Culinary hanky-panky

I'd like to take a moment today to visit with a columnist who doesn't get nearly enough virtual ink here, William Raspberry at the Washington Post. In his column from yesterday, Raspberry asks and answers the question, "When it comes to Iraq, are the congressional Democrats chicken-hearted flip-floppers, merely clueless critics with no ideas of their own -- or are they Karl Rove cunning?"

The author covers a number of reasons, all of which have been discussed here, why the administration's defense against Iraq war critics is full of holes. But why did the these same Democrats "vote for the war" in the first place?

Congress didn't have the same information the administration had; it had the information -- and the analysis of that information -- that the administration opted to share. The choices, really, were to share the administration's conclusion that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction or to accuse it of cooking the evidence.

But when events suggested just such culinary hanky-panky, how can it be considered inconstant or duplicitous to second-guess the earlier pro-war vote?

[The Democrats] didn't really vote us into war. As I recall, that vote authorizing the president to use force against Iraq was analogous to a trade union's strike vote. When negotiations bog down, union leaders often will ask their members for a resolution authorizing a strike. For members to refuse such a vote would cripple their own leadership. But to grant it is not the same as ending negotiations and launching a strike. It is a way of steeling the leadership, giving it a powerful negotiating tool.

It doesn't get much clearer than that. He then goes on to tackle the more prickly question of how the Dems need to handle this, and what, if any, strategy do they offer as an alternative? Do the Democrats have an exit strategy?

Of course they don't.

If the Democrats had their own Karl Rove, he'd probably tell them not to even try to come up with one. If a sound exit plan means getting out without leaving Iraq less stable than it is now, and with a reasonable chance of becoming an American-style democracy, nobody has one.

If Iraq is most likely to implode into civil war, leaving it a far more dangerous hotbed of terrorism than it was before our invasion, wouldn't the Democrats be smart to let it happen without interference? That isn't to say the Democrats yearn for failure -- but it's a cinch they don't want to be blamed for it.

And in the end, that's what it comes down to. The right wing will continue to accuse progressives of "cheering for failure" in Iraq. This, of course, is poisonous partisan hackery. I have yet to talk to a single person who truly wants us to fail in Iraq. But Raspberry is right. When there apparently is no successful exit plan, the minority party doesn't want us to fail.

They just don't want to be blamed for Bush's mess.