So Much For Pushing Back

Not all of the center-right commentary regarding the war over the past week has been directed at the seditious Left. The recurring theme of George Bush's "New Tone" fetish and the crippling self-handicap it has inflicted upon his Administration's public relations efforts has also continued to garner growing attention - in tandem with the frustration of the GOP grassroots.

Daniel Henninger touched one aspect in the Wall Street Journal on Friday:

The Administration, inadvertently, may be contributing to the problem [of falling public support for the war]. In its push-back week, the President and others have cited prewar Democratic statements of belief that Saddam in fact had WMD, leaving listeners to conclude that Saddam duped everyone. This too undermines belief at the margin that any of that WMD stuff is very real, or a direct threat.

Here is one man's view of why we are in Iraq: We are trying to democratize this country so they don't try to kill us. That Iraqis should "get their freedom" is genuinely good and desirable. But I wish President Bush would say more often that Iraqi democratization is in our raw self-interest. It doesn't much matter to me whether the country we democratize is Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria. The theory that democracies don't attack other democracies is as strong as such notions get, and what the world most needs now is a new, large Islamic democracy. A democracy, however "imperfect," is less likely than an authoritarian state to detonate a nuclear device in someone else's territory.

This gets back to a previous White House error, the Colin Powell-pushed decision to go back to the UN for one more try at weapons inspections, which made the WMD justification paramount in the immediate pre-war debate in lieu of emphasizing Saddam Hussein's numerous connections with al Qaeda, which would have reinforced the connection with the greater GWOT in the public consciousness. As well, of course, as needlessly delaying our invasion for six months, giving Saddam ample time to evacuate his WMD stockpiles to Syria. Had the President taken the alternative path, the whole "BUSH LIED!!!!" false meme, weak as it is, would have been even more difficult to engineer, and public support proportionately more difficult for the Left to erode.

In last Wednesday's Weekly Standard, Joel Engel also highlights the President's perplexing passivity:

The man who positioned himself as the anti-Chamberlain has nonetheless allowed his presidency to be hijacked by appeasement. For two years, he appeased those who shouted ever louder that he lied about why we went to war in Iraq. At first, no doubt, the President saw those claims as too ridiculous to merit any kind of response; doing so would've seemed beneath the office.

But in not reacting, as President Clinton used to do almost daily to his political adversaries, President Bush has allowed the Big Lie chorus to drown out the rest of the country. It's gotten so loud that polls now show nearly half the populace believing our President can't be trusted. Which is of course why he and his advisers have at last gone on the offensive, pointing out that his critics in Congress saw the same data he saw and yet voted to grant him their blessings to send out the troops. [emphasis added]

Thank you, Mr. Engel. Also Jim Geraghty, who devotes an entire NRO column to the same subject. I've been saying that for two and a half years. Nice to see, finally, that I am no longer bitching into a vacuum by my lonesome.

The noted Jed Babbin blogged one sentence Friday that completed the trifecta of the White House's self-inflicted war-related PR woes:

If we were fighting this war to win it - instead of to not lose it - former Marine Jack Murtha would not be saying it's time to throw in the towel. [emphasis added]

I think Babbin is cutting Murtha far too much slack. But the contention that the Bush Administration is essentially fighting half a war is another lonely equinoid I've been flogging for many moons. Finishing the job in Iraq still leaves Syria and nuclear Islamist Iran to be dealt with, and the twelve year prelude to Operation Iraqi Freedom ought to provide all the evidence necessary to conclude that nothing short of U.S.-led invasions will remove (or "disarm") these two murderous terrorist regimes.

Once again, by failing to cast Iraq in the context of the overall GWOT, the President has made making the case for these additional necessary military campaigns prohibitively difficult. After blitzkrieging across a country the size of California in three weeks with barely over a hundred fatalities, we've since sat there for over forty-four times that long and incurred nearly twenty times that many additional deaths strangling handfuls of metaphorical sand. To be sure, we are winning - our troops, as they always do, have adapted to the nature of this breed of conflict brilliantly and with lethal effectiveness, and as a result Iraq has a democratic constitution and will elect its first parliament next month, and its security forces are on a pace to complete the take-over of Iraq's self-defense responsibilities within the year - but however true it is that we are winning and getting the job done over there, and however many times the Bushies reiterate that stablizing and democratizing Iraq is the "plan," it still gets drowned out by the DisLoyal Opposition's relentless, mindlessly vicious, despicably dishonest Bushophobic smears and policy fabrications. And that is a function of the President's obstinate unwillingness to engage his political enemies and marshal the overpowering contextual arguments for not just securing Iraq but rolling the war forward to her two hostile neighbors, without which the GWOT cannot be brought to a victorious conclusion.

Completing the sweep of the "Arab crescent" (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan) is the true answer to the question of what our "exit strategy" needs to be. And it seems to me that the White House has less and less to lose by employing such "with the bark on" candor.

Instead, today Dubya gave us this retreat into insipidity:

After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy.

"People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq," Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were "reprehensible."

The President also praised Representative John Murtha, D-PA, as "a fine man" and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible....

"I know the decision to call for the immediate withdrawal of our troops by Congressman Murtha was done in a careful and thoughtful way," the President said. "I disagree with his position."

{*sigh*} What can I say? His enemies are obsessively determined to rip out his political entrails, and George Bush appears content to bare his midriff and let them do it. I can't even get that worked up about the press mischaracterization of Bush's and Cheney's "push-back" comments last week, which did not call "war critics" reprehensible, but applied that label very narrowly and specifically to the ferocious character assassination directed at the President and Vice President. While appropriate push-back does not necessitate slashing personal assaults in return, it does require the retraction of such gracious generosity of spirit that attributes thoughtfulness and careful, sober deliberation to a raving extremist demand for betrayal of the Iraqi people and retreat into a national suicide that presumes the consequent carnage will never touch the advocate or anybody he holds dear.

The only thing I can fathom is either the White House has concluded that a week of "push-back" culminating in the House's ritual slaying of the Murtha "proposal" is enough to offset two and a half years of an opposition "push" that will not abate any time soon, or they are running away from the favor House GOPers did for them and into the arms of the suddenly "bipartisan" (bipolar is what I would call it) ex-Marine:

Murtha told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday he hoped the Administration would take his proposal seriously and the President would "get a few of us to the White House and talk to us about this very difficult problem which the whole nation wants to solve with a bipartisan manner."

I feel another group hug coming on. Will the Secret Service make Murtha and his colleagues leave their metaphorical long knives at the front door?

Sh'ya, right.