Cry Havoc

On the News Hour on Friday, David Brooks and Mark Shields got into a very un-PBS style argument -- one in which emotion was visibly involved. The starting point was Brooks' statement that the Senate hearings on Douglas Feith's office's reports before the Iraq war were, well, irrelevant. Brooks was of the opinion that the Senate should be debating what to do in Iraq now, rather than worrying about 4 years ago and a guy who's been out of office for 2 years. His point, which Shields found quite objectionable, was that we should worry about where we are now, rather than how we got here.

This is from the same guy who told Charlie Rose that the Libby trial is unimportant to the country at large, even as the Libby trial has done more to unveil the evil machinations of the Cheney White House than any other single event in the last 6 years.

David Brooks often gets under liberals' radar, because he pretends a certain degree of reasonableness. Well, perhaps it's not pretense; perhaps he believes himself to be reasonable. But frequently, I find that White House/NeoCon talking points that I will later see in vitriolic form in the Hannitys and Limbaughs will appear in more palatable form in Brooks. As an example, I offer the right wing "If Dems don't like the surge, they need to offer their own plan" meme, which came from the Prez straight down -- and which Brooks voiced, in his typically single-message fashion, on the News Hour, All Things Considered, and in the pages of the Times. This, by the way, even as Brooks is himself pushing a Democratic plan -- the Galbraith/Biden/Gelb partition plan. Do you get that? He is pushing a plan fronted by a Democrat, even as he bitches that Democrats have no plan. That's reasonable, eh?

So you'll have to forgive me if I view Brooks' prostests that we should keep our eye on the current moment with a bit of cynicism. Allow me to make a case for what's at stake in the "Eyes on the Prize" argument from the right (and yes, the irony of that title is intentional).

We are in a bloody fucking muddle in this country, and it's about to get worse. The Iraq war is universally agreed to be a disaster, and yet that agreement goes only so far. We all know the occupation was a royal clusterfuck. But the larger question of whether it was ever a good idea is still entirely unresolved. It is unresolved precisely because we have never successfully dealt with the two crucial issues -- how the hell did the intelligence get so fucked up (answer: truly shocking executive mendacity), and is pre-emptive war a good idea, even if everything goes right (answer: are you kidding me?)? These may well be separate issues, but they are clearly interrelated: the intelligence was faked to support the pre-emption; the pre-emption would never have been acceptable without the intelligence. In our assessment of the whole thing, I suspect they will remain linked. When Americans find out that it was all a tissue of lies, they may think twice about pre-emption, and the degree of trust it demands in leaders. But in order to resolve that issue -- or even bring it to the forefront -- we most certainly need to not pursue the "well, we're there now, so let's let the past be the past" line of thinking.


The Senate hearings, the House hearings, and the trajectory of history all suggest that the question of our original sin is about to blow wide open. We are going to have to find out how we got into this war, if for no other reason than because the question of whether it was ever a good idea (on which, again, I am sublimely unconflicted) currently remains only vaguely considered. And both the Libby trial and the congressional hearings are steps on the road to answering that question.

David Brooks can't be such an idiot that he doesn't know that we are currently in the midst of putting together a casus belli for Iran; today's anonymous (brave; really brave) announcement by a group of intelligence officials that Iran is supplying Sadr (really, just Sadr? Not SCIRI, our Shiite allies?) with explosives being an ostentatious move in that direction. The writing is huge on the wall, and the ability to pull off the inevitable military action depends entirely on timing.

Many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was affiliated with Al Qaeda. Many believe we found WMD's in Iraq. Many of them will never read a paper, or find out anything. But congressional hearings threaten to bring all of the non-troglodyte population of the US to the understanding that they were fucking lied into a globally destabilizing war. And when they understand that, they may be more willing to encourage congress to stand up to the administration on Iran. They already know the war is a failure; but what if they know it was always bullshit?

On the other hand, if David Brooks gets his wish, we keep our eye on the future, where it doesn't matter how we got into Iraq, it only matters what we do now. In such a world, do you imagine there will be sufficient public pressure to force a constitutional crisis between the congress and the president over military action against Iran? Do you really think that congress will have the balls to completely cut off funding for the war, or to impeach Bush AND Cheney, or to otherwise (and I don't know how) force the administration not to violently attack the biggest regional player in the middle east when we've got 180,000 hostages in uniform sitting on their either side? So really, I think David Brooks knows perfectly well what's at stake here. And as usual, he's a good foot soldier, trying to make ideology sound like reason by occasionally making a concession that the president fucked up, or that he himself doesn't hate gays.

Wake up, people. It's on. When Tony Snow says "We are not going to invade Iran" he's not lying. We're not going to invade them -- we're going to bomb the shit out of them. The invasion will be a proportionate response to their response. If you want that not to happen, you'd better pray that congress holds all the hearings it can as fast as it can.