http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/09/triumph_of_the_new_moral_center.php
Triumph Of The New Moral Center
Robert L. Borosage
August 09, 2006
Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America’s Future.
Ned Lamont’s stunning upset of incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary race on Tuesday sends shock waves through the dead sea of American politics.
Lamont did the impossible—this virtual unknown beat in his own party’s primary an 18-year incumbent with universal name recognition, a $12 million campaign war chest and the support of Washington insiders, the punditry and the corporate lobbies.
His victory represents a growing voter revolt against the failed policies and politics of the Bush administration and its congressional enablers, particularly the debacle in Iraq. Until a few weeks ago, Lieberman prided himself on being the president’s leading Democratic ally in touting the war. After his defeat, Democrats will show more backbone in challenging the current disastrous course and more Republicans will look for ways to distance themselves from the president.
Lamont’s victory was propelled by a rising tide of progressive energy—activists who are tired of losing elections to the right and disgusted with cautious politicians who duck and cover rather than stand and fight. Until a few weeks ago, Lieberman exemplified those Democrats who establish their “independence†by pushing off the causes of their own party and embracing the right’s agenda. His voters didn’t abandon him; he abandoned them long ago. After his defeat, incumbents in both parties may begin to listen more closely to their voters and less avidly to their donors.
Lamont’s victory was fueled by a new generation coming into politics with a passion—and organizing over the Web. Over the past year, the Washington establishment has scorned them as extreme and mocked them for failing to win anything. After Tuesday, there will be no more “bring em on†challenges issued to the bloggers.
Most important, Lamont represents a new moral center in American politics – a challenge to the failed status quo and a demand for a new direction that a growing majority of Americans are searching for. Bring an end to the disastrous occupation in Iraq and bring the troops home with honor. Change priorities to invest in our schools, in universal pre-kindergarten, in modern infrastructure. Champion affordable national health care for all. These are not issues from the “edges of our politics,†as Lieberman suggests, but ideas whose time has come.
Lieberman, in a classic sore-loser posture, refuses to accept the verdict of the voters. The man who spent the last weeks of his campaign boasting that he was a good Democrat now announces he’ll form his own party and denounces partisan politics. The man who last week said he had gotten the message and would go to Washington to challenge the president’s policies now says he’ll go to Washington to make common cause with Republicans to “get things done.â€
But his brand of “getting things done†is exactly what Americans are turning against.
He joined with the president in championing the war in Iraq—got that done.
He joined with Republicans and corporate lobbies in passing corporate trade deals that have destroyed American manufacturing and undermined wages in America—got that done.
He joined with conservatives in championing the privatization of Social Security—at least he was blocked there.
He joined with CEOs in defending off the books, stock options that gave CEOs a multimillion-dollar personal incentive to cook the books and raid pension funds—got that done.
He doesn’t get it. The problem isn’t that things aren’t getting done—the problem is that the things he was helped to produce are weakening this country abroad and undermining workers and middle-class families at home.
Lieberman’s sore loser campaign will be well financed by the corporate lobbies he has served. Since he has no new ideas to offer, he’ll run a nasty negative campaign of personal vilification against Lamont, trying to smear him before voters have a chance hear what Lamont has to say.
And that race will be a test for every Democratic leader. Will they come to support Lamont and the new energy, the new ideas, the new moral center that he represents? Or will they offer nominal support but stay away, refusing to challenge Lieberman’s low-road campaign? Their reactions will be a true measure of who is ready to fight for a new direction for this country and who is not.
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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/09/bring_the_war_home.php
Bring The War Home
Robert Dreyfuss
August 09, 2006
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com .
During the Vietnam War, a favorite slogan of the antiwar movement was: Bring the War Home. It was, of course, a double entendre ; first, of course, it was a play on an earlier, more modest slogan (“Bring the boys homeâ€). But it had a more threatening interpretation: that the Vietnam War had so divided the country that it was time to instigate a political war at home.
At this stage it might be too early to say so definitively, but it’s clear that the Iraq War finally seems to be coming home, too. At the very least, the victory of Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman puts the war in Iraq at the very front and center of political debate for the next 12 weeks—until the November elections—and beyond.
The defeat of Lieberman was not, of course, a surprise. It had been anticipated widely among political cognoscenti , who were reading the polls. One by one over the past several weeks, leading Democratic moderates began drifting, like embarrassed Johnny-come-lately’s, into—or at least into the vicinity of—the anti-war camp. Perhaps the clearest indication of that process came when, without much fanfare, the entire Democratic congressional leadership inked their names to a letter to President Bush demanding that a “redeployment†of U.S. forces out of Iraq begin immediately—that is, before the end of 2006. From the letter, which has not, by the way, been widely quoted in the mainstream media:
We believe that a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq should begin before the end of 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces, and force protection of U.S. personnel. … Mr. President, simply staying the course in Iraq is not working. We need to take a new direction.
Signing the letter, besides those who’ve already staked out that position—Rep. John Murtha and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—were some formerly pro-war centrists who must have gritted their teeth while autographing the epistle, such as Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, and Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip.
In any case, what was critically important about the Democrats’ letter, signed by a dozen House and Senate members in all, is that too late—arguably, years too late—the entire Democratic party leadership has opted to demand a withdrawal from Iraq. To be sure, it is a qualified demand, with lots of typical politician-type weasel words. But to criticize the Democrats for not taking an even more militant stance is a quibble. The fact remains that by signing the letter, the Democratic leadership has drawn a line in the sand. On one side are the Republicans, arguing: Stay the course. On the other side, there are the Democrats, saying: Get out. That is a difference that even the most obtuse voter can get a handle on. It sets the stage for a bitter, take-no-prisoners battle over Iraq over the next three months. It is going to get ugly.
The Democrats, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, upped the ante by demanding the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, create a formal National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq by October 1—in other words, in time for the election. Throughout the U.S. intelligence community, there is virtual unanimity that the situation in Iraq is pretty much an unmitigated catastrophe, lurching toward civil war. For that reason, Kennedy knows what they are likely to get: an unsparingly bleak assessment of Iraq that will garner huge headlines and kick the last props out from under President Bush’s strained optimism and relentless stay-the-course obsession.
That the intelligence estimate will be gloomy on Iraq is doubly true because the man charged by Negroponte with putting it together is none other than Tom Fingar, formerly a top official with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It was this bureau that was the most vocal, in the two years before the invasion of Iraq, in arguing that the Pentagon’s assessment of the threat from Saddam Hussein was mostly hot air.
Over the next three months, the Democrats will be vastly aided in their attempts to draw a clear distinction between Bush’s policy and theirs by a key factor: reality. The crisis in Iraq is going to get worse, not better. Following congressional testimony by two U.S. generals that Iraq is perched on the brink of civil war, General George Casey was even more blunt, in an interview with ABC News , though he stumbled over the words while getting them out: “A countrywide, a threat of a countrywide civil war, I think that, I would say, that probably is the most significant threat right now.â€
Indeed. The more the Democrats can argue that the war in Iraq is already a civil war, the stronger is the case for simply getting out: first, because U.S. troops do not want to be caught in the crossfire of a civil war; and second, because if civil war is already underway, it makes nonsense of the argument that the United States has to stay in Iraq to prevent civil war.
For U.S. forces in Iraq, it’s damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t. On one hand, the U.S. occupation army is battling the Sunni-led insurgency, which seems to include more and more of the Sunni establishment with each passing day. During a visit to Damascus, Syria, the Sunni speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mahmoud Mashadani, lambasted the United States. As recorded by Juan Cole, in his Informed Comment blog, Mashadani called his country “Americastan,†and he added:
Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq? Who stole from Iraq? Who humiliated Iraq? Who desecrated Iraq’s holy sites? Who damaged the honor of Iraqi women? It is none other than the … occupation.
The occupation is the first and last cause of the problem, it has overthrown the [former] regime without a plan, it has suppressed the state with no reason, it has led to the resistance and it has infiltrated it, it has brought al- Qaida to Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Shiites are becoming increasingly inflamed over the war in Lebanon, and they are incensed over U.S. actions to suppress uppity Shiite militias, too. Especially those associated with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. When U.S. forces hit a Sadr-linked force earlier this week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (whose Dawa cult party is closely allied to Sadr) said he was “very angered and pained” over the U.S. action. That, after Maliki has led Iraqi politicians in bitter condemnations of the Israeli jihad against Lebanon.
In other words, the United States has managed to anger and alienate both the Sunnis and the Shiites—who, it should be pointed out, are massacring each other at a steady pace.
So the Democrats seem to have the upper hand. A New York Times poll this week showed that Americans continue to oppose the war in large numbers: “56 percent said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal; 33 percent said it should do so even if it means handing Iraq over to insurgents.â€
Some Democrats were miffed by a Times editorial on Sunday that seemed to take them to task for not outlining a more detailed plan for exiting Iraq. The editorial said, in part:
Democrats are embracing the withdrawal option because it sounds good on the surface and allows them to avoid a more far-reaching discussion that might expose their party’s own foreign policy divisions. Most of all, they want an election-year position that maximizes the president’s weakness without exposing their candidates to criticism. But they are doing nothing to help the public understand the grim options we face.
In the strictest sense, the Times may be right. But it is an election season, and the GOP, Karl Rove-led counterattack is going to be a scorched earth one, fueled by tens of millions of dollars in attack ads portraying the Democrats as terrorist sympathizers. It will be war. Having drawn the line, the Democrats cannot flinch. It’s time to bring the war home. Ned Lamont, welcome to the front lines.
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration
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