Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Bush

These days, it seems that public disapproval of President Bush is like water to a fish: it is so prevalent and permeating that one hardly notices it surrounding everything. Every day, we suck it in and blow it out.

And if that's true, David Brooks is kickin' it like a fish out of water in this op-ed for the New York Times

He raises some interesting issues, not just about Bush, but about how our own prejudices can end up suffocating our ability to honestly assess the world around us.

5 comments:

Zach Wallmark said...

This was a good piece, and Brooks is right in saying that neither side in the political dialog should stick to their narratives in the face of changing facts.

I would say, however, that calling "the surge" a success is still way premature. Claiming that Bush did something right is saying that the alternative - what he did not do - would have been worse, and I think the jury is still out on that one (nor will it ever convene due to the metaphysical impossibility of knowing what would have happened). Had we continued with the same losing strategy, in all likelihood things would be worse today; but who knows what would have happened if we would have started to pull down troop levels.

We shouldn't discount the fact that violence in Iraq truly is down. But this is due in large part to events and strategies that are both unsustainable and deeply damaging to the country. Many neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed, hence no need for violence anymore; Sunni militiamen are actually being paid by us, the US taxpayers, to not kill Shia; and, of course, there are thousands more troops standing on the corners keeping the peace at the barrels of their AK-47s. Yes, violence is down; yes, tentative signs of greater political reconciliation are coming into view, but I hesitate to call this a successful policy by any stretch of the imagination.

As Frank Rich pointed out in his column last weekend: what sort of a victory is it if we can never leave? Yes, the surge seems to be working in many key regards, but this central problem remains. If it only works because our kids are over there in the heat providing the threat of force, and we're shelling out money to keep them from brawling in the streets, then success is still a long ways off. Despite the gains that the surge has provided, we're still a long ways off from the end of this quagmire.

Ben Batchelder said...

Thanks Mark for the fascinating link, so tantalizingly introduced. Bush-wacking has been all the rage for a while now, and given the amount of pleasure it gives the wackers will likely continue for a long time to come.

This pleasure fest, like most, has its down sides, and not just to the intellectual honesty of its most fervent practitioners. As Brooks relates so well, war- and surge-critics have voluntarily blinded themselves to the significant gains, both military and political, in Iraq, the fruits of a change in strategy driven by a commander-in-chief willing to sacrifice personal popularity for medium to long-term security gains – and, yes, by the hope of salvaging his administration’s reputation the hard way. (It should be recalled that Lincoln and Roosevelt persevered through surprisingly large setbacks – so common to the chaos unleashed by war – and also took years to get the mix of strategy and generals right.)

Granted that Sen. Obama felt obliged to run further to the left of Clinton during the primaries on this all-important issue, and will now have difficulty in tacking back to the more pragmatic center. (Perhaps a long overdue visit to Iraq will allow an eventual climb-down?) Yet the ritualistic denials, by the candidate and his supporters, of the startling progress catalyzed by the surge seem to show a disconnect from reality driven by that unfailing Bush enmity – as if admitting Bush was right on the surge would undermine the critics’ world-view and, somehow, self-worth.

Even our fearless blog-meister Zach struggles with a bit of cognitive dissonance above, and resorts to making that hairiest of old chestnut analogies, by comparing Iraq to the Vietnamese ‘quagmire’ – which is a misleading comparison on so many levels. As the New Yorker might say, Block that analogy! for it risks taking the debate backwards and not forward.

Zach Wallmark said...

Your point is well-taken, Ben, but I feel I need to jump back into the ring to clear a couple things up. (We need more idea sparring at this blog!)

"Quagmire" in my commentary was not a reference to Vietnam but simply a dictionary usage in the "mucky swamp" sense. I do think that Iraq is a mess from which we cannot easily extricate ourselves, and saying that we are stuck in something like a quagmire is appropriate. We are going to have to maintain a strong geopolitical (if not military) presence in that country for years to come.

I think we should also take a moment to distinguish the objections made against the surge on ideological, Bush-hating grounds and those that have legitimate weight. The problem I had with Brooks's piece is that it seems to conflate all criticism of the surge with close-minded liberal Bush bashing. While a lot of this sort of thing has taken place (moveon.org's "General Betray-Us" is a good example), it shouldn't eclipse genuine criticisms of the policy, whether we're making progress or not. The fact of the matter is that violence IS down because of that surge - that is in itself a commendable success. But what I tried to address in the comment is Bush's claim that the surge was the BEST way to proceed. As far as that question goes, I can certainly see the surge being great in the short run, but digging us in even deeper in the region in the long run. The point is, the jury is still out. Proclaiming the victory of a particular strategy is premature at this point.

Furthermore, we have to take into account that polling indicates the vast majority of Iraqis were against the surge - the president of Iraq didn't even support it. If we expect Iraq to ever function as a sovereign nation, we're going to have to start paying attention to what the Iraqi street wants for themselves, and not just impose projects on them from above. The surge is just one in a series of such US-dictated plans (Bremer's de-Baathification being another prominent example). Is it really appropriate for us to send more troops there when they want less?

I am in complete agreement that irrational, gut-level objections to the surge based on an instinctive dislike of Bush and his policies really misses the truth. But defending the surge based on the opposite premise - that all criticism is invalidated by irrational Bush-hatred - is similarly intellectually dishonest. (I'm not claiming that anyone on these pages is doing that, but I sense this logical outcome to Brooks's thesis.)

Ultimately, the question for me is this: is the surge getting us any closer to being able to leave Iraq? I think the answer to that question is highly debatable, whether you like Bush or not.

chris bailly said...

This is a great post for generating discussion. Thanks Mark!

I have a further question to add, which I think is hinted at in the margins of all these comments.

Do we really know the effect that the surge has had?

Yes, violence is down. But you can attribute that to multiple causes: the surge and extra security, pre-surge ethnic cleansing, different methods of tabulating violence, etc.

I'll come out and say that I don't know the answer to why violence is down, although I suspect it is an incredibly complex combination of a lot of factors, the surge included. Partisans on either side tend to want to isolate one factor or another, but as is usually the case, reality is probably far more complex.

Again, we can also not truly know the effect of one policy over another. Like Roosevelt and Lincoln, we are fighting a war in which our leaders must make policy choices and live with the decision. We can't see the Iraq of today with no surge. We can't see the Iraq of yesterday with the Iraqi army left intact. Credit is due Bush for changing strategies in the face of failure. But that is different then saying the strategy is a success or failure.

Lastly, I think what Zach was saying is that unlike Roosevelt or Lincoln, there is really no measure in which to gauge are success. Lincoln wanted to rejoin the union, Roosevelt sought the surrender of Germany and Japan. Iraq is a quagmire in the sense that we have no concrete achievable goals. The best we have is stability, an amorphous goal at best.

I think many people have latched onto leaving as a goal, simply because it is concrete. I count myself as one of those people. In leaving, we can see a tangible gain in stopping the loss of money and American lives. Unlike the Iraqis, we have the luxury of leaving that country. But again, we don't really know if leaving is the right choice. At a level, there may be no right choices anymore.

Ruxton Schuh said...

Pardon me for my dissent, but this whole debate, at least partially, borders on silliness.

Basically, I equate this to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. This issue is like sitting bolt-upright and staring straight at a wall that's projecting shadows of reality, yet the difference here is that people are ignoring what's behind them instead of being rendered incapable of comprehending it. Such is the folly of a human trying to recount history in a linear time scheme. Fact is, you can argue the merits of Bush on the whole issue of the surge until you're blue in the face, the ultimate question is and should be "What the hell are we doing in Iraq in the first place??!!" That's not to say that I've been asleep for the last 5 years, rather I'm saying that I refuse to get caught up in this smoke & mirrors routine when this entire war has been a complete travesty from the start.

If you want a laundry list of why this Brooks article is merely distracting look at the articles of impeachment presented to congress by Dennis Kucinich. The first thing that came to my mind when reading that articles was "What is this trying to accomplish?" Applauding Bush at this point is moot. Basically this is equivalent to rioters throwing a brick through a storefront window, but they manage to sweep the broken glass into a neat little pile amidst looting the place. Please. The surge isn't going to bring back the dead troops or dead Iraqis. The surge isn't going to give the Americans their homes back. The surge sure as hell isn't securing our oil interests in the area. I got an A in English in 6th grade, but that doesn't mean I obtained proficiency with the construction of the language. Giving merit to the surge is like putting a pig in a Vera Wang dress.

In all fairness I can't say I agree too much with certain points of contention either. Iraq is very much like Vietnam. American forces are invading a foreign nation in an effort to clean up a prior botched military campaign (only in this case we're cleaning up America's mess and not France's), they are doing so against the consent of the popular majority, and they are going to war against an ethos. I'm sorry, but you cannot win a war against ideas, whether they be communism or terrorism (see previous articles if you're interested in my opinion on "terrorism"), and the fact that these wars are waged by a nation that wears its First Amendment on its sleeve is ludicrous. Second, I think everyone here gives far too much credit to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mark, I do think you were right in asking people to consider their pre-disposition towards the logic of the issue. I think that is fair to ask anyone, and any honest person is going to analyze a degree of bias that they probably will not like too much. The issue itself is absolutely nothing but a distraction, and really has little to do with George Bush but more with John McCain. If you look at the way the article was crafted it is more apt to be a point of support for John McCain's political decisions as opposed to salvaging a shred of dignity for Bush.