As to the war, isn't the most important loss for the United States our -- I don't know what to call it -- dignitas? We were the shining city on the hill. Fairness and habeas corpus. Introspective and at least embarrassed at our hypocrisy. Even with the dirty tricks, we came through the Cold War's stalemate, and I think we got a pass in the 1990s. Then after 9/11 we had all but a blank check.
We used to be respected and could use our moral authority alone to move mountains. Now, after Iraq, we may be feared because of our weapons, but the U.S. is being compared to any other country with a corrupt political system.
Where do we go to get our reputation back?
TZ.
You're absolutely right: the loss of American credibility and moral standing because of the Iraq incursion is a devastating tragedy. The damage will take several presidencies or more to heal, but some of it may be irreparable. A whole generation of radical young jihadists has been spawned around the world who see the United States as the Great Satan, an entrenched system of military and cultural oppression that must be attacked by any means.
Bombing the mountains of Afghanistan after 9/11 to obliterate terrorist camps was, in my view, good strategy and proper retaliation. But by stupidly making Iraq (ruled by a tattered despot with decaying infrastructure) the theater of war, the Bush administration has exposed American citizens to danger wherever they live, work or travel for decades to come.
I would like to know, precisely and specifically, why you think the mission in Iraq is unwinnable. What do you believe constitutes a win, and why is that goal is impossible?
David Walton
"Victory"-- a word constantly on President Bush's hopeful lips -- cannot be achieved in an amorphous insurgency or in a vast land with indefensible borders that is splintered among ancient sects and tribes. There is no distinct enemy, only a welter of saboteurs hiding among the population, whose loyalties cannot be assessed by a foreign force embarrassingly lacking elementary knowledge of local culture and languages. Our troops are being asked to convert, pacify and reconstruct even while waging war and hence are constantly being put in exposed positions where they can be killed or maimed with simple roadside devices.
What victory is possible in such a scorpion-filled labyrinth? Bush will just stubbornly let the carnage of brave soldiers and hapless civilians go on until he's helicoptered off the South Lawn of the White House on Inauguration Day 2009. Blood is Bush's legacy.
The liberal hatred of President Bush has had the ironic effect of driving the president further to the right. When Bush was running in 2000, my superiors at the Christian Coalition (I was the "Jewish lawyer" there) kept warning each other, "They're moderates." Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is basically big spending and big government with occasional bursts of conservative-sounding rhetoric. If liberals had not been so hell-bent in hating Bush and opposing him, they might have wooed him over and cut him away from the right-wing. Instead, Bush ended up with nowhere else to go. Liberals hate him, and conservatives are unhappy because of the continued growth of government and spending.
One of the major sins of the Clinton administration was its total failure to adhere to proper procedures. Too much effort was spent on appearances and not enough attention was spent on the details of actually getting anything done. You may strongly disagree with President Bush's policies, but there is no denying that all of his actions have been taken with appropriate attention to the procedural details. How many times have we had "scandals" because of memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel or from Capitol Hill -- memos that only exist because the administration is following the proper procedures for the actions they seek to take. Contrast this with the Clinton administration, where these procedures were ignored and where memoranda were self-serving CYA often prepared after the fact.
If Senator Clinton becomes president, we will see a return of many the same individuals to the executive branch along with all their failings. Do we really want to see Sandy Berger as national security advisor again? For that matter, why is Lawrence Libby being grilled by an aggressive prosecution for allegedly lying about leaks that the White House personnel did not make, when Mr. Berger gets off with minimal punishment for destroying government archive documents and lying to investigators about it?
Hugh Greentree
I appreciate your insider's perspective on the rifts in the conservative base. I agree that liberal hatred of Bush has verged on the irrational and threatens to become counterproductive.
I also agree about the fiasco of Sandy Berger's tenure as national security advisor -- a crucial and ultra-sensitive post for which he had shockingly weak credentials. The nation has paid the price for that botched appointment in our lack of preparation for 9/11 -- whose likelihood was signaled by the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, an ominous episode that the Clinton administration largely ignored.
I was livid about Berger's theft of documents from the National Archives and appalled by Bill Clinton's laughingly blowing it off on the David Letterman show as everyone knowing how "disorganized" Berger's desk was at the White House. Good lord, this was Clinton's high-level appointee! The failure to levy due punishment on Berger for his brazen theft, while the book is regularly thrown at working-class felons, is symptomatic of a corruption in our system of justice that should concern all Americans, regardless of party.
Next page: Do conservatives really see war as the ultimate solution?