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?"