Reality vs. McCain on the surge Posted by Max Bergmann

Michael Ware absolutely rips McCain on Iraq and the surge. Ware makes the basic and obvious point that what brought down violence was the decision to start negotiating with Sunni insurgent groups which began two years ago - well before the surge started. McCain has already demonstrated that he doesn't understand the details of the surge and Ware challenges McCain to define it saying that if McCain thinks violence is down just because of 30,000 additional troops then McCain "has no idea what is going on in Iraq."

The best point though, is Ware's first. When he says "the troops will come home with honor regardless...They've earned that honor." Staying forever or redeploying will not change that.

All that in just a 2 minute video.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

Please wake up! From a political point of view, obsessing about these kinds of debates is still missing the forest for the trees, and missing it badly. The general public doesn't care if the reduction in violence is due to The Surge or due to The Surge Plus The Awakenings and Some other Stuff. Democrats really need to stop arguing so much about the damn surge and the last two years, and focus a lot more on the whole war and the last seven years.

To the extent that the election becomes a referendum on the war, the candidates will succeed or fail on the basis of the simplest possible stories they can tell about the war, and on whose story turns out to be more compelling. The two campaigns are battling for victory over the rhetorical high ground and the power to pronounce the historical verdict on the Iraq War.

So far, this is what the broader public probably understands about the contrasting positions:

Republicans: The Iraq War was a good war, and it's a damn good thing we fought it. It took us a little longer than we hoped to win it, but with the success of surge we have finally won the war. This proves we were right all along!

Democrats: The surge helped make some a bad situation better, but the Iraq War was a bad war and should never have been fought. It was a national disaster, and it's the Republicans fault.

The problem I see is the the Democrats, possibly to do with deep internal divisions in the party over foreign policy, have failed so far to articulate a really compelling, simple and easily grasped account of why exactly the war was a bad war. And yet, this should be so damned easy! The majority of the American public appears to have decided for the time being that the war was a bad mistake. They are looking for a candidate who will champion their position. But for some reason the Democratic campaign will not rely on the factors that are most compelling to the general public, but has gotten way, way too subtle. And the public repudiation of the war will not stand if the Republicans are able to continue running their Iraq victory narrative while we hear such confused and inconsistent opposition from Democrats.

The Democratic campaign is now relying heavily on the idea that the war was a mistake because it "distracted" us from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the broader war on terror. But while this account may carry some weight with certain audiences, I'm not sure how much overall traction it gets. It seems hard to make the case to ordinary observers that the Iraq War has seriously damaged the war on terror, given that we haven't been hit with a terrorist attack in the US since 9/11. Obama needs a short, sweet, forceful and much more compelling answer to the question, "Why should we never have fought the Iraq War?"

My sense is that if you ask ordinary Americans who have rejected the war what they think was so bad about it, the answer goes something like this:

1. The war cost an absolute fortune and has burdened us with massive debt;

2. The war killed and maimed thousands of good American soldiers;

3. Iraq is a shithole country on which we have no business wasting all these lives and treasure unless we have to do it to defend ourselves against dangerous bad guys;

But,

4. There were no WMDs in Iraq, and there was no Al Qaeda connection with Saddam, even though Bush deceived us into thinking the opposite in 2002 and 2003. So we spent in excess of a trillion bucks and killed all of those American boys for no good reason.

Most ordinary Americans judge our wars by selfish national defense criteria. But elite foreign policy experts often don't share the values of ordinary Americans. The Obama campaign is being held back by a gang of experts and advisers from the foreign policy establishment who are deeply out of touch with the outlook of ordinary Americans. Most of them have plenty of money, and don't know anyone who came home in a body bag or without a leg, and they therefore think there are all sorts of very excellent reasons to spend a fortune and kill thousands of our guys, reasons that have nothing to do with defending the United States and its people in any urgent way, but are about various other refined moral and ideological objectives - like removing one crappy dictator from one crappy foreign country, or enlarging the "liberal world system", or something of that sort. Since money and lives are no object for these pampered elitist pricks, the latter have to come up with lots of complicated and iffy reasons for opposing an obviously stupid war. Reasons, for example, such as the story that the war was a mere tactical misstep in the "good fight" that we must fight with "all our might", a blunder in the megalomaniacal world crusade to stamp out non-Americanism wherever it is found, and stuff the liberal democratic world system into every orifice in the global body.

Let's get back to basics here. The Iraq War was an absurd, unwarranted and criminally wasteful venture. The Bad Iraq War is sitting right there on a tee. It is very frustrating that the Obama campaign refuses to knock it out of the park.

It's likely that the election will hinge on a simple thumbs up vs. thumbs down debate on the Iraq War. Republicans are going for a big thumbs up. If Democrats fail to go bold with a hearty and forceful thumbs down, and go for a wavering thumb flopping up and down, or pointing off on some tangent, or pointing every which way, we will lose!

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