ReMcGovernizing the Democrats

William Kristol:

I don't think Congress ought to be running the war. I think they ought to be funding the troops.

--George W. Bush, press conference, July 12, 2007

President Bush is absolutely right. But in a way his admonition to Congress at his press conference last week was unfair. He's correct that Congress can't run a war. But this Congress doesn't want to run a war. It wants to lose a war. Congress can, in principle, achieve this, and the Democrats who control this Congress are doing their best to bring it about.

In the process, congressional Democrats are also doing a good job of re-McGovernizing their party. Last week, 95 percent of Democrats in the House voted in favor of legislation requiring that the United States withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008. The notion that their party is serious about any policy alternative other than getting out and giving up is becoming unsustainable. It may be, though, that calling this the re-McGovernization of that party is unfair to George McGovern--especially as his friends assembled in Washington this weekend to celebrate his 85th birthday. It is worth noting, after all, that Vietnam wasn't nearly as central to U.S. security interests as Iraq--and that McGovern had a coherent, if mistaken, world view that guided his actions in a principled way. So it would be unjust to George McGovern to call these Democrats McGovernites. We'll just call them Defeatists, who are willing to ensure a U.S. defeat for the sake of destroying the Bush administration.

The Defeatist Democrats have lots of support from the mainstream media, most of whom have simply given up on reporting the war or analyzing arguments about the war. Actually, the newsmen who know something, like John F. Burns and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, have produced some terrific reporting. But run-of-the-mill foreign policy and White House reporters have little interest in what is actually happening in Iraq, or in a real consideration of the likely outcomes of different policy options. They're not even reporting what's happening in Washington. They're simply committed to discrediting the war and humiliating the Bush administration.

As for the foreign policy establishment and its fellow travelers in the punditocracy, one might have thought they could be serious about this war--actually analyzing events, engaging in a grown-up debate about the real-world consequences of different courses of action, keeping calm amid the political posturing. Many in the Bush administration who care for their standing in the establishment's eyes have spent an awful lot of time cultivating these masters of nuance and complexity. All for naught. The establishment, like the media and the Democrats, wants to discredit and humiliate an administration that too often (though not often enough!) dared to think for itself, and to act without their permission. They're out to destroy Bush, his ideas, and his supporters, no matter the consequences for the country.

Over the last few weeks, all of these estimable entities--the Democratic party in Congress, much of the media, and the foreign policy establishment--have joined together to try to panic the country, and the Bush administration, into giving up. The story of the past week--an important week--is this: They failed. Many around Bush wobbled. But Bush stood firm. Most Republicans on the Hill stood firm. And, so far as one can tell, the country as a whole pulled back a bit from the irresponsibility of cutting and running.

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Kristol thinks they might have overplayed there hand. There is a sense of breathless momentum that develops to push the left wing agenda of the Democrats in the media that builds and builds until President Bush pulls the rug out from under them. You saw it this spring on earlier votes on the war, the Democrats attempts to get him to throw Gonzales under the bus, etc.

This week was just the latest show and it is interesting to see how the tone changes when Bush makes it clear that they are not successful. It is like the air is let out of the balloon and the stories have a never mind tone.

What is a little different this time is the Democrats and the media finally having to deal seriously with the fact that al Qaeda is in Iraq and al Qaeda claims it is the central front in its war with the US whether Democrats and the media agree with them or not.

Just this week the NY Times put one its best reporters on that story and his honest report did not reflect the headline they put over the story. The fact is al Qaeda is there and it is one of the main focuses of our military effort already in Iraq and the proposals being floated by Democrats and squishy Republicans to redeploy US forces in Iraq will only benefit al Qaeda and will not make our forces or ourselves safer.