The War's Going Great, Thanks!

Does our dialogue about the Iraq war have anything much to do with reality these days? I've been writing about this a couple of times already, but you've got to give the Prez a healthy dose of respect for consistently confounding reality-based considerations, assumptions, and actions. His latest gambit in Iraq is to keep pushing the point at which we have to make a decision about our possibilities and intentions there further and further into the future. Atrios has been doing a good job of tracking Friedman Units predicted by various people, and I believe we've now been delayed until sometime in 2009 before we'll have enough definitive information to make a final determination.

Frank Rich wades into all this in his latest column, "Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death," correctly identifying our current discourse as a farce. Although he acknowledges that there aren't quite so many Iraq hawks as there once were, they haven't all disappeared. And they aren't so ashamed that they're keeping their opinions to themselves.

Some of them are busily lashing out. . . . Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars' critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.

It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, "A War We Just Might Win," by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued "at least into 2008."

The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, "No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" in Iraq if there's no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.

But even more galling was the authors' effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." That's disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration's incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of "Mission Accomplished."

You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald's Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway "experts" now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn't do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.

But it's not just the questionable way the hawks build up the war that Rich addresses but also their tactics against their critics.

It's also the tic of Mr. Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard (and its Murdoch sibling The New York Post), to claim that the war's critics hate the troops. When The New Republic ran a less-than-jingoistic essay by a pseudonymous American soldier in Iraq, The Weekly Standard even accused it of fabrication - only to have its bluff called when the author's identity was revealed and his controversial anecdotes were verified by other sources.

A similar over-the-top tirade erupted on "Meet the Press" last month, when another war defender in meltdown, Senator Lindsey Graham, repeatedly cut off his fellow guest by saying that soldiers he met on official Congressional visits to Iraq endorsed his own enthusiasm for the surge. Unfortunately for Mr. Graham, his sparring partner was Jim Webb, the take-no-prisoners Virginia Democrat who is a Vietnam veteran and the father of a soldier serving in the war. Senator Webb reduced Mr. Graham to a stammering heap of Jell-O when he chastised him for trying to put his political views "into the mouths of soldiers." As Mr. Webb noted, the last New York Times-CBS News poll on the subject found that most members of the military and their immediate families have turned against the war, like other Americans.

As is becoming clearer than ever in this . . . endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war's sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war's champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war's opponents.

Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of "Nightline" was branded unpatriotic by the right's vigilantes.

The same playbook was followed by the war's champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his "near insubordination." When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.

All of this is pretty self-evident, and yet these are the tactics that are winning the debate these days. The media has jumped on the bandwagon and is presenting the skewed administration view of the war effort as the only reasonable position to hold. Even when the media mouths the anti-war arguments, as Tim Russert did on Sunday's Meet the Press interview with Defense Secretary Robert Gates (transcript here), they don't much challenge the normal nonsensical platitudes they're given in response. And so the Bushies successfully continue their holdout against the reality-based outlook.

(While we're on the subject of Russert, he uses a Bushism [apparently seriously and on purpose] that I've never fully understood, misunderestimated. I have no problem understanding that this means underestimated incorrectly, but does it imply that there's a correct way to underestimate something?)