Quicksand
By Joseph Sobran
Most of the pundits agreed that President Bush’s televised “surge” speech had failed. It was uninspired, he delivered it without conviction, and it didn’t even produce a slight bump in the polls. The Democrats, no longer shocked and awed, attacked it, and some Republicans joined them, Sen. Chuck Hagel calling it the worst foreign policy mistake since the Vietnam War; few Republicans were hardy enough to support it. Bush himself seemed demoralized as he delivered the speech, as if he didn’t even expect anyone to believe him. It struck me as the weariest hype I have ever seen.
But he hinted that Iran still poses a threat to the United States. Are we back in the “mushroom cloud” phase so soon? Will he dare to widen the war, in a desperate, double-or-nothing bet on fortune? That is of course what John McCain and the neoconservatives hope he will do. Will the Democrats dare to oppose him if he does?
Backers of the war demanded that the Democrats offer an alternative to the Iraq surge; but after all, it’s a lot easier to get into quicksand than to get out of it, and the Democrats aren’t quite bold enough to vote to cut off funding for the war or to demand an immediate withdrawal. That would be politically dangerous. Better to let Bush have his way and take all the heat until he leaves office. If he’s in a hole and wants to keep digging, why try to stop him? So what if he expands the war? What’s bad for the country may be good for the Democratic Party in 2008. The “new direction” Nancy Pelosi promises can wait until then. Meanwhile, any hope of a conservative agenda is in ruins. Bush’s agenda is to fight to the finish — endlessly.
It may be idle speculation to ask, but can Congress declare peace? It gave Bush a vague mandate for his war on “terrorism” — an undefined enemy — and allowed him to fill in the blanks. Bush has taken his constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces in time of war to mean that he is a “decider” who can pretty much define the limits of his own authority.
That way lies dictatorship. The basic idea of the U.S. Constitution, after all, is the rejection of arbitrary one-man rule, and it is no accident that the two presidents the neocons most venerate are the two most dictatorial, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their motto seems to be, “George, be a king!” But most of the country now agrees that if we are doomed to have one-man rule, the one man should be someone other than George W. Bush.
http://www.sobran.com/wanderer/w2007/w070125.shtml