The Politization of War

Years from now, when historians look back at the presidency of George W. Bush, the thing he will be faulted for, perhaps more than anything else, is the way he so shamelessly turned war into a partisan political issue.

In the summer of 2002, less than one year after the most traumatic day in modern American history, the Bush White House made the decision to "run on the war." In the days after 9/11, the American people came together; Republicans and Democrats largely put their ideological differences to the side and pledged their support for the war on terror. Overwhelming majorities favored our invasion of Afghanistan, a move that we all agreed was an eminently logical and necessary response to the 9/11 attacks. The world was with us too. The coalition of the willing including just about everyone.

But in the summer of 2002, Bush and his advisors made a fateful decision. They looked around, saw a unified nation, and decided it was time to cash in politically. They decided to turn terrorism and war into political issues and use them to solidify GOP control of Congress. Suddenly, decorated war veterans like Max Cleland found themselves being attacked for being soft on terrorism because they took issue with the labor provisions of the Homeland Security Act. Karl Rove and his surrogates made a point of characterizing any Democratic disagreement with anything as being "soft on terror."

And from that point on, there was no turning back. The GOP was carried to victory by the fumes of a national unity that would soon be completely dried up.

But worst of all, the Bush administration decided that the election season was the perfect time to launch a coordinated public relations campaign designed to gin up support for the launch of a new war, this time with Iraq. The word was sent out and soon every conservative pundit and talking head was discussing the threat posed by Saddam Hussien and the need for immediate action. Not to be left out or seem "unserious," many liberals pundits soon followed suit. Before long, the discussion reached a fever pitch, despite the fact that there had been absolutely no new developments from Baghdad to trigger the sudden calls for invasion. Saddam was the same dictator he'd always been, and he wasn't going anywhere.

On September 23, 2002, Al Gore tried to restore some sanity to the discussion in a speech he delivered in San Francisco. He began by making an obvious point:

To begin with, to put first things first, I believe
that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and
foremost against those who attacked us on
September 11th and who have thus far gotten
away with it. The vast majority of those who
sponsored, planned and implemented the
cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000
Americans are still at large, still neither located
nor apprehended, much less punished and
neutralized. I do not believe that we should
allow ourselves to be distracted from this
urgent task simply because it is proving to be
more difficult and lengthy than was predicted.

Gore then observed:

Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that
America's most urgent requirement of the
moment right now is not to redouble our efforts
against Al Qaida, not to stabilize the nation of
Afghanistan after driving his host government
from power, even as Al Qaida members slip
back across the border to set up in Afghanistan
again.

Rather, he is telling us that our most urgent
task right now is to shift our focus and
concentrate on immediately launching a new
war against Saddam Hussein.

And here's where Gore lets slip another inconvenient truth, a truth that was transparently obvious at the time and at the same time universally ignored:

Now, the timing of this sudden burst of urgency
to immediately take up this new cause as
America's new top priority, displacing our
former top priority, the war against Osama bin
Laden, was explained by – innocently, I believe –
by the White House chief of staff in his now
well-known statement, and I quote, "From an
advertising point of view, you don't launch a new
product line until after Labor Day," end quote.

That particular quote by Andy Card perfectly sums up everything that was wrong with the national debate at the time. It was artificial, contrived, infused with a false sense of urgency. Gore pointedly noted the difference between how Bush was making the case for war and the way his father had a decade earlier.

[B]ack in 1991 President George H.W. Bush
purposely waited until after the mid-term
elections of 1990 in order to push for a vote at
the beginning of the new Congress in January of
1991. President George W. Bush, by contrast, is
pushing for a vote in this Congress immediately
before the election.

The implication was clear and hard to dispute. Whereas his father hoped to remove politics as much as possible from the equation, George W. Bush made a conscious effort to inject politics into the debate. He all but dared Democrats to vote against the war resolution, making it clear that the GOP would use a "no" vote to hammer them over the head on election day.

In his speech, Gore presciently warned us of the consequences of a hasty and politically-timed decision to invade Iraq.

I believe that this proposed foreshortening of
deliberation in the Congress robs the country of
the time it needs for careful analysis of exactly
what may lie before us. Such consideration is
all the more important because the
administration has failed thus far to lay out an
assessment of how it thinks the course of a war
will run, even as it has given free run to persons,
both within and close to the administration, to
suggest at every opportunity that this will a
pretty easy matter. And it may well be.

But the administration has not said much of
anything to clarify its idea of what would
follow regime change or the degree of
engagement that it is prepared to accept for
the United States in Iraq in the months and
years after a regime change has taken place. . . .

And when you ask the administration about
this, what's their intention in the aftermath of a
war--Secretary Rumsfeld was asked recently
about what our responsibility would be for
restabilizing Iraq in the aftermath of an invasion.
And his answer was, and I quote, "That's for the
Iraqis to come together and decide."

Now here we are, almost four years later. Iraq is a mess and we are stuck in a terrible position. If we stay, we may continue to suffer significant casualties in an ultimately futile attempt to keep the country from falling apart. If we leave, we may well trigger a Bosnian-style civil war, complete with widespread ethnic cleansing. This is what happens when decisions about war and peace are decided by political expediency instead of calm, patient deliberation.

Despite the obvious lessons from the Iraq debacle, we once again find ourselves in the middle of a coordinated PR campaign to drum up support for war, this time with Iran. The very same pundits and politicians have begun to ratchet up their rhetoric in an election year. Despite the fact that every reputable intelligence estimate has Iran at least five years away from developing nuclear weapons, we again find the debate infused with a false sense of urgency. We are told that we must "get serious" and we must do so NOW. There is no time for calm deliberation; our window of time to take decisive action is small and fleeting, we are told. This simply cannot wait until after the November election. Sure.

It's hard to imagine a more momentous decision than the decision to wage pre-emptive war, again. The consequences of such an action will be far-reaching and difficult to predict. The fallout may be intense and long lasting. We owe it to ourselves not to be suckered into debating this issue in political terms and within the clarity-defying madness of an election season, particularly when there is no compelling argument for such urgency. War and politics should be kept as far apart from each other as possible.