November 9, 2006
Fear and Trembling
By Jack D. McNamara
Are you afraid?
Virgil L. Evans of Marfa is not afraid. He wrote President George W.
Bush; “You cannot and should not be a leader who tries to govern the
country entrusted to you by using fear against those who elected you.”
Certainly we are concerned even if we are not afraid. An October 28 Houston Chronicle/KHOU-TV poll
reported that 52% of Texans surveyed said the fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan was the most important issue facing the U.S.
Texans’ concerns are well placed. On October 28 the New York Times reported on the
advice to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice over a period of 18 months
in confidential memorandums. The advisor is Phillip D. Zelikow, the
State Department Counselor who was also the executive director of the
9/11 Commission. One of Zelikow’s memos “described the potential for
Iraq to become a ‘catastrophic failure.’”
Many others in the chattering class describe the Bush Administration’s
policies in Iraq as a “disaster,” but increasingly we see the word
“catastrophe.”
Now whose catastrophe is it? Not Mr. Evans of Marfa, and not the
soldiers and Marines who have been fighting since April 2003. They
haven’t lost a battle. Like their fathers and grandfathers they have
done their duty on an arduous battlefield. Mr. Evans of Marfa knows
what those duties entail. He was drafted in 1945. He did not “cut and
run” and in his letter to the editor of the Big Bend Sentinel he said that
“using fear as a method to influence voters is unworthy of any public
official.”
My personal favorite is the often-repeated refrain that we must get the
terrorists in Iraq or they will follow us here. What! Come across our
well-defended borders? Surely you jest.
A new variation of this theme was flight-tested by U.S. Senator
Elizabeth Dole, a North Carolina Republican who is chairperson of the
Republicans’ Senate Reelection Committee. She told the other
chairpersons and NBC’s Tim Russert of “Meet the Press” last Sunday that
“Democrats appear to be content with losing.”
Of course no Democrat said that. The party’s attack machine simply
takes anything that any adult might say and shrieks it out in hope of
getting a few votes. Mrs. Dole ought to look carefully at a man who is
an intellectual author of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy.
Richard Perle, an advocate of the invasion told the magazine Vanity
Fair that the Administration was dysfunctional and their policy
a
“disaster.”
According to the public opinion polls on Monday Americans agree. The
entire chattering class (including your humble author) is shocked to
actually see a U.S. midterm election hinge upon a question of foreign
policy.
We need reminding that the Democrats did not make it so. Until recent
weeks Democrats seemed ready to run on their tried and true platform of
education, health care, the minimum wage, and the culture of corruption
in a Washington which is controlled by a Republican Congress and a
Republican President. The Democrats have a lot of ammunition for such a
political campaign. They have help from a wide range of experts,
including the former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey who
wrote a column October 29, “Where We Went Wrong.” Armey says the
greatest threat to Americans “today is a catastrophic fiscal meltdown
resulting from long-term entitlements.” There’s that word again.
Republicans hold majorities of everything and they set the agenda. They
set the agenda for this election. The most
conservative national columnist is Robert Novak and he wrote only
Monday in the Washington Post that
“the election has been nationalized around two standards that cannot be
more unfavorable to the GOP: an unpopular war and an unpopular
president.”
In nothing we have discovered is there any thing significant that the
Democrats have actually done. They are the beneficiaries of their
opponents’ fumbles. The fumbles are the result of arrogance. Perhaps
the Democrats were very clever. Perhaps they let the Republicans insult
everyone who opposed the President’s Iraq policy until there was no one
left to insult and only then discovered everyone despised the
President’s policy.
Or perhaps this is a Republican trap. Let the Dems get their hopes up
then close with their hard-core infantry and sweep the field.
If in the next few weeks we conclude that this election was indeed
about Iraq it changes little. The U.S. will still have to invent a
strategy which will actually work. Any strategy selected may simply
scramble our national factions and create more controversy. We are
years from being relieved of our apprehensions about Iraq.
But we might make some changes. As we do we might keep in mind Mr.
Virgil Evans of Marfa’s closing words: “Mr. President, we are not
afraid.” •
(Also
published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas November 9, 2006.)
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