Daniel Henninger zeroes in on the most vital, but also most under-addressed, implication of the bitter tug-of-war over Harriet Miers's doomed SCOTUS nomination and the so-called "Plamegate" investigation.
At this juncture in the post-9/11 world, however, nothing should more occupy the remainder of Mr. Bush's term, including preoccupations with Supreme Court nominations, than stopping from happening to him what happened to the war presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.The erosion of domestic political support for the Vietnam War was an opposition strategy, a movement, and its success ensured the loss for a generation of America's self-confidence in its military capacity and moral authority. More specifically, it legitimized an American strategy of withdrawal from its commitments, a three-piece-suit version of cut-and-run.
The possibility of Rove and Libby indictments comes the same week that the Iraq War crossed an arbitrary threshold of 2,000 dead--jack-hammered home Wednesday by the New York Times' publication of 995 thumbnail photographs of killed soldiers, portentously titled "The Roster of the Dead." We may assume this was not meant to rally the homefront. The Times' effort to cut its reporter Judith Miller from the herd last Sunday is best understood as reflecting its apparent belief that her WMD stories alone--which is to say the authority of the New York Times alone--permitted the entire Iraq war to happen, smudging the paper's bright and shining legacy of exposing lies in war.
Without doubt, the decision to liberate Iraq by military means put great and unpredictable forces in motion--not merely the jihadists swarming to Iraq to fight America's troops, but also the U.S. and European policy establishments that were in opposition to the Bush-Rice-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz worldview before 9/11.
The only Vietnam analogy appropriate to Iraq is that this opposition's efforts to promote a withdrawal (today euphemized as a "troop draw-down") persists in the middle of a U.S. commitment--even as 2,000 U.S. soldiers die attempting to make that commitment succeed, as millions of Muslims protected by these Americans braved death to vote in Iraq's January election, braved death to write a constitution, braved death to affirm that constitution in a vote this month and now prepare for Dec. 15 elections to form a parliament.
One may legitimately argue that all this has been a "mistake." It is less easy to see what this administration's constant opposition expects would become of these troops and these Iraqis after it had used the Plame affair to push Messrs. Rove, Libby, Cheney and with them the Bush presidency over the cliff.
Nothing is more important than that President Bush preserve sufficient standing with the public to see this commitment through. The Miers nomination threatened that standing, and its withdrawal restores the conservative political support he will need to defend him against daily opposition to his 9/11 presidency.
Still, there is a lesson from the Miers nomination relevant to whether the president succeeds in Iraq and with the policy beneath it. His government has to do a better job of communicating the necessity and the substance of this action. The troops deserve better on this score. Just as the Miers nomination was a mystery and was allowed to remain a mystery, the war in Iraq most of the time has been allowed to drift through the mind of the American public on not much more than al-Zarqawi's news budget for the Western media. Just as the Miers nomination failed because of inadequate explanation, Iraq too may falter for the same reason. It should not.
Indeed, it must not. It cannot. Otherwise, more than 2,000 heroes will have died in vain.
President Bush's attention should be focused on the War on Terror, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Social Security "reform" is a sidetrack, as are highwire judicial nominations and levee reconstruction projects.
His presidential legacy, and all our lives, depend on it.
Posted by Alan at October 28, 2005 01:18 AM