The Surge and The Spin
22 August 2007 12:35 am by Taylor Marsh
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| graphic via The New Yorker
VIDEO: It’s getting messy. |
Nothing is causing
more consternation among Democratic candidates than the upcoming White House
Report that Petreaus will offer up on Iraq, which is already being teased and
trumpeted by wingnuts everywhere. Now Democrats and some Republicans have another problem.
And now the Democrats, along with wavering Republicans, will face an advertising blitz from Bush supporters determined to remain on offense. A new pressure group, Freedom’s Watch, will unveil a month-long, $15 million television, radio and grass-roots campaign today designed to shore up support for Bush’s policies before the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, lays out a White House assessment of the war’s progress. The first installment of Petraeus’s testimony is scheduled to be delivered before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a fact both the administration and congressional Democrats say is simply a scheduling coincidence. … ..
I don’t mean to go all Bette Davis on you, but fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy fall ride.
It began with Levin and Warner, but then every wingnut around grabbed a hold and touted
that Levin was saying “the surge is working.” One problem, that’s
not what he said. But as I continue to warn around here, wingnuts don’t operate
on facts. They extract their own meaning, present them or make them up. Here’s
the truth of it from Think
Progress.
LEVIN: Well, that purpose has not been achieved, even though the level of
violence has been reduced in a number of areas. The purpose of the surge,
by its own terms, was to have the — give the opportunity to the Iraqi
leaders to reach some political settlements. They have failed to do that.
They have totally and utterly failed.
As Salon’s Tim Grieve pointed out, Fox
“News” was all over it yesterday, too: Sens. Warner and Levin
Travel to Iraq, Praise Surge Results. But Grieve adds the important points and also draws out Clinton’s comments, too.
Clinton went on to say that the United States alone cannot “impose a military solution” on Iraq; that the Iraqis are not “ready to do what they have to do for themselves yet”; that it is “unacceptable for our troops to be caught in the crossfire of a sectarian civil war while the Iraqi government is on vacation”; that it’s “time the Iraqi government took responsibility for themselves and their country, because the American people and our American military cannot want freedom and stability for the Iraqis more than they want it for themselves”; and that the “best way” to honor the men and women who have served in Iraq is “by beginning to bring them home and making sure that when they come home that we have everything ready for them.”
Then yesterday the Washington
Times begins on Clinton
where Karl Rove left off, hitting her in a more vulnerable spot than Rove’s
“fatally flawed” candidate conversation ever could.
The Democrats’ reframing of the war debate helps them avoid criticism for
naysaying U.S. military achievements while still advocating a speedy pullout
from what they say is a civil war the Iraqi government cannot quell.“It’s working,” Mrs. Clinton said of the troop surge yesterday
in a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas
City, Mo., a group at odds with her votes for a pullout and against emergency
troop funding. … ..
The New York Post couldn’t wait to blast this headline: IRAQ
SURGE WORKING, BUT TOO LATE: HILLARY CLINTON. Drudge Report followed suit.
Media Matters dissects
it all, while making important points about the distinctions of Clinton’s
remarks.
But Clinton did not give a “positive assessment of the troop surge,”
and her statement was not in reference to “Iraq, including the war-torn
Anbar province”; rather, she cited Al Anbar as one place where the “change
[of] tactics” has brought positive results.
Craig
Crawford chimes in and hints of a flip flop.
Speaking to a veterans group, Clinton undercut claims, including her own,
that President George W. Bush’s troop buildup would not work. “It’s
working,” she said, but “we’re just years too late.” Seven
months ago Clinton had predicted that the surge “cannot be successful.”
Nuance is a bitch. But Clinton has only herself to blame when she serves up
stuff like this:
“We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly
in Al Anbar Province, it’s working,” said Mrs. Clinton, the New
York Democrat and candidate for her party’s presidential nomination.
“We’re just years too late changing our tactics. We can’t
ever let that happen again. We can’t be fighting the last war; we have
to be preparing to fight the new war.”
Camp
Edwards jumped on the opening.
“Our military’s hard-won progress in Al-Anbar province should not distract
us from the fact that pouring more military resources into Iraq is no substitute
for the comprehensive national political solution that will ultimately resolve
the situation in Iraq. President Bush’s failed strategy has led to increased
terrorism in Iraq, as we saw with the bombing of the Iraqi Parliament months
ago in the Green Zone and the recent horrendous bombings in northwest Iraq
that killed over 250 people. And despite the surge, the Al-Maliki government
is disintegrating before our eyes. Even worse, President Bush’s mistakes in
Iraq have only helped make terrorism worse in the world. As the National Intelligence
Estimate recently found, Al Qaeda is as strong now as it was before 9/11.”
However, I think everyone is missing the real problem with Clinton’s statement.
“… .. We can’t be fighting the last war; we have to
be preparing to fight the new war.” – Hillary Clinton
This is rhetorical hawkery at its worst. It’s also political pandering at its
most egregious. As someone adamantly opposed to the “global war on terror”
talking point, I automatically bristle at this kind of language. It’s either
sloppy or a window into Clinton’s true feelings on national security. Unfortunately,
whatever it is it’s opened up the one vein Clinton had closed off after much
work. Republicans might love this type of rhetoric, but Democratics do not and Clinton needs lots of them to win in the primaries.
We don’t have to prepare to “fight the new war.” We need to change
our foreign policy so that muscular diplomacy replaces the knee jerk reaction
to go to war at all unless there is a clear and present danger. But it’s what
happens when a candidate gets in front of a military group and thinks she has
to saber rattle to illustrate her strengths. It’s a horrendous overreach by
Clinton and an intemperate statement that leaves her wide open to people who
do not trust her rhetoric on Iraq from the moment she refused to apologize for
her Iraq vote. It also threatens to unravel all of the work she’s done to make
people trust her.
Here’s a lesson. Petreaus’s tactics are having a positive effect in some areas, while their is no political gains on the ground at all. Get it? You don’t use words like “working,” because they’re not only wrong, but hand your opponent an actionable word that means the whole ballgame.
However, that’s not even the rub right now. With all this undisciplined, rambling “the surge is working” talk and a Republican ad blitz coming around the corner to bolster Bush’s White House Report, it’s clear the Democrats have strayed so dangerously off message as to threaten what we’ve worked for all this time. Bush got his surge, with an escalation on top. The political movement in Iraq is non-existent, but yet the Democrats are about to be pressured that “the surge is working” through a political ad blitz right before Petreaus delivers the White House Report on — wait for it — 9/11/07, while wingnuts use quotes coming out of the mouths of Democrats to make Bush’s case. How in the hell did this happen?
