Accentuate the Negative:
Confessions of a Nattering Nabob

1. Liberals have tended to accentuate the negative about the war in Iraq.

This is not to say that the SCLM have presented a skewed picture—since they are virtually the only source of information for people like you and me, we have little idea whether the picture they present is skewed or straight. What I mean is this: given the information available to us, liberals have tended to focus on and perhaps even exaggerate difficulties, dangers and failures associated with our efforts in Iraq.

This is a charge that is easy to make and easy to deny. Many who make the charge are the usual collection of right-wing ideologues who equate any criticism of American with hatred of America, defeatism, etc. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even those guys will eventually get it right.. The charge is easy to deny, and I’m sure that many of the denials are true and many of the false denials are nevertheless sincere, since it’s a hard thing to admit even to yourself.

Speaking from my own case, however, I must confess to experiencing a certain degree of schadenfreude as a result of our difficulties in Iraq. I am not proud of this—far from it. I’m not defending this reaction, I’m merely trying to be honest about it. I judge myself to be a decent observer of American politics, and I think that my reactions are shared by a significant proportion of American liberals.

2. Accentuating the negative increases the likelihood that our efforts in Iraq will fail.

If we focus inordinately on or exaggerate the difficulties, dangers and failures associated with our efforts in Iraq we raise the likelihood that we will demoralize the American electorate and give hope to Iraqi insurgents.

3. Failure in Iraq would be disastrous.

Failure in Iraq would be disastrous for the people of Iraq. It would also be disastrous for American prestige—it’s prestige in the eyes of the rest of the world, as well as in the eyes of Americans themselves. The Bush administration’s mendacity, unilateralism, and bullying have already damaged our prestige in a far more profound way, but military-political failure in Iraq would, it seems, put the icing on the cake.

4. Regardless of how we got there, winning is imperative.

I have a strong inclination to agree with what I take to be Tom Friedman’s position, which I understand to be roughly this: we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, and we definitely shouldn’t have gone in the way we did, but we’re there now and we have to accept that and try to do what’s best given the hand we’ve been dealt—or, rather, the hand we’ve dealt ourselves. And I’d add the following: the world would be a better place today had Clinton or Gore or McCain or Bush ’41 or virtually anybody else been president on and after 9/11. The world would be a better place had we focused on defeating al Qaeda and rebuilding Afghanistan rather than undertaking ill-advised Iraqi adventure. Supposing we did attack Iraq anyway, the world would be a better place if we had worked with NATO and the UN and other Arab nations. The Bush administration has foolishly and irresponsibly put America and the rest of the civilized world in a precarious position. (Only the civilized world, though; their actions have been a boon for bin Laden and other Islamic extremists.) Anger at the Bush administration is richly warranted. But none of these things justifies us in irresponsibly exaggerating the difficulties and failures the U.S. is experiencing in Iraq if those exaggerations are likely to make things worse.

5. We must separate our assessment of the Bush administration and its case for attacking Iraq from our assessment of progress in Iraq.

Liberals must be careful to separate their justifiable anger at the Bush administration from their assessments of the progress in Iraq. Speaking for myself, this is harder than it might seem. It’s as if I walk around under a cloud of disgust at the actions of the administration, and this seems to infect my opinions about progress in Iraq. Disgusted at the irrational and dishonest manner in which our troops were sent there, I find myself half-expecting us to fail there.

Worse, I sometimes find myself half-hoping that we do. I hate Saddam and wished that we’d gone after him in the first Gulf War. I am a liberal hawk—I think that the U.S. should use its military to defend human rights and make the world a better place. I recognize the importance of winning in Iraq. I want our soldiers and the Iraqi people to be well, live long, happy lives, and die at ripe old ages. And yet I find it difficult to wish whole-heartedly for success in a project with such a sinister and despicable genesis. But if you find yourself in a sinking boat, the thing to do is bail with all your might rather than sullenly refusing to help on the grounds that you advised against the outing in the first place.

6. We should emphasize the irrationality of the policies rather than exaggerating their failures.

I imagine that I detect similar thoughts among my fellow liberals, and I expect that these thoughts are in large part responsible for our negativity about progress in Iraq. But a proper respect for humanity demands that we do what we can to insure success. At the very least, we must do no harm; and that means, at least, that we must refrain from accentuating the negative and thereby undermining morale and thereby undermining the will to succeed and thereby lowering the likelihood that we will do so. We must simultaneously work for success in Iraq and success in America. The former means winning the war and the latter means winning the election. And there’s the rub, of course: success in Iraq increases the likelihood that Bush will be re-elected, and that opens to door to four more years of epic blunders. And that may be part of what is at the root of much liberal negativity about Iraq--the thought that some degree of failure there is an acceptable price to pay in order to remove from power the architects of the Iraqi misadventure.

I must confess some sympathy with these thoughts, but I want to suggest a higher road for the loyal opposition. As Tom Friedman has said, the left needs to become more morally serious about this matter. We must emphasize our commitment to and expectation of success, while making it clear at every opportunity that this mission should never have been undertaken in this way. We must neither exaggerate failures nor successes in Iraq. We must make it clear that al Qaeda should have been our real target, that there is no link between al Qaeda and Iraq, and that, even though we expect to succeed in Iraq, the administration’s policies took us far nearer to failure than we should ever have been. In short, we must tell the truth. It’s a harder case to make—people like a winner no matter how foolish the gamble. But if we take the high road, at least we’ll be able to look at ourselves in our mirrors on November 3rd without remorse.