To End a Wobble

Any smart politico will tell you: the fundamental reason Democrats lost in 2004 is because the party seemed wobbly on national security issues—particularly Iraq. Rather than choose a) the confident anti-war argument that acting in Iraq would divert resources from America’s real enemies, or b) the confident pro-war argument that acting in Iraq would remove a threat and plant democracy in the world’s most dangerous neighborhood, we liberals appeared to choose c) the squeamish hope that post-Saddam Iraq would collapse, and Bush would get embarrassed.

To take the spotlight off his own (incomprehensible) position on the war, John Kerry built his whole post-convention campaign on bad newspaper headlines about Iraq. The message was: “Whatever I’m offering can’t be worse than this.” Kerry would hoist the reports about Americans killed in combat, and you could almost imagine Democratic campaign aides high-fiving each other as news of another insurgent attack hit the wires. Understandably, hoping that Iraq would fail gave many Americans the impression that Democrats…hope that Iraq would fail. Finally, Bush’s “pessimism” charge started to stick.

Even today, that pro-insurgent mentality hasn’t gone away, and—among some prominent Bush-bashers—it is even accompanied by a mendacious pro-Saddam nostalgia. Michael Moore continues to defend his “Fahrenheit 9/11” portrayal of “sovereign” (though internationally sanctioned) pre-war Iraq in which children fly kites and shoppers smile in the sunshine. Popular Democratic bloggers continue posting only the negative stories out of Iraq. And just last week, a spokesperson for Moveon.org again condemned “the senseless number of Iraqi deaths that this war and instability has caused.” Once-idealistic liberals now poison their anti-Bush stew with what used to be heartlessly Republican foreign policy ideas: dictatorial “stability” over democratic turbulence, and “sovereignty” over human rights.

For the record: it is true that somewhere between 21,000 and 24,000 people have died since America’s Iraqi campaign began in March 2003. With the exception of Saddam’s murderous sons—and the gang of thugs employed as secret police by the Hussein family—each one of those deaths is a tragedy. It is even possible that many of them could have been averted if the administration’s blinded neo-cons had listened to Colin Powell and done some better pre-war planning.

But as liberals, let’s not pretend—as Moore does—that pre-invasion Iraq was a veritable Palm Springs on the Euphrates. While good data is hard to find, most human rights experts agree that at least a million Iraqis were killed because of Saddam’s policies: half a million slaughtered because of Saddam’s aggression against Iran; a hundred thousand massacred because of Saddam’s invasion into Kuwait; and, at home, countless hundreds of thousands raped, tortured, and murdered.

The New York Times’ John Burns visited Iraq before the war and concluded of Saddam’s state: “The terror is self-compounding, with the state’s power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell—of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners’ wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads, and the pistol shots to the head.” According to the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Baghdad, “Saddam Hussein killed no fewer than 600,000 innocent civilians” over the course of his 24-year reign.

This means that before American troops ever arrived, Saddam’s agents butchered between 70 and 125 Iraqis every single day—numbers that don’t include the hundreds more who were discreetly plucked from their homes and forced into torture chambers.

Since the American intervention began, net Iraqi deaths are down something like 75 percent—and that is during a period of all-out war between insurgents and three new Iraqi governments, a period in which al-Qaeda declared Iraq the headquarters for global terrorism.

Whatever the failures of America’s Iraqi occupation—and from Abu Ghraib to distorted intelligence, there have been more than a few—liberals have got to recognize what the voters already see: that those mistakes are a shade of pale next to the atrocities that preceded them.

The larger story here is the dangerous Democratic disconnect on foreign policy. Whether you were for the Iraq war or against it, liberals have got to put national security back at the center of what it means to be a liberal. The times demand it; the voters expect it; and Democratic history can inspire it. Since when are the Republicans—who have long despised the “nation-building,” foreign aid, and public diplomacy that are vital to the war on terror—the party of foreign policy idealism? And since when are the Democrats—who authored the Fourteen Points, the New Freedom, the Marshall Plan, and NATO—the party of dictator-coddling realists? And most recently: the party that fails to pound Bush for dragging his feet on Darfur nearly as much as we pounded him for rushing into Iraq.

Brian M. Goldsmith ’05 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.