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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
Top Democrats to Voters: Enough Already,
Now Shut Up!
"We've
Got a War to Run!"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Let's go first to that moment of good
cheer on the morning after. Horrible senators like Allen and
Burns lost narrow races. The Republicans got a pasting. A man
who called Alan Greenspan "a political hack" and George
Bush "a liar" will be Senate majority leader. A woman
elected to Congress with the help of thousands of San Franciscan
homosexuals, some of them married by Mayor Gavin Newsom, would
be Speaker. Who wouldn't want Harry Reid instead of Bill Frist,
or Nancy Pelosi instead of fatty Hastert?
It's also the role of elections
in properly run western democracies to remind people that things
won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You
can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers
expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done. Nowhere was\
there an item on the Democrats' "must do" list saying
"Reverse plunge towards fascism. Rescind Patriot Act. Dump
the Military Commissions Act. Restore habeas corpus and the Bill
of Rights." Pelosi made haste to say: impeachment is off
the table.
"Bold new vision"
these days means Pelosi pledging a drive to notch up the minimum
wage. I don't know about the vineyard, hotel and restaurant that
Pelosi co-owns, but the effective minimum wage here in Humboldt
country, northern California, is about $10 an hour, which is
what you have to promise a young person to mow the yard. The
pay-out rises rapidly to $13 an hour if you want to buy the tyke's
loyalty for return visits. Maybe on some slave plantation in
southern Florida attainment of the federal minimum wage is part
of the American Dream , but elsewhere we have to talk about a
Living Wage, which is something altogether different.
But who cares! No one believes
the Democrats are ever going to mess with the system, and that's
not why the voters put them back in charge of Congress. They
want America out of Iraq. Pronto, just like Rep Jack Murtha said
it should, this time last year. To her credit and the chagrin
of the Washington Post as well as Fox News Pelosi backed Jack
Murtha against pro-war Steny Hoyer to be House Majority Leader
and said that Jane Harmon shouldn't chair the House Intelligence
Committee.
A couple of days later the
House Democratic caucus sent Hoyher cantering home 149-86, with
Hoyer cheered on by the Washington Post, which ran nasty stories
about Murtha; also by the New York Times which ran two dreadful
stories by Michael Gordon saying this was not the time for the
US to leave Iraq.
So at most you can reckon
there are 86 antiwar votes on the Democratic side of the aisle
in the new House of Representatives. Over on the senate side,
Harry Reid, who'd been calling for "redeployment" of
US troops out of Iraq "within the next few months"
told his fellow Democrats that the issue of what to do in Iraq
shouldn't be raised till James Baker and his Iraq Study Group
issue their report.
Optimists somehow imagine the
Baker Report will explode excitingly under the war's partisans
and blow them sky-high. It'll do nothing of the sort. There'll
be paragraphs of soggy language about the promise of democratic
governance and the rule of law in Iraq, raised fingers of warning
about the perils of failure, acres of statesmanspeak about the
need for multilateral involvement. Probably, Baker and Co think
the US should quit Iraq, but can't think of a way of accomplishing
this without jump-starting charges across the next two years
that America is cutting and runnng and is this any way to run
an Empire? McCain's saying that already.
There is a ferocious battle
in the offing and the swift rebuff to Pelosi and Murtha is not
an encouraging straw in the wind. On the one side is the majority
of Americans sickened of the war in Iraq, who spoke clearly on
November 7. Their prime institutional ally is the uniformed military
which was against the war from the start, and which gave Jack
Murtha the briefings that emboldened him to take his stand last
year. Their most plausible presidential candidate, Russell Feingold,
has just said he won't run for the nomination.
On the other side is the massed
legions of cold war liberalism, of whom the notorious neo-cons
now denouncing Bush and Rumsfeld -- are but one battalion.
Remember the origins of the neocons, as shock troops of the
Israel lobby. Back in the mid-70s Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol
, Albert Wohlstetter and the others saw the US facing impending
defeat in Vietnam, and feared that the McGovernite peaceniks
would rot the resolve of the Democratic Party to stand behind
Israel. So they fanned out into the Committee on the Present
Danger, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and stoked
up the furnaces of the new cold war and greased the wheels of
the Reagan campaign.
The apex neocons are a pretty
discredited lot these days but there are legions like them spread
across the nation's think tanks and policy institutes, all imbued
with exactly the same fears that reverberated across the Wall
Street Journal editorial page, Commentary, and the New Republic
a generation ago: that America's "resolve" will soften;
that there will be accommodation with Iran; that Israel will
be abandoned. And in fact such fears are now more vivid. Thirty
years ago the weight of the Israel lobby wasn't being excoriated
by mainstream professors from Harvard and Chicago. Thirty years
ago respectable professors like Tony Judt weren't publicly pillorying
the Anti Defamation League. Thirty years the name of Israel,
blowing apart children in Beit Hanoun and Gaza didn't stink in
as many nostrils as it does today.
So the stakes are very high,
and the party of permanent war represented at its purest
distillation in the form of senators like Joe Biden and congressmen
like Rahm Emanuel are regrouping for a counter-attack, their
numbers refreshed by a phalanx of incoming blue dogs, ranged
against the 60-80 "out now" Democrats. You think
pro-war Tom Lantos one of the most rabid Zionists in Congress
-- will be an improvement on antiwar Jim Leach as chair of the
House International Relations Committee? The Democratic foreign
policy establishment cannot and will not tolerate the notion
of Cut and Run in Iraq. Expect the Israel lobby to say, post
November 7, "We're back, stronger than ever!" Expect
reassertions of the essential nobility of the attack that ousted
Saddam Hussein, a deprecation of the destruction of Iraq as a
society, a minimization of the outrages committed by US forces.
Expect a fierce campaign
spearheaded by the Democrats and the surviving neocons, to wage
a "better" war, evocations of the bloodbath that would
accompany "over-hasty" us withdrawal (weird: your 2003
attack triggers the killing of maybe half a million and you
claim anti-bloodbath credentials?)
Expect a presidential campaign
waged among warmongers, from Clinton through to McCain by way
of Giuliani. The voters spoke up, but that's the last chance
they'll get, at least at the ballot box, for another two years.
Top Democrats to voters: Okay. Enough already. Now shut up!
In a few weeks we could be looking at Lieberman, Obama and Clinton
holding a joint press conference and saying that no military
option should be left off the table when it comes to Iran. They
have said it often enough already. Ranged against them will be
the peaceniks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and maybe
Robert Gates, though that man is as slippery as an eel. Hagel-Edwards
in 2008! (Liz Edwards of course.)
Footnote: An earlier version
of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went
to press last Wednesday.
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