From the Salmon

Sunday’s Washington Post contained a refreshingly candid, confessional reflection on the US situation in Iraq by Eliot Cohen. Cohen is a Johns Hopkins professor who, as a member of the Project for the New American Century, is cut from the same neoconservative cloth as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton and others. In this piece, Cohen offers greater insight into the original ideological underpinnings of the push for “regime change” in Iraq, he levels a scathing critique of the execution of the post-combat phase of the war, and he confesses the pride, fear, and rage that swirl inside him as he watches his son prepare to be shipped off to serve in Iraq.

Cohen’s article is worthy of discussion on many fronts, but in light of the sentiments I expressed in my last post, I thought I’d focus on his concluding paragraph:

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders’ chief concern. If we fail in Iraq — and I don’t think we will — it won’t be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth — an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.
(Emphasis mine.)

I think Cohen cuts right to the heart of why I wrote what I wrote on Saturday. I, too, want to demand simple, serious honesty from our leaders. And when they offer me something else instead, it makes me angry and frustrated and wearily disillusioned and cynical.

Look, when I hear President Bush repeatedly make statements like “We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home,” I have two options. One option is to take him at face value and accept that this is truly what he believes, in which case, I would argue that it’s not just offensive, it’s downright frightening.

The other option, and the one I find more plausible, is that Bush doesn’t really mean what he says. It’s simply a talking point, a rhetorical device, a false dichotomy strategically chosen so that those who have serious questions about why we went to war can be dismissed as do-nothings who would rather have the terrorists attack us at home than unquestioningly support the President’s war.

Why do I think this is more plausible? Well, because this has been Bush’s pattern from the beginning with this war.

As he sought to convince us that attacking Iraq was absolutely necessary, President Bush told us what he thought we needed to hear in order to support him. And he did so in a way calculated to maximize his political advantage over those who had doubts, questions or fears about his plan. As a result, we never had a full, open, honest discussion of whether going to war was the right decision.

Eliot Cohen writes about the need for regime change as part of a grand vision to reshape the Middle East. If that was the primary thrust behind the desire to remove Saddam, then we should have had a serious discussion of what such a mission might entail and whether that was a proper use of American military force at that time. But that’s not the discussion we had, because that’s not the story the President chose to tell us.

Any responsible discussion of whether to go to war should also have included an unvarnished accounting of the likely costs and sacrifices that were necessary to be successful. But that’s not the discussion we had either. If we had actually talked about the fact that bringing stability to a region the size of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops, we either would not have gone to war or we would have gone about our military strategy in a much different fashion. But we didn’t talk about that, just like we didn’t talk about the possibility that a military venture like this could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and limit our flexibility in dealing with other nations like North Korea, Iran, or Sudan. Those who tried to discuss these ideas were dismissed by the administration or shouted down by hyperventilating cable news network hosts.

The point is this: if President Bush was confident that taking the country to war was necessary and right, then he should have been unafraid to tell us the whole story before sending troops. And if he’s now truly committed to success in Iraq, he should be committed to open, honest assessment of our military progress, with no respect to the political consequences. With something as serious as war, that’s the minimum that decency and moral leadership should demand.

So I’m tired of the talking points. I’m tired of the spin. And I’m sick of the disrespect President Bush demonstrates for me and for my fellow citizens by continuing to cling to meaningless, polarizing rhetoric rather than coming to us with a serious commitment to truth.