I've said it before: I lack the enviable certainty of many of my liberal contemporaries.
I stand by in wonderment that they can be so sure they're right. The issues are so complicated, sos dependent on conditions that I for one can't guess at and am loth to imagine. I feel the same about them as I do about Bush.
Should we withdraw all troops from Iraq? Should we surge forward? How do they know? What's the evidence, for or against? By which I mean evidence. More and more, the evidence for my opinions consists of the opinions of other people I've decided to put my faith in. And more and more, that feels perilous to me.
Of course, I feel from time to time as if I know too, but in all honesty, it's more that I feel that I "know." At some level, I know that I don't. Other people aren't hindered by any such doubts.
The President and General Petraeus think they know what to do about Iraq, as do Nancy Pelosi, Jim Webb, and other people from my side of the fence. And this is one thing I know: all of them know more about it than I do, at least as regards logistics, risk/benefit studies, and so on.
And this is another thing I know: half the problem with the discussion is that no one ever finishes their sentences.
Now James Baker---Mr. "Grave and Deteriorating"----is weighing in on the President's, and General Petraeus's side.
[quote begins from Salon, "Still Grave and Deteriorating," by Walter Shapiro]
The president's plan ought to be given a chance," Baker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The general [David Petraeus] you confirmed 81-0 just the day before yesterday, this is his idea. He's a supporter of it. He's now the commander on the ground in Iraq. Give it a chance." Baker repeated his refrain so often that it sounded like he was channeling some perverse version of a John Lennon tune: "Give Escalation a Chance."
[quote ends]
The trouble I have with the request to "give it a chance" is that it's an incomplete sentence. A chance to do what, exactly? A chance to win? Win what for whom? What measurable, identifiable goal or prize should we expect? How will we know when we get there?
I'm disconcerted that this is Baker, previously of the Iraq Study Group, telling me this. Not that I believed he was objective, but I'd given him credit for a certain level of detachment.
What's missing at this point is information from reliable sources. Everything is getting filtered through politics, including an article such as Shapiro's. As I trust Salon and have determined over the years that their views and mine are generally parallel, I am inclined to allow my opinions to be guided by them.
But the stakes at present are too high for me to rely even on Salon. I want objective data to the extent any can be had.
I do not believe in peace at any price. I do think, however, that it's important to work out exactly what the price of it would be and who it is who is actually going to pay it. Military personnel, Military families, Halliburton, the oil industry, supporters/cronies of the President, loud and angry Republican men? Me personally? Most of all I want to know what I personally, a private U.S. citizen, stand to lose if they put an end to this war.
Unlike Bush and the
neocons I am neither an "idealist" nor yet an "ideologue." I don't
think my "tax dollars" should be spent on other people's dreams of
global domination (economic or otherwise) or on "promoting democracy"
(democracy might not be good for some cultures). Frankly, I am more
concerned about the threat presented by global warming than terrorism.
So to persuade me that we need to "surge", I need to hear what I am
going to lose if we don't.
Maybe there is a way they can persuade me that I may sustain great losses if we don't. But even then, I need more information than I'm getting now. Which losses are speculative, worst-case scenarios, which inevitable, which highly probable, which already in train? Furthermore, what further losses would be the consequences of those consequences?
I want to hear from generals or military experts on both sides. I want to know what people think whose careers aren't in any way at stake, so let's say experts with no political aspirations: retired generals and academics who don't belong to "think tanks," so-called.
I also want to hear from constitutional scholars. Shapiro's article makes it chillingly clear just how far Congress was originally willing to let the President go on behalf of rooting out the WMD and putting a stop to Saddam Hussein. Having empowered Bush then, where do we draw the line now?
[quote begins from Salon, "Still Grave and Deteriorating," by Walter Shapiro]
Despite the White House's trumpeting of an overarching interpretation of the president's war powers as commander in chief, the consensus among both liberal and conservative legal scholars at the hearing was that Congress does possess war-ending powers if it chooses to assert them. As Bradford Berenson, who served on Bush's White House legal staff during the president's first term, declared, "I do think that the constitutional scene does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war."
What was telling during the hearing, however, was how much power Congress has ceded to the president since it passed the war resolution in October 2002...
Walter Dellinger, a leading liberal legal theorist who had been assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration, regretfully acknowledged that Bush has the legal power to expand the war into Iran under the guise of protecting U.S. troops in Iraq. As he put it, "The resolution of 2002 is quite broad and quite broadly worded ... It is not geographically limited."
[quote ends]
And it's this last that is so alarming. While I'm still waiting for an answer to the question of what I as a citizen would lose by the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Administration is discussing the value of increasing the scope of this military escapade. And it isn't even clear that anyone has the right to prevent this. This being so, I want some sort of assurance that the Administration's theories are right or at least not clearly wrong.
It's not as if giving war "a chance" doesn't itself carry a clearly marked price, as well as all sorts of hidden costs I don't fully understand. What I'm hearing strikes me viscerally as illogical if not irrational, but I've got the ever-increasing sense that nothing I'm hearing means what it says, except incidentally. It's all about something else entirely.
As a simple layperson, it seems clear to me that the best way to protect the troops is to bring them home where they won't get shot at as a regular part of their daily routine. Being told that we have to have more troops in harm's way to protect the ones already there simply adds to the confusion.
Again, they're talking about going into Iran for broad, general, nonspecific goals and without a clear, detached breakdown of the objectives and of the arguments pro and con.
For a peaceable but not pacifist citizen, the conversation among elected officials increasingly sounds as spuriously intelligible as Alice's conversations on the other side of the looking glass.
Everything's about something else. Some of the agendas are so thinly veiled it's embarrassing. Even the most stirring rhetoric concerning the war is at least partly in the service of something that's not about the war at all.
Which is why, for me, this sentence from Shapiro's article is the most chilling. "For all the easy talk of a confrontation between Congress and the White House over Iraq, it remains unclear whether most legislators want to move beyond anguished speeches about the war."
At present, my friends, it feels more and more as if we are increasingly at the mercy of elected officials whose real goal is to serve themselves or their respective parties. And while this has doubtless always been true "to an extent," it's now true as a matter of course.
At present, I don't feel I can believe---in the sense of "put my faith in"--- anything that comes out of the mouth of any elected representative and particularly out of the mouths of those who wield the most power. As the media reveal themselves to be more and more at the mercy of the views of their editors or stockholders, I am more and more inclined to be skeptical of anything I learn from those sources.
I don't know who I can afford to believe anymore. I therefore no longer know what I think is true or even, in many instances, credible.
Even if my hero Al Gore were to run as I have wished, his throwing his hat in the ring would change everything. He'd stop speaking for the purpose of having an effect and start speaking for effect. Or if not, it's what I would assume.
I don't mean to come across as self-serving, dim-witted, intellectually lazy or naive. It's just more and more it feels that to be an ordinary citizen trying to get on with her life and to leave governing to the people elected to do it is, by definition, to be self-serving, dim-witted, intellectually lazy or naive. Without better information, how can I reach even any sort of meaningful conclusion about what I want my representatives to do? And if I can't do that, how can I hold them accountable? And to what, or whom? What's the test for deciding who does---or does not---know what he or she is doing> What's the test for knowing who is right, or at least less wrong?
Comments