Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq

Voters split over McCain, Obama views on Iraq is an article that has recently appeared in Yahoo! News. Worth reading, it pretty accurately reflects the crazy, mixed up sentiments of voters this year about the war in Iraq, oldstyleliberal thinks.

Clearly, the fact that sizable voter majorities think the war was a mistake does not help Senator Obama all that much. Senator McCain gets high marks for his seeming to be the better military leader, even though (or perhaps because) he vocally supports the war:

"He's more experienced militarily," said Ann Burkes, a registered Democrat and retired third-grade teacher from Broken Arrow, Okla. "And I don't know if I agree with [his] stay-the-course (policy), but I think the good probably outweighs the bad with him, experience-wise." ...

Leeann Ormsbee, a registered Democrat from Waterford, Pa., believes the United States rushed to war, but now does not believe troops should simply withdraw. The 29-year-old self-employed house cleaner says she has never voted for a Republican. She might this time.

"I do believe that he will do better in Iraq," she said of McCain. "Because he's served in the military and he has said we can't just pull out. ... I think we're just kind of stuck with it now and we have to finish."

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse calls these voters "nose-holders."

"They don't like the fact that we're over there, they don't think the decision was the right one, but they understand that if we simply withdraw our troops it would leave things worse off," he said.

The belief of yours truly, oldstyleliberal, is that things will eventually be worse off if we stay. oldstyleliberal believes that sooner or later, war begets war and violence begets vengeance.

Without fail, killing desensitizes the soul — whether one does it or merely witnesses it. And watching your comrades get killed spurs a desire for revenge. Put the two together, and you have a sure recipe for future violence.

The violent future can, however, be delayed. Those Iraqis who would seize power, terrorize their countrymen, and generally exact revenge for the last several years of killing may just be biding their time until a Democratic president enters the White House and cuts U.S. troop strength over there.

Which means that if we cross them up and elect the hawkish McCain instead, there may be a surge of postponed Iraqi atrocities coming to the fore at that time, provoking a President McCain to hit back even harder than ever, thereby stoking the resentment mill even further in Iraq.

War begets war. Violence begets revenge. It is an Iron Law of human behavior.

So Obama is right. We need to withdraw as expeditiously as we can, given the need for preventing the withdrawal itself from provoking additional chaos.

Once we are out of Iraq, we can expect to witness the ghastly sight of innumerable chickens coming home to roost in that country, and being slaughtered ... just as happened in Vietnam after the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Americans such as those mentioned in the article who oppose the war, but also oppose withdrawal, are hoping in vain that something good will happen between now and when we finally do pull the plug ... something that will cancel the balance long overdue for vengeance in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal feels their reluctance to face facts and insist on ending the war will make for a worse outcome, not a better one.

Jim Webb for Veep!

Check out Joe Klein's latest column for TIME, "Getting to Know Jim Webb." Though he won't say so right out loud, Klein thinks Webb, the recently elected senator from Virginia and a Democrat, is the clear top choice as Barack Obama's running mate in the November presidential election.



oldstyleliberal agrees. Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, as a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service." Klein says Webb, in his recent book A Time to Fight, "takes a well-calibrated ... swing at the Bush Administration's naive neoconservative foreign policy — after all, Webb opposed going to war in Iraq in a 2002 Washington Post Op-Ed piece."

I like the fact that Webb could not be more sympathetic to and supportive of those who serve in uniform, those who have so served in the past, their families, and their general culture ... which ties in closely with Scots-Irish working class from which Webb himself proudly hails. My own family's roots are likewise to be found in this slice of the American soil.

I also like something else Klein quotes from Webb's book:

"The ultimate question," Webb writes about Democrats and the military, "is this: When you look at a veteran, what do you see? Do you see a strong individual who overcame the most difficult challenges most human beings can face ... or do you see a victim?" But if some Democrats tend to pity members of the armed forces, the Republican Party "continually seeks to politicize military service for its own ends even as it uses their sacrifices as a political shield against criticism for its failed policies. And in that sense, it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As some of my recent posts have indicated, on Memorial Day Weekend of 2008 I "saw the light," becoming, in my heart, a pacifist. I now oppose the Iraq War, and all wars from this point forward, as being insane. This does not mean, however, that I despise — or pity — the military. Jim Webb may or may not agree with me that we should never fight another war unless we're attacked. But I agree with him that the values of duty, honor, and personal sacrifice which the military stands for are the best things about America and should be revered by its political class, not exploited for the civilian leaders' own twisted ideological purposes.

So I think Barack Obama will have to look long and hard before he'll be able to find a better running mate than Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia.

Polls and the Iraq War

This web page provides a handy-dandy list of a whole slew of polls concerning the Iraq War. This particular blogger, oldstyleliberal, finds they seem to show a lot of disaffection with the war, yet the disaffection does not translate into a prospective rout of John McCain by Barack Obama in the fall election.

John McCain is well-known to support the war, seeing it as part and parcel of the fight for our country's life in the global war on terrorism. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has opposed the war from day one on grounds that it was "dumb" for the U.S. to start it. Their attitudes could not be further apart and still be considered by any stretch of the imagination reasonable. So one might think Obama's antiwar stance, in that it matches that of the bulk of the electorate, would make him odds-on favorite in November.

But, no. Obama may be very narrowly ahead of McCain right now — see Poll Finds Independent Voters Split Between McCain, Obama, with actual Washington Post-ABC News polling data here — but it is not clear that the war dominates the decision-making process voters are going through in lining up behind one candidate or the other in 2008. This is itself odd, I think, since questions of war and peace have historically played big roles in how we elect presidents. (Or am I wrong about that?)

At any rate, it looks as if roughly two-thirds of us continue to feel that President Bush is not handling the war well, and a clear majority feel it is not still possible to achieve victory in Iraq. A slight majority used to want us to bring the troops home in 2009 without waiting for Iraq to stabilize, but in more recent polling that percentage drops to 49 percent, possibly in response to the lower rate of American deaths of late and the consequent increase in hope that Iraq can be stabilized.

Even so, 61 percent in a May 30-June 3, 2008, CBS News poll say Iraq will probably never have a stable democracy.

Blunting the effect of pro/anti war sentiment on the prospective general election outcome is the fact that the roughly two in three Americans who are disenchanted with the war split down the middle on whether all of the troops, or just some, ought to be withdrawn immediately. Clearly, there must be quite a few of us who cannot imagine that leaving the troops in Iraq will ever bring stability, but do not want all the troops taken out of Iraq now.

That seeming contradiction probably reflects a widespread unwillingness to have us look like failures in the eyes of the world, plus a practical appreciation of the fact that a hasty departure would expose our troops to more risk, not less, during any sped up, hence chaotic withdrawal period.

Meanwhile, Democrats are nearly unanimous in opposing the war, while Republicans and Independents break about 2-to-1 in the war's favor. However, though Republicans and Independents support the war in roughly equal numbers, the former are much less willing to have the next president wind the war down than are the latter.

About a third of Americans say the country is safer from terrorist attack due to the war in Iraq than it otherwise would have been, and the number who think deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on us has only very recently begun to decline from roughly that same level to, presently, something more than a quarter of the populace.

It is clear that continuing support for the war depends greatly on the many among us who in their minds connect the war's onset directly to the terrorist attacks on American soil on 9/11. Given that skeptics spared no effort in debunking the Saddam's-links-to-terrorism myth during the early days of the war, it looks as if over a quarter of Americans have simply made up their minds that such "liberal" carping should not be listened to.

Debating the Iraq War?

Ever since this blogger underwent a Memorial Day 2008 conversion to a sort of pure and simple pacifism — in addition to continuing to oppose President Bush's current war in Iraq — he has noticed a strange dearth of op-ed chatter about the war. Not only is the idea that all war is bad well off today's radar screen — nothing new there! — but the chattering classes have gone eerily silent on questions of supporting or opposing the Iraq conflict as such.

I decided to pay a visit to the Opinions area at WashingtonPost.com to see what gives.

Most of the current verbiage I saw thumbnails of was, as expected, about politics: What we can look forward to with the coming Obama-McCain match-up was second to the rehash (will the instant replays never cease?) of the drawn out, supposedly bitter Obama-Clinton slugfest. Doing a Firefox Find on "Iraq" or "war" on the Post web page linked to above turned up exactly zero hits.

I bethought me to look for mentions of Iraq in the archives of various honorable Post scribes. First up was Anne Applebaum. The most recent Applebaum allusion to Iraq seems to have been in a May 13 '08 column on "the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma," wherein she takes a sideways slap at "the damage done by the Iraq war [that] goes far beyond Iraq's borders." Not really about Iraq at all.

I skipped David Broder, as his beat is domestic politics per se.

Richard Cohen seems to have mentioned Iraq but twice in recent months. McCain in the Mud has it that "McCain supports the Iraq war. But Iraq is still a mess." Ohh - kaaay. That settles that. Clinton in the Wilderness reveals that Clinton "offered a weak and disingenuous defense of her Senate vote in support of going to war in Iraq." Thin gruel, both of these.

Jackson Diehl has two recent pieces mentioning Iraq. The main references therein are to:

• Pundits and bloggers [who] have seized on the proposal as proof that McCain, like George W. Bush before him, is in thrall to the "radical neocons" who allegedly authored the war in Iraq.
• The rockets fired from Gaza and from Sadr City [being] two prongs of an offensive aimed at forcing the United States out of Iraq, putting Israel on the defensive — and leaving Iran as the region's preeminent power.

OK. At that point I got tired of trying to avoid stepping in "all" the incidental references to Iraq, however infrequent even these seem to have been, and went looking for just one column by someone, anyone, that addresses Iraq square on. I found an April 11 piece by E. J. Dionne Jr., Turning No Corners, which is almost on topic. Actually, its topic is not the war per se, pro or con, but rather the way that supporters and opponents of the enterprise talk past each other:

For supporters of the war, the primary issue is Iraq itself and what will happen if we leave. For the war's opponents, the focus is on how the conflict in Iraq is sapping our energies, weakening our military and diverting our attention from our interests elsewhere in the world.

Notice that opposition to the war is, per Dionne, not grounded in the war's merits or lack thereof, but in the supposed sheer impracticality of continuing to inject our ever more thinly stretched military forces into Iraq with no end date in sight.

No one today is coming right out and saying that this war should never have been fought. No one is courageous enough to say we simply ought to wrap it all up and bring the troops home now, because they oughtn't be there in the first place. No one wants to be labeled a peacenik.

Thus there is no real, ongoing debate over the war as such. To which my reaction can only be, "What's wrong with this picture?"

The Solidarity Sentiment

As I have been indicating in recent posts, I have become convinced that "war is not the answer" — not any more, not in today's world. It is accordingly of great concern to me that not many of my fellow Americans seem ready to denounce the war in Iraq in no uncertain terms. The "antiwar" Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive, Senator Barack Obama, has not engaged in ringing rhetoric against the war, by any means. Meanwhile his opponent, Senator John McCain, is at least as much of a hawk as President Bush is.

The dominant sentiment in this country seems to run as follows. The president, as commander-in-chief, made a judgment call in the wake of 9/11 that U.S. troops had to be committed indefinitely in Afghanistan, to harry Al Qaeda, and also in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. The justification for the latter involvement turned out to be ill-founded, perhaps, but at the time almost all of the present opponents of the Iraq War (with the conspicuous exception of Obama, who was not yet in Congress) concurred that Bush ought at least to be given authority to go to war if necessary.

Once he had been so authorized by Congress, he went ahead and invaded Iraq. We can argue about whether he was right or wrong, about what his real intentions were, about whether he was totally honest with the American people, about whether this war can ever be won, etc., etc., etc. What we cannot argue about now is that our troops are there, in Iraq, in harm's way right now. Many of them have sacrificed lives, limbs, physical and mental health, marriages, and other less tangible things. The mission is not yet accomplished, and more valiant sacrifice remains to be made. The last thing we at home ought to do now is pull the rug out from under our troops.

Keeping faith with the troops is job one of the patriot today ... so the story goes.

When a duly authorized commander-in-chief sends troops into danger, even if his judgment is and was flawed, we all henceforth need to suck it up and stay the course, however unlikely the chances of ultimate success may seem. To cut and run now guarantees that all the sacrifices made to date will have been in vain.

Once the bleeding and dying have begun in a war, any war, we at home must have infinite patience. If we back away hastily, we are in effect spitting on the graves of the 4,000+ who have died while carrying the American flag into peril in Iraq.

Solidarity with the troops is thus the gripping hand when it comes to sentiment about the Iraq War, for many Americans today — even those who tell pollsters of their private doubts about the purposes and justifications of that war. On the one hand, spreading democracy around the globe sounds like a good idea. On the other hand, Iraq doesn't seem ready for it. Eliminating Saddam's WMD threat was necessary; yet, was there really any threat? Saddam was, or was not, in collusion with America's mortal enemy, Al Qaeda.

Debate between these two outlooks would ordinarily be understandable, even healthy. But there is that third, gripping hand to take into consideration: the need to support the troops. Undercutting the commander-in-chief by attacking his motives and challenging his reasoning only prolongs and intensifies the danger they face every hour of every day.

That's the dominant motif in how many patriots see the war. This blogger understands it, and even though he doesn't personally subscribe to it, he realizes that it is the prime impediment to any hopes he may have for an effective peace movement to arise that will push this country away from war. Solidarity with those in uniform who bleed on our behalf is always an honorable and noble point of view. To ask people to insist on peace seems accordingly to be asking them to behave dishonorably and ignobly.

I also recognize that today's widespread solidarity sentiment is being advanced as a beautiful way to try to make amends for the shameful lack of solidarity with returning soldiers many citizens exhibited during and after the Vietnam War.

How can one argue with such a sense of duty and obligation and honor and nobility? By its very nature, it transcends pro-and-con argumentation. It repudiates reasoned discourse and silences philosophical debate ... which is a large part of its appeal. It can be a way of coming together behind the Man in the Driver's Seat and putting mere ideological disputes in the back seat or trunk, where they belong in time of war.

How to Work for Peace?

In Let there be peace on earth ..., and then in ... and let it begin with me, I told of my recent peace conversion. A PBS Memorial Day celebration, broadcast from the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and intended as a paean to staunch patriotism, included the reading of a series of letters about what the war in Iraq has done to two American military families, taking the life of one husband and nearly that of the other, causing a newborn daughter to never be able to know her father, bringing untold sadness and misery to the wives of the two soldiers ... all this drove home to me that not only this Iraq War but all wars are insane.

But how do I seek peace and pursue it ... meaningfully ... in today's environment?

Is there actually a peace movement today?

According to this section of a Wikipedia article, there is. But reading it and following the links contained therein convinces me that most of its member organizations have main agendas other than peace qua peace, such as libertarianism or the environment or gay rights or radical politics. I resist utopian or ultra-ideological approaches to peacemaking instinctively. It is as if their proponents are saying that we can't have peace until we have a perfect world ... which I think we will never have until we are all perfect people.

Isn't there a more practical way to work for peace?

Besides, I personally feel the basic impetus for peace comes from a gut-level antipathy to war that bypasses all argumentation and nuanced reasoning.

This past weekend I attended a play at a local repertory theater, In The Heart of America, by Naomi Wallace, a searing indictment of war that depicts imaginary (or are they?) atrocities in the Iraq War superimposed with not-so-imaginary ones from Vietnam (think Lt. William Calley and Charlie Company's massacre at My Lai). I was accompanied by a woman friend who was raised in a military family, lost a husband in Vietnam, and would like to be thought of as true to the red, white, and blue ... but who opposes this war and this President.

In our discussion after the play, she told me she'd felt like she was being torn in two. On the one hand, it was hard for her to resonate with the anti-military, antiwar thrust of the play. On the other, she knew that the brutality laid at the feet of the warrior characters was an honest reflection of reality.

I told her about my peacenik conversion on Memorial Day weekend, about how I now see all war — even the so-called "good wars" — as insane.

I went on to present a case for believing that it's an illusion to put different wars in separate cubbyholes, according to how "good" or "bad" they seem to be. I didn't think of alluding to the image at the time, but upon reflection what I should have told her was that every war sows dragon's teeth that grow into new warriors destined to clash in the future.

World War I set the stage for World War II, which set the stage for the Cold War and fears of nuclear Armageddon, which engendered the Vietnam conflict. The "good" (in my estimation) war by which Holocaust-decimated Jews forced their way into their new and rightful home in Palestine, has led to endless bloodshed. Etc., etc., etc.

The "good" wars such as WWII lead people to believe that war can be right and just and honorable.

The "bad" wars such as Vietnam lead patriots to blame a failed war's opponents for "aiding and abetting the enemy" — implying that, next time, job one is to marginalize or silence opposition.

Either way, there will always be a next time. There will never come a time when "war is not the answer."

For war to end, conflict must be resolved peaceably. Diplomacy must be given every chance to work. Aggression must be fended off regretfully, as a last resort. But most of all, people must lose their taste for war.

That happened in Europe following WWII. A continent whose soil has historically been drenched with blood beat its swords into plowshares. Movements of the human spirit away from war are possible.

What would it take to have one here?