A few days ago, Chris Preble highlighted two important Washington Post op-eds in his post on this blog, which Chris called “The Costs of War.” The same day, July 11, Connecticut Representative Christopher Shays held a hearing of the Committee on Government Reform’s Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations. David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, testified on, among other things, the budgetary costs of the war in Iraq. They are quite substantial (about $3 billion a week, he estimated based on a new GAO report).

I wasn’t at the hearing and, frankly, I didn’t know anything about it until I heard David Welna’s story about it the next day on NPR’s Morning Edition. Welna’s story includes shocking examples of partisan rancor and spin — another cost of the Iraq War. I don’t know whether Welna’s exerpts from the hearing were truly representative of the session. But two particular comments stuck out to me.At the hearing on the “Evolving National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” Representative Michael Turner (R-OH) attacked the Democrats: “Something as simple as the War on Terror where we should have full and unanimous support from everyone turns into a litany of political complaints and assaults on the Administration.”

Regardless of your view of the links between the Iraq War and the War on Terror — whether you think we needed to attack Iraq as a logical step in that fight, or you believe that the chaos in Iraq has drawn jihadis and made it a hub of the War on Terror, or you believe that Iraq is primarily a diversion from our main fight against al Qaeda — I think that this comment should strike you as shrill and disengenuous.

It is perfectly reasonable to believe strongly in vigorously fighting the War on Terror and yet still criticize the Administration’s “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” The U.S. government is built on the principle that our elected representatives should discuss and debate the best ways to achieve our national goals; our system is designed for a responsible clash of ideas. We believe that debate yields the best policy in the end. And so we should not hope that every discussion in wartime should be unanimous.
But even more important, Rep. Turner’s statement distorts the Democrats’ positions. It is surprisingly difficult to find Democrats who advocate any substantial changes from our established course of fighting a long counter-insurgency war in Iraq (Rep. Murtha is a refreshing exception, and it has been extremely difficult even for him, with his strong national security credentials, to get his colleagues to engage in substantive discussion of his ideas). More important, as far as I know, there are no Democrats — or important national figures of any stripe — who oppose strong measures to defend against terrorist attacks or, indeed, strong offensive measures to aggressively go after terrorists before they attack. Sure, there is debate at the margin about how far the line between security and American civil liberties should be moved, about what form of trials and standards of evidence should be used when suspects are brought to justice, etc. But debates about means are not the same as debates about ends.

In the NPR story, Welna quoted a Democratic response to Rep. Turner’s comment. Sadly, that response made none of these points. Instead of trying to seem reasonable, painting Rep. Turner as an extremist, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio went overboard on the other side. He attacked the Administration’s “lies” about Iraq. Now I don’t claim personal knowledge about whether Administration representatives have lied — that is, deliberately made public statements that they knew to be false at the time — and I don’t think that Rep. Kucinich has such evidence, either. What we do know is that many of the Administration’s claims have proven to be false as more evidence has come to light, and we do know that the Administration has not acknowledged mistakes and reasonably claimed, for example, that it made the right decisions based on what was known at the time. Some of the time, at least some people in the Administration have behaved badly. But alleging (without new evidence) that the Administration has lied about Iraq is not productive — and does not respond to either the “Evolving National Strategy” or to Rep. Turner’s outburst.

Even if these shrill partisan comments are not representative of the tone at the Congressional hearing, even if the rest of the discussion was actually statesmanlike and substantive, the media story about the Iraq War is far too often one of partisan bitterness (see also this NPR story, and countless others). Maybe the fault lies with what the reporters choose to report. Maybe the fault lies with what interests the public. Or maybe the fault lies elsewhere — perhaps with the actual predominant tenor of the debate among politicians, which I suspect is nasty and low on substance. Regardless, if politicians were more focused on doing the right thing for the country, with acting as elected representatives to make the best policies in the national interest, then even a malicious media (if the media were malicious) or a scandal-mongering public (if the public were truly interested in soap operas rather than good policy) could not find so many examples of bad behavior with which to feed their addictions.

We should expect better from our representatives. In fact, I do expect better.

No related posts.