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The Chicken Doves
Elected to end the war, Democrats have surrendered to Bush on
Iraq and betrayed the peace movement for their own political
ends
By Matt Taibbi
11/02/08 "Rolling
Stone" -- -- Quietly, while Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with
their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and
Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political
collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the
Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the
Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm
mandate to end it.
Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S.
political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his
party's energies on topics other than ending the war by saying
he just couldn't fit Iraq into his busy schedule. "We have the
presidential election," Reid said recently. "Our time is really
squeezed."
There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic
leadership, as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights
expressed deep sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of
change had been thwarted by circumstances beyond their control —
that, as much as they would love to continue trying to end the
catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have to wait until, oh,
2009 to try again. "We'll have a new president," said Pelosi.
"And I do think at that time we'll take a fresh look at it."
Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on
Iraq, sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying
with a straight face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal.
"We just didn't have any plays we liked down there," said the
coach of the 0-15 Dems. "Sometimes you just have to play the
field-position game...."
In reality, though, Pelosi and the Democrats were actually
engaged in some serious point-shaving. Working behind the
scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the
anti-war movement, packing the nation's leading group with party
consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the
war. "Our focus is on the Republicans," one Democratic
apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. "How
can we juice up attacks on them?"
The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who
handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing
preview of what's to come if they win the White House. And if we
don't pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there's still
time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be
stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more
years. With no one but ourselves to blame.
The controversy over the Democratic "strategy" to end the war
basically comes down to whom you believe. According to the
Reid-Pelosi version of history, the Democrats tried hard to
force President Bush's hand by repeatedly attempting to tie
funding for the war to a scheduled withdrawal. Last spring they
tried to get him to eat a timeline and failed to get the votes
to override a presidential veto. Then they retreated and gave
Bush his money, with the aim of trying again after the summer to
convince a sufficient number of Republicans to cross the aisle
in support of a timeline.
But in September, Gen. David Petraeus reported that Bush's
"surge" in Iraq was working, giving Republicans who might
otherwise have flipped sufficient cover to continue supporting
the war. The Democrats had no choice, the legend goes, but to
wait until 2009, in the hopes that things would be different
under a Democratic president.
Democrats insist that the reason they can't cut off the money
for the war, despite their majority in both houses, is purely
political. "George Bush would be on TV every five minutes saying
that the Democrats betrayed the troops," says Sen. Bernie
Sanders of Vermont. Then he glumly adds another reason. "Also,
it just wasn't going to happen."
Why it "just wasn't going to happen" is the controversy. In and
around the halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made
a sincere effort to end the war meets with, at best, derisive
laughter. Though few congressional aides would think of saying
so on the record, in private many dismiss their party's lame
anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony show, a calculated
attempt to score political points without ever being serious
about bringing the troops home.
"Yeah, the amount of expletives that flew in our office alone
was unbelievable," says an aide to one staunchly anti-war House
member. "It was all about the public show. Reid and Pelosi would
say they were taking this tough stand against Bush, but if you
actually looked at what they were sending to a vote, it was like
Swiss cheese. Full of holes."
In the House, some seventy Democrats joined the Out of Iraq
caucus and repeatedly butted heads with Reid and Pelosi, arguing
passionately for tougher measures to end the war. The fight left
some caucus members bitter about the party's failure. Rep.
Barbara Lee of California was one of the first to submit an
amendment to cut off funding unless it was tied to an immediate
withdrawal. "I couldn't even get it through the Rules Committee
in the spring," Lee says.
Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a fellow caucus member, says Democrats should
have refused from the beginning to approve any funding that
wasn't tied to a withdrawal. "If we'd been bold the minute we
got control of the House — and that's why we got the majority,
because the people of this country wanted us out of Iraq — if
we'd been bold, even if we lost the votes, we would have gained
our voice."
An honest attempt to end the war, say Democrats like Woolsey and
Lee, would have involved forcing Bush to execute his veto and
allowing the Republicans to filibuster all they wanted. Force a
showdown, in other words, and use any means necessary to get the
bloodshed ended.
"Can you imagine Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert taking no for an
answer the way Reid and Pelosi did on Iraq?" asks the House aide
in the expletive-filled office. "They'd find a way to get the
votes. They'd get it done somehow."
But any suggestion that the Democrats had an obligation to fight
this good fight infuriates the bund of hedging careerists in
charge of the party. In fact, nothing sums up the current
Democratic leadership better than its vitriolic criticisms of
those recalcitrant party members who insist on interpreting
their 2006 mandate as a command to actually end the war. Rep.
David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a
key Pelosi-Reid ally, lambasted anti-war Democrats who "didn't
want to get specks on those white robes of theirs." Obey even
berated a soldier's mother who begged him to cut off funds for
the war, accusing her and her friends of "smoking something
illegal."
Rather than use the vast power they had to end the war,
Democrats devoted their energy to making sure that "anti-war
activism" became synonymous with "electing Democrats."
Capitalizing on America's desire to end the war, they hijacked
the anti-war movement itself, filling the ranks of peace groups
with loyal party hacks. Anti-war organizations essentially
became a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from
inside the Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting
Republicans.
This supposedly grass-roots "anti-war coalition" met regularly
on K Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At
the forefront of the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad
Woodhouse of Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, the
leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K Street
crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The
Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted
the anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in
shirtsleeves, riding a mirthful spirit into political combat —
changing the world is fun!
But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At
its most recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi
"squeezed for time" mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the
war and focus on electing Democrats. "There was a lot of
agreement that we can draw distinctions between anti-war
Democrats and pro-war Republicans," a spokeswoman for Americans
Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.
What the Post and the Times failed to note is that much of the
anti-war group's leadership hails from a consulting firm called
Hildebrand Tewes — whose partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul
Tewes, served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee (DSCC). In addition, these anti-war leaders continue
to consult for many of the same U.S. senators whom they need to
pressure in order to end the war. This is the kind of conflict
of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the
activist community.
Worst of all is the case of Woodhouse, who came to Hildebrand
Tewes after years of working as the chief mouthpiece for the
DSCC, where he campaigned actively to re-elect Democratic
senators who supported the Iraq War in the first place. Anyone
bothering to look — and clearly the Post and the Times did not
before penning their ardent bios of Woodhouse — would have found
the youthful idealist bragging to newspapers before the Iraq
invasion about the pro-war credentials of North Carolina
candidate Erskine Bowles. "No one has been stronger in this race
in supporting President Bush in the War on Terror and his
efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq," boasted the future
"anti-war" activist Woodhouse.
With guys like this in charge of the anti-war movement, much of
what has passed for peace activism in the past year was little
more than a thinly veiled scheme to use popular discontent over
the war to unseat vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in
2008. David Sirota, a former congressional staffer whose new
book, The Uprising, excoriates the Democrats for their failure
to end the war, expresses disgust at the strategy of targeting
only Republicans. "The whole idea is based on this insane
fiction that there is no such thing as a pro-war Democrat," he
says. "Their strategy allows Democrats to take credit for being
against the war without doing anything to stop it. It's crazy."
Justin Raimondo, the uncompromising editorial director of
Antiwar.com, regrets contributing twenty dollars to Americans
Against the Escalation in Iraq. "Not only did they use it to
target Republicans," he says, "they went after the ones who were
on the fence about Iraq." The most notorious case involved
Lincoln Chafee, a moderate from Rhode Island who lost his Senate
seat in 2006. Since then, Chafee has taken shots at Democrats
like Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, all of whom
campaigned against him despite having voted for the war
themselves.
"Look, I understand partisan politics," says Chafee, who now
concedes that voters were correct to punish him for his war
vote. "I just find it amusing that those who helped get us into
this mess now say we need to change the Senate — because we're
in a mess."
The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq
is that it's now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the
table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened
in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided
to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war,
despite the fact that, for all the noise they've made to the
contrary, in the end they've done nothing but vote for war and
cough up every dime they've been asked to give, every step of
the way.
Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone
limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises
its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to
grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush's
notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in
and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his
middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as
torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet
about upsetting the country's gazillionaires, refusing to close
a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate
less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.
But the war is where they showed their real mettle. Before the
2006 elections, Democrats told us we could expect more specifics
on their war plans after Election Day. Nearly two years have
passed since then, and now they are once again telling us to
wait until after an election to see real action to stop the war.
In the meantime, of course, we're to remember that they're the
good guys, the Republicans are the real enemy, and, well, go
Hillary! Semper fi! Yay, team!
How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we
supposed to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world
credit for wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the
right thing?
Look, fuck your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you
don't, sooner or later this con is going to run dry. It may not
be in '08, but it'll be soon. Even Americans can't be fooled
forever
©Copyright 2008 Rolling Stone
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