Rethinking Iraq

A month before the elections, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh predicted the consequences of a Bush victory for Iraq. "If Bush wins re-election, he will bomb and bomb and bomb," he said. "Civilian targets, civilian neighborhoods." He was right.

Within a week after the election, the administration launched a no-holds barred offensive against Fallujah. Unlike the first assault in 2003, this time around no building was out of bounds in a strategy that was summed by Capt. Paul Fowler in the Boston Globe: "The only way to root them out is to destroy everything in your path." When the first air strike targeted the city's sole hospital, The New York Times explained – without comment – the Pentagon's rationale: "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties."

No one knows how many died in the attack, civilian or otherwise. No one cared to ask – not the mainstream media, not the Democrats, not the American public. Iraq was also absent from the extensive electoral post-mortem as pundits, leaders, and opinionmakers publicly argued vociferously on every subject – morals, economics, the Democratic party leadership, political strategy, race – but the one issue that drove progressive politics in 2004. The unprecedented level of grassroots organizing that characterized the campaign of John Kerry would not have been possible without the anti-war movement. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 galvanized progressives of all stripes and brought them out on the streets. The anti-war demonstrations marked a level of passion and energy that surpassed even many of the Vietnam-era protests.

During the primaries, anti-war activists rallied behind Howard Dean, who emerged as the only major presidential candidate to oppose the war. But in the end, "electability" trumped all other issues in the primaries as the majority of Democrats put aside their anti-war sentiments to vote for John Kerry. Desperate to oust Bush from the White House, few wanted to take the risk of picking an anti-war candidate – not with the memory of George McGovern's ignominious defeat to Richard Nixon still looming large in the party's memory. When Kerry won the party's nomination, progressives rallied around him under the Anybody But Bush banner. The irony was unmistakable. The campaign of a candidate who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq was being driven by his supporters' opposition to that very same decision. But in the spring of 2004, it seemed vastly more sensible to pick the ex-warrior to take on a self-described war president. In the following months, however, the Republicans would take each of Kerry's perceived strengths and turn it into a fatal weakness, be it his position or Iraq or his service in Vietnam. They paired his two votes on Iraq – the first to give Bush the power to launch the war and the other against an $87 billion appropriations bill – to paint him as a morally indecisive flip-flopper who couldn't be trusted to lead the country at a time of crisis.

The strategy worked because Kerry's position on Iraq suffered from the same key shortcomings that undermined his larger campaign. He was unable to articulate a clear moral position on one of the most important issues facing the nation and the world. When mocked by Bush for criticizing the very same war that he had authorized, Kerry responded with a complex argument about executive power: Bush as president should have been given the authority to wage war, but then bore the responsibility to do so only as a last resort. When that line of reasoning proved ineffective, he fell back on criticizing Bush's competence – the lack of a post-war plan, his poor diplomatic skills, intelligence failure, and on and on. While the evidence was damning, it lacked the moral resonance to counter the appeal of a presidency that offered certitude in an increasingly dangerous world.