Liberal Pundits Lost

Mass confusion seems to have afflicted several liberal journalists who are currently trying to get some footing on the crumbly cliff that is our Iraq policy.

The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because -- unlike many leftists -- they understand exactly what this war is about.

-- The New York Times

"Ending the occupation now" is not just an idea that will never see fruition, it's a bad, irresponsible, naïve one that would have disastrous consequences if it were carried out.

-- AlterNet

In conceiving of Iraq exclusively as Bush's venal adventure, Saturday's antiwar speakers, like many Democrats and progressives, left no affirmative role for liberals in resurrecting that broken country.

-- Salon

The underlying message -- issued from pundits at Salon, AlterNet and the New York Times -- is clear: Maybe it was alright to oppose the war before it started, but by now you should have realized that we're committed to a basically benevolent, albeit flawed, occupation that is trying, in the words of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, "to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world," and if we don't Get It Right we will be blowing an historic opportunity.

But is that necessarily a bad thing? Because if you scrutinize the thinking of the hawks and neoconservatives, the opportunity we are blowing is to install a pro-Western puppet regime and permanent U.S. military bases in one of the most important Arab countries. For liberals to whitewash this under the cover of helping civilian Iraqis is to be willfully ignorant of the larger stage upon which this whole play is being acted out. Pro-occupation liberals and conservatives have completely different underlying motives for forcefully remaking Iraq -- and only one of them is in power. And motives affect results.

Yet, their best efforts to micromanage the occupation from afar, including detailed prescriptions for what the Coalition Provisional Authority needs to do before it can come home, miss the point: The current Iraq crisis is much less about the CPA being dominated by what one anonymous CPA'er caustically told Newsweek was America's "C-Team," and much more about the faulty, cynical premises that the occupation is based upon.

Part of this confusion stems from conflating, whether deliberately or not, reconstruction with occupation. Ending a U.S. occupation would inevitably be followed by some effort, however flawed -- and let's not romanticize the competency of the UN -- by the international community to transition Iraq to self-rule. The United States, as the world's most powerful and wealthiest country, would inevitably have a lot of say and bear much of the burden of supporting such a program, financially and perhaps militarily -- but it would not be directly in charge. To attack the slogan "End the Occupation Now" because it doesn't explain what would happen after is to demand protesters attach addendums and footnotes to their signs.

Friedman insists that while Bush is otherwise "radically conservative," Iraq "is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched -- a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world." A revolution? Maybe by proxy. And does this mean Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer are the Jefferson and Washington of the New Iraq?

He doesn't say, but he does have analogies for the different forces in Iraq that are designed to reassure us that "despite this notion being peddled by Europeans, the Arab press and the antiwar left that 'Iraq' is just Arabic for Vietnam," those mysterious folks behind all these deadly bombings and shootings and rocket attacks are not trying to liberate their country as the Vietcong were, but are actually just Iraq's version of the Khmer Rouge who are "not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis."