‘Centrist’ Democrats Want It Both Ways

Sometimes it's great to be wrong. When the Democrats took the House and the Senate—contrary to my published expectations—I breathed a sigh of relief. So what if James Webb is a pulp-fiction-writing former Reaganite. The senator-elect from Virginia and his Democratic colleagues have pledged renewed scrutiny of the Iraq catastrophe, and that's reason enough to celebrate.

Then again, was my pessimism so misguided? I wanted the Democrats to win so they might get us out of Iraq, but I thought that they would fall short because of their steadfast refusal to condemn the war with a unified voice. Too often during the campaign, I couldn't tell the difference between the Democratic and the Republican positions on Iraq.

Take the race in Indiana's 2nd District, where Joe Donnelly, the Democrat, unseated the incumbent Republican, Chris Chocola. During one of their debates, Donnelly explained his position on Iraq as follows: “What we need is leadership in Washington that is as good as our troops. We can't walk out of Iraq. We have to stabilize that country, and we have to win.” Sounds like “stay the course” to me.

Now, a month into the new Democratic majority, it's possible to conclude that Americans voted for oversight—and the more distant hope of withdrawal from Iraq—without fully understanding how pro-war (or if you prefer, anti-anti-war) the opposition party really is.

To analyze this paradox it's necessary to consider the work of Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.-Ill.), the hatchetman for Bill and Hillary Clinton and boss of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emanuel labored hard to keep strongly anti-war candidates off the Democratic line and slate Iraq equivocators instead.

Emanuel's most publicized recruit was Tammy Duckworth, the former Army helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq. With national-party backing, Duckworth defeated the more anti-war Christine Cegelis in the primary in Illinois's 6th District (Senator Clinton's native grounds). But despite her martyrdom, Duckworth's cautiously critical position on Iraq (“we can't just pull up stakes and create a security vacuum”) wasn't enough to defeat the Republican Peter Roskam in the general election.

Of the 22 Democratic candidates initially backed by Emanuel and his sponsors in the Clinton machine, only one, Peter Welch in Vermont, favored speedy withdrawal from Iraq. Welch won easily. Of the other 21, only 8 were victorious last month. And one of Emanuel's original picks, Steve Filson, didn't make it past his anti-war primary opponent, Jerry McNerney, who prevailed decisively over the incumbent Republican in California's 11th District.

Before the election, Emanuel and his Senate counterpart, Charles Schumer, pleaded “pragmatism”—that the Democrats couldn't be seen as the party of “cut and run” if they wanted to attract “moderate” voters. After the election, Emanuel made a quick costume change, and brazenly retailed a story to The New York Times that portrayed him as the architect of a “brilliant” strategy that exploited the mounting anti-war sentiment in the country.

Under the headline, “Democrats Turned War into an Ally” the Times's credulous political reporters parroted Emanuel, saying that “the Democratic strategy of running against the war, which would have seemed impossibly risky three months earlier, when the White House had urged its candidates to embrace the war, was encouraged by poll after poll, not to mention regular reports of American casualties.”

Impossibly risky? What nonsense. Polls showed majority support for withdrawal in early August, and anger over Iraq dates back much further. That's what encouraged long-shot candidates like Webb to challenge entrenched, pro-war incumbents.

Besides, if Emanuel and the Democratic caucus have recognized the merits of opposing the suicidal American occupation of Iraq, then why did they smash John Murtha's bid to become majority leader? Last year, Murtha courageously broke ranks with his party's establishment by calling for a rapid pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq (he cleverly calls it “redeployment”), but his initiative attracted little congressional support. Even so, as a Pentagon insider and Marine Corps veteran, Murtha cut a high profile in the war debate, so voters aiming to protest Iraq may well have mistaken the Pennsylvania Democrat's position with his party's position.

Following Murtha's defeat, the next House speaker, the increasingly anti-war Nancy Pelosi, was pilloried in the press for backing Murtha against Steny Hoyer, an early supporter of Bush's Iraq folly. Evidently taking its cue from Emanuel, The New York Times's editorial page declared that because of his near-indictment in the Abscam scandal, “Mr. Murtha would have been a farcical presence in a leadership promising the cleanest Congress in history” and tut-tutted that Pelosi “has managed to severely scar her leadership.”

Received wisdom is a bipartisan taste, and right-wing columnist John Podhoretz was also happy to take the Emanuel feed, calling Murtha in The New York Post Pelosi's “sleazy born-again-peacenik buddy” and arguing that the Democrats won Congress “in spite” of Pelosi and her anti-war allies. “Rather, [the Democratic victory] was the handiwork of Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who recruited the right candidates, raised money for them and made sure they knew what themes were working, according to Democratic polls.”

I think that Murtha would have weathered the Abscam video tape (after all he did turn down the proffered bribe), especially if it was contrasted with the corrupt awarding of vast amounts of money to Halliburton and the other sleazy defense contractors currently looting Iraq. And Podhoretz is simply wrong on the politics: Emanuel's batting average, 9 for 22, doesn't justify his crowning as the mastermind of victory. You could just as easily say the Democrats won in spite of Emanuel.

Of course, House Democrats haven't suddenly become Puritans. A bigger reason for the hostility to Murtha is that he meant what he said about leaving Iraq and would have quickly forced the issue come January when the 110th Congress convenes. For now, the “centrist” Clinton wing controls the party's agenda and wants to have it both ways—responsible critics who support the president's alleged mission of democracy building in Baghdad.

Things are worse in the Senate. The brightest hope for the anti-war Democrats was Ned Lamont's insurgent candidacy, which nearly knocked out Bush's loyal war ally, Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Here I was wrong again, and this time I am sorry. I thought Lamont would carry not only anti-war Democrats, but also fiscally conservative Republicans appalled by the sheer cost of Iraq.

Unfortunately, collusion between the national Republican Party and a significant minority of the Democratic Party in Connecticut rescued Lieberman and, for the time being, Bush's war policy. In a 51-49 Senate, Lieberman holds the balance of power on Iraq, since he can always threaten to switch to the Republicans and throw control to Dick Cheney, who as vice president can vote to break ties.

The New York/Washington power elite, dominated by Bush and the Clintons, doesn't have the guts or the honesty to admit that Iraq is hopeless and that U.S. soldiers are being killed and mutilated for nothing more than Bush's vainglory. The power elite's spokesman, the champion equivocator and ace sloganeer Thomas Friedman, provides the purest distillation of the current conventional thinking on Iraq. The other day, The New York Times's star columnist was still clinging to the fantasy that America could have “properly occupied” Mesopotamia and even now could send more troops and “crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it.”

Friedman and many Democrats haven't figured out that lots of Iraqis view America as a dark force of colonialism and don't want our version of “progressive politics.”

Friedman apparently doesn't even remember that Iraq was once a British colony, since he blames the present chaos on “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Ba'athist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Nothing about the Sykes-Picot (1916) carving up of Syria and Iraq by the British and French; nothing about the destabilizing British practice of divide and rule that pitted Sunnis against Shi'ites, Arabs against Kurds; and nothing about Washington's support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and '80s.

As a senior Democratic senator told me last week in Washington, with the Democrats divided the only politician who can end the American role in the war is the executive, George Bush. That means we're a long way from leaving Iraq, no matter what the voters want, no matter how loudly the Democrats celebrate their victory.

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