail in Iraq, and that they think American failure would
be a well-deserved comeuppance rather than a monumental
tragedy.
Meanwhile, their flagrant disregard for facts, and their refusal
to put the national interest ahead of pure political advantage —
such advantage often defined by fawning allegiance to every order
from their overlords among union leadership and the plaintiffs’ bar
— on even the most important of subjects, is frighteningly
reckless. Faced with strong pleas from (Democratic) Intelligence
Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, backed by a
bipartisan, two-thirds vote in the Senate, and endorsed as a
“vital” intelligence need by the utterly nonpartisan Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell (with significant service in
the Clinton administration, no less), Pelosi’s House leadership has
refused for two months to provide immunity for telecommunications
companies that helped American foreign intelligence surveillance
efforts. Indeed, some Democrats went so far as to question the
honesty and motives of McConnell, a 40-year intelligence
veteran.
And so goes the rank irresponsibility, the outlandish rhetoric,
and the flat-out denial that the United States is a morally
defensible actor on the world stage, from Democratic leaders on
issue after issue after issue. On the Colombian trade agreement, a
crucial pact with our closet ally in South America. On
acknowledgement (or refusal thereof) of Saddam’s ties to
terrorists. On the nature and history of al Qaeda. On both
political and military progress in Iraq. On the actual conduct of
American interrogations of “enemy combatants.” On missile defense.
Again and again, according to Democratic congressional leaders,
there is no health in us. We, the United States, are the bullies.
We, the United States, are the dishonest ones. We, the United
States, are in the wrong. And conservatives who believe otherwise
are not merely mistaken, or incompetent; we are liars, torturers,
bloodthirsty, authoritarian, racist thugs.
So say the congressional leaders of the American Left.
They cannot possibly believe their own bile. It is bile based on
no evidence, no logic, and certainly not a shred of good will. And
it is bile so virulent that it can be described only as a
pathology. It is a pathology whose effects, if not motivations, are
so profoundly antagonistic to the American tradition as to be
potentially deadly. It is a pathology that must be defeated, by all
honest and lawful means. And then replaced with a responsible Left,
if such a thing still exists in this country. Unfortunately,
whether such a thing exists in any decent numbers is very much an
open question.
