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Election Day has come and gone, Rumsfeld has resigned, Bush borders on contrite, the party of moral values, gay sex, and backdoor dealings has been replaced by the party of ethics, gay rights, and open hearings, and my heart is happy for an America I had begun to forget.
On the subject of my progressively deteriorating memory, I’ve taken a page from the Republican playbook and applied it to my infrequent spats with Julie My Love: I now take preemptive action when I recognize the potential for future conflicts. In a heated argument, I can’t rely upon my spotty recollections to buttress my side of the debate, so I’ve begun pointing out things that might create stress on our relationship in the future as soon as I recognize them.
Of course, the fatal flaw of this strategery is that I must depend upon her to remember my various prognostications when the foretold fight finally arrives, and thus to argue with herself on my behalf.
The idea of a person, or a party, attacking itself seems as ironic as a setting sun meant to represent a rising one, but political memories are even more fallible than my own, and this leads me to engage in another act of augury.
Iraq is fucked. Cut and run? Stay the course? Phased withdrawal? Nobody’s got a good answer because THERE ISN’T ONE. Leave now or leave later, we have fucked up Iraq real good, and whenever we do get out (or don’t,) it will still be really, really fucked up.
The Republican Administration, the Republican Senate, and the Republican House, enraptured by the neoconservative concept of preemptive foreign policy, made it this fucked up, and so (finally, fortunately, and little surprisingly) America has decided on a little course correction of its own.
Can we expect big changes in how our government runs? Yes. I predict that there will be fewer lobbyist-sponsored golf trips to Scotland, fewer defense-contractor-provided Rolls Royces for representatives, and a lower likelihood of gay sex with underage boys in the Halls of Congress for at least a few years.
But Iraq is still fucked, and it will still be fucked two years from now. This leads me to my primary prognostication: Iraq is now the Democrats’ problem, but soon, through some Rovian sleight of hand, it will be the Democrats’ fault as well. When I hear “failed policy in Iraq” (and that’s all we’ve been hearing since the mission was accomplished three years ago,) I think of Republicans, but when the run for the White House really heats up, you can expect to hear those same Republicans declaiming the Democrats’ “failed policy in Iraq.”
Yes, like Iraq, the Democrats are now fucked. I’m grateful that the Bush cabal has two fewer years to destroy our American values and institutions, but now everyone who is opposed to the Republican War in Iraq must start to prepare to defend themselves against Republican attacks claiming that Democrats are unable to solve this political, military, and humanitarian nightmare.
Ironically (yes, we’re back to irony!), those Republicans will be right because the only solution, the one half the Country and the rest of the world favoured, is now impossible: don’t invade Iraq. It’s much too late for that, so now we’re going to hear more of the same - cut and run, stay the course, phased withdrawal, failed strategy - coming out of exactly the opposite mouths they were coming out of yesterday. A Democratic Congress will search for an answer just as anxiously as the Republicans did before them, but they won’t find one, because it doesn’t exist. Iraq is just fucked. Period.
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