Shortly after winning the 2004 presidential election, George W Bush boasted that he had saved political capital and that he intended to spend it. And in talking of the growing mess in Iraq, and the culpability of his administration, he said this: “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections”, his meaning being, he made clear, that the American people had demonstrated their satisfaction with his performance by returning him to office.
Well as we all know, what little capital he had left after squandering much of it on a failed effort to privatise Social Security went floating away in the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina or went up in smoke in the increasing chaos that is Iraq. Combined, these disasters have become a metaphor for the utter fecklessness of the Bush administration. To this point, however, he has escaped genuine accountability for the mess he and his Republican Party enablers in Congress have made of governing this country. It is way overdue.
Certainly many of us hoped and believed that the 2004 election would be the time when he was held accountable for his ignorance, his hubris, his unsurpassed incompetence and his intellectual laziness. Well, unfortunately, the disgusting Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Veterans for…what was it? - Oh yeah - Truth, ensured that enough of the electorate saw John Kerry as an unacceptable alternative to give us four more years of Bush. The GOP even managed to retain their hold on both houses in Congress.
Well, as they say, what goes around comes around. The 2006 congressional elections will give us a second chance to get it right and things currently appear bleak for the Republicans. If the elections were held tomorrow the Democrats would almost certainly win the House of Representatives and make serious inroads on the GOP majority in the Senate. Unfortunately, they are not until November, which gives the GOP plenty of time to fund and mount the inevitable campaign to depict Democrats as weak on national defence, cut and run light-weights, defeatist beatniks - well, you get the picture.
The Democrats’ failure in 2004 stems in part from their failure to make it a referendum on Bush and the GOP congressional majority on their myriad failures of leadership governance. The mess in Iraq was already becoming obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Yet Rove and the GOP were able to frame the issue as one in which it would be risky and foolish to change horses in mid-stream in the war on terrorism. Instead of: “how the heck did we get in this mess and who put us here?” it was: “okay this is bad but who is best able to lead us from this point”? Well nobody can accuse the GOP of not being very savvy politically. Not to put too fine a point on it, the American people got it wrong as subsequent events have proved beyond any doubt.
Now we have another chance and we must not muff this one. We hear all the time about the choice we have between withdrawing from Iraq with the attendant risk that it will be torn apart by civil war and possibly become an Islamic fundamentalist republic or, worse, a terrorist haven; and the alternative which is to hang in there indefinitely in the hope that it will emerge one day as a stable and hopefully democratic nation. This last option will inevitably entail the United States continuing to pay a high price in blood and treasure, and to suffer the consequences of a huge commitment of and concomitant wear-and tear on the Army and Marine Corps. It is a monstrous national dilemma, and one that is entirely of this administration’s making. Either option has the very real potential to do enormous harm to our national interest.
This is not the only box into which this administration and the slavishly obedient Republican Congress have placed the country; witness the complete failure to restrain spending whilst affording the richest Americans a succession of tax breaks with the result that the national debt has grown alarmingly in the last six years. With obligations to Medicare and Social Security looming we face a future in which we must enact massive spending cuts or enormous tax increases - or risk long term and harmful damage to our economy if foreigners decide to stop financing our debt binge.
No matter how angry liberals and progressives are with the likes of Senator Maria Cantwell or Joe Lieberman - well okay he’s a special case - we must not lose sight of who is responsible for the depressing domestic and foreign policy outlooks. We invaded Iraq not because of the vote of Maria Cantwell or any Democrat, but because George W Bush decided that it would be so. He was aided and abetted by a GOP that happily painted Democratic opponents as unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. The invasion of Iraq, of course, was a diversion from the struggle against Islamic terrorists not an attack upon it. And as we now know the threat of weapons of mass destruction was an illusion fed by cherry-picked intelligence titbits, distortions and misinformation; which, in any case, ignored the fact that Iraq was already being held in check.
This level of ignorance, stupidity, arrogance and dishonesty cannot again be allowed to pass without the American people making their voices heard. May it be loud and clear come November.
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