[Mb-civic] The Politics of War - Fred Hiatt - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Politics of War

By Fred Hiatt
Monday, November 14, 2005; Page A21

Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's vice president, may seem a bit unfeeling as he 
assesses the ongoing violence in his country. It is very hard, he says 
-- but better than during Saddam Hussein's day, when, Mahdi says, each 
year 30,000 Iraqis were executed or assassinated by the regime or killed 
in the dictator's wars.

It may sound unfeeling, that is, until you remember that, just days 
before Mahdi's visit to Washington last week, his older brother was 
killed in a drive-by shooting.

This he does not speak about quite so matter-of-factly. But Mahdi, who 
was imprisoned and then exiled by Hussein, puts even this fresh murder 
in historical context. "My brother always suffered," Mahdi said. 
"Whenever they had a problem with me, they would detain him, they would 
torture him . . .

"They waged terrorism from within the government," Mahdi added. "Now 
they are waging the same attacks, as an opposition, from the streets. . 
. . These are the same methods, practiced by the same people."

A Shiite political leader with a good chance of becoming prime minister 
after next month's elections, Mahdi brought to Washington a familiar 
complaint: that the U.S. media and their audience focus exclusively on 
the bad news, ignoring Iraq's "tremendous achievements." Turnout was 
high in Iraq's first election, higher for its constitutional referendum 
and will be higher still, he said, in the December vote -- all despite 
death threats to anyone who votes. In the face of terror, Iraq's 
progress toward democracy is unprecedented in the Middle East.

But, he says, Iraq and the United States are "victims of different agendas."

"Iraq's is a life-or-death agenda -- how to build a democracy," Mahdi 
said. "Others' are political agendas."

Whether Iraqis are in fact committed to a life-or-death struggle for 
democracy will become clear as its army does, or does not, continue to 
shoulder a greater burden. But the aptness of Mahdi's view of the United 
States is already evident in Congress, which pours most of its 
Iraq-related energy into allegations of manipulated intelligence before 
the war.

"Those aren't irrelevant questions," says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). 
"But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to 
sustain public support for the war."

What Lieberman doesn't say is that many Democrats would view such an 
outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further 
undercut President Bush, and Bush's war, without taking the risk of 
offering an alternative strategy -- to satisfy their withdraw-now 
constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position.

Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the 
United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq 
would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his 
countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined 
with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, 
seems to override that understanding.

The Democrats could be responsible and fiercely critical, too, as Sen. 
John McCain (R-Ariz.) has shown throughout the war. When they pull a 
stunt such as insisting on a secret Senate session, it could be to 
debate Bush's policies on torture and detention. They could ask whether 
everything possible is being done to furnish the Iraqi army with 
protective armor. They could question whether anyone inside the 
administration is focusing with the same urgency on prodding Iraqi 
politicians toward compromise as are America's ambassador and top 
generals in the field.

Individual Democratic senators have focused on individual questions such 
as these (for example, Michigan's Carl Levin on torture), but for the 
caucus and its leader, Harry Reid (Nev.), the key questions are all 
about history.

"We're at war, and we've got to remind ourselves of that from time to 
time," Lieberman said. And not just, or even mostly, Democrats, 
Lieberman stressed last week at an Aspen Institute forum: "It really has 
to start, ought to start, with the administration."

President Bush can lash out at the Democrats, as he did Friday, but 
ultimately they are mostly exploiting public opinion; he is largely 
responsible for shaping it. And had he been more honest from the start 
about the likely difficulties of war, readier to deal with them and then 
more open in acknowledging his failures, the public likely would be more 
patient.

A true wartime president, Lieberman said, would reach out regularly to 
congressional leaders of both parties. He would explain strategy, admit 
mistakes, be open to suggestions.

That hasn't happened -- which goes a long way toward explaining why a 
war that should be understood as life-or-death for Americans too has 
become, as Mahdi said in more polite terms, a political football.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/13/AR2005111301062.html?nav=hcmodule
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