Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

Chapter One

Nothing in recent politics has been more disheartening and maddening than the Democrats' behavior on the Iraq war. We have come to expect the Democratic Party to politicize domestic and social issues. But it is still rather shocking that they also play partisan politics over life and death issues involving our national security.

We are way past the point where today's Democratic leaders even pretend to respect the long-accepted adage that "politics stops at the water's edge." They might as well have substituted "no holds barred" as their guiding philosophy on issues of national defense and foreign policy. They politicized the Iraq war even before it began but denied doing so and reversed the charge-falsely-against Republicans. Senator Hillary Clinton said, "The exercise of playing politics with war . carries with it a very high cost, and those who choose to play that game are squarely in the wrong." If only she and her colleagues could follow their own advice.

Democrats complain loudly and often about perceived challenges to their patriotism. But one cannot closely follow the news without noticing that in the War on Terror, especially in the Iraq theater, the Bush administration is fighting terrorists and insurgents on the one hand and the leadership of the Democratic Party on the other. At every turn the Democrats can be counted on to oppose and obstruct President Bush regardless of the consequences to the national interest.

With respect to President Bush's policies on Iraq, Democrats "hear no good and see no good." No matter how positive certain developments are in Iraq, they find something to complain about. There are basically two reasons for this. One is that they truly disagree-philosophically-with the hawkish bent of the Bush administration. They are appeasement-oriented to a fault, especially when their party does not control the presidency.

So they would be against President Bush on the Iraq war even if they weren't playing partisan politics. But they are-the second reason for their unmitigated opposition. It's as if they sense the horrifying potential of a smoothly run, unopposed war to boost the popularity of a commander in chief and his party. They simply cannot allow him his due on any aspect of the Iraq war, because to praise him is to elevate him politically.

From the very beginning of our attack on Iraq, the naysayers had their say. They were beside themselves that we didn't give the UN weapons inspectors more time. They predicted tens of thousands of American casualties. They were hysterical over Bush's preemptive attack. They complained that we acted unilaterally and strained relations with our European allies. They said we were alienating more Muslims than we were liberating and creating more terrorists than we could kill or capture.

They shouted "quagmire" when a sandstorm hit Iraq shortly after our invasion. They said our ground forces were moving through the desert efficiently all right, but too efficiently-so quickly that they had outrun their supply lines, resulting in unarmed and unfed soldiers. They said our drive toward Baghdad had stalled and a longer war would be likely. They said we didn't sufficiently equip and arm our troops. They said we sent too few troops. They said we sent too many troops.

We were being greeted, said the critics, not as liberators, but as occupiers. We were killing innocent Iraqi women and children. They implied we didn't care about "collateral damage," though our entire prosecution of the war was carefully designed to minimize injury and death to innocent civilians. They said we were destroying the Iraqi infrastructure. They said we didn't anticipate and guard against the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. They said we allowed stockpiles of munitions to be removed from Al-Qaqaa, a former Iraqi military installation, even though signs indicated that most of those weapons had been removed before our troops arrived in the spring of 2003. (The New York Times reported the munitions removal as a scandal of prewar planning incompetence, but it was given repeated, exhaustive coverage-sixteen separate stories in the eight days before the election-even though it was actually old news. The Times curiously discontinued reports on the story following the election.)

The naysayers said we attacked Iraq for oil. They said we attacked because we are an imperialistic nation. They said President Bush bribed other nations to commit troops and other resources to help rebuild Iraq. They said we might have had a plan to win the initial phase of the war, but had no idea how to win the peace. They said we sowed the seeds of our ultimate difficulties with the terrorists and insurgents by the very nature of our rush to Baghdad, letting Iraqi troops retreat to the countryside to fight us later. They characterized isolated cases of abuse and humiliation as a systematic policy of torture and attributed it to the Bush administration. They demanded constitutional rights for enemy combatants. They mischaracterized intercepts of international communications of terrorists as domestic spying on innocent American citizens. They were quick to rush to judgment upon news of alleged Marine atrocities in Haditha.

They say we should have anticipated the insurgency that followed the war because this was obviously Saddam's plan. Yet a recent U.S. military history study, "The Iraqi Perspectives Project," concluded that Saddam did not, in fact, plan the insurgency, mainly because he was convinced the U.S. would never invade his country and that we would never dare enter Baghdad. The study said, "As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there were no national plans to embark on a guerilla war in the event of military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such plans as its world crumbled around it."

Mission Accomplished

A perfect example of the Democrats' orchestrated pessimism was their refusal to join President Bush in celebrating the triumph of our initial rout of Saddam. They ridiculed him for piloting a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, standing in his flight suit in front of a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and declaring an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq. Though some say Bush didn't actually utter the phrase "mission accomplished," he admittedly did say, "America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."

Sometime later, with the full benefit of hindsight, liberals triumphantly condemned Bush for that "premature" assessment. They spun it as a reckless distortion, when at face value it was accurate. Saddam was removed-in short order, no less-and the Iraqi people were liberated from him. That terrorists and insurgents launched an action to undo what America had already accomplished didn't invalidate Bush's statement that we had effected a regime change.

Iraq was certainly not a terror-free zone, but it had become a free society on its way to constitutional self-rule. Perhaps it is fair game to criticize the administration for its failure to anticipate the degree to which terrorists would begin a reign of horror designed to break our will, though it remains unclear how anyone, including Nostradamus, could have predicted that with certainty.

It is unfair to say that Bush was intentionally overstating the military's accomplishment in Iraq. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what conceivable motive Bush would have had to make such a statement if he knew upcoming events would undermine our victory. Why would he voluntarily subject himself to the inevitable ridicule of his ever-eager detractors? Even if he had anticipated the nature and degree of the insurgency, there is nothing wrong and everything right with his congratulation of our troops for their accomplishment-and it was a magnificent accomplishment.

We Let Osama Escape

One of the Left's most frequently uttered antiwar mantras is that Iraq is not part of the global War on Terror and that Bush decided to attack it for personal reasons. In doing so, he diverted our resources and focus from Osama bin Laden-our real enemy. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, "Iraq never threatened U.S. security. Bush officials cynically attacked a villainous country because they know it was easier than finding the real September 11 villain, who had no country." Senator Kennedy said that though Bush mentioned terror twenty-seven times in his State of the Union address, he never mentioned the man who launched the September 11 attacks. "What world is he living in?" asked Kennedy. "He started a war we never should have fought. He stopped fighting a war we hadn't won, and left our greatest enemy in the world still at large, planning his next September 11."

One of Senator Kerry's favorite campaign slogans was that Bush outsourced the job of capturing Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001 to Afghan warlords. General Tommy Franks refuted this canard, saying that our Special Forces units were on the ground in hot pursuit of bin Laden. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Franks wrote, "As commander of the allied forces in the Middle East, I was responsible for the operation at Tora Bora, and I can tell you that the senator's understanding of events doesn't square with reality." Franks rejected Kerry's contention that we allowed bin Laden to escape after having him surrounded, saying "we don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001."

Nor, according to Franks, did we "outsource military action." President Bush never "took his eye off the ball" when it came to Osama bin Laden. Perhaps most important, Franks affirmed that "the war on terrorism has a global focus" and "cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq."

"Bush Lied, People Died"

No other accusation against Bush was as slanderous as the repeated allegation that he lied about the intelligence on Iraqi WMD in order to drag us into an unnecessary, unjustified war. This was a particularly egregious tactic by those who accused Bush of hurting our national image. Their false charges not only discredited President Bush, but damaged the image and standing of the United States in the world. If American leaders-opposition party or not-consistently tell the world that the nation's commander in chief concocted a false version of events to justify attacking a sovereign nation, without provocation, how can the world possibly think America's hands are clean in Iraq?

Certain Democrats began accusing President Bush of misconduct in the War on Terror well before we invaded Iraq in 2003. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, donning her conspiracy hat, asked shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, "What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11?" Senator Hillary Clinton was not far behind, asking on the floor of the Senate, "What did Bush know and when did he know it?" DNC chairman Howard Dean, not to be outdone, related his theory on WAMU radio that the president "was warned ahead of time by the Saudis [about the September 11 attacks]." The New York Times reported, "President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of September 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday."

All of this hype was sparked by a single Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, which didn't mention a word about plans for hijacked planes to be flown into buildings. It did mention that Osama had aspired to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 1997, and told his followers that he wanted to target Washington, D.C. But, as the briefing made clear, Osama had made this statement "after US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998," which was three years before September 11. This is why the White House was correct in referring to the intelligence contained in the briefing as "historical."

The briefing did refer to bin Laden's desire to "hijack a US aircraft," and stated that the FBI had detected al Qaeda activity suggesting "preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." But the purpose of such hijackings was "to gain the release of 'Blind Shaykh' 'Umar' Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists." The briefing mentioned that terrorists had engaged in recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." Later that evening the New York Times clarified its reporting to admit that "the briefing did not point to any specific time or place of attack and did not warn that planes could be used as missiles." But the damage had already been done. The fact remains that there was absolutely nothing in the memo that could have alerted the administration that the plane attacks were coming-or when or where. But that didn't keep the liberal press and Bush-hating Democrats from painting the picture that Bush virtually knew about the attacks in advance, could have prevented them, and chose not to do so.

Democrats also began accusing President Bush of lying about Iraq before we attacked in 2003. Three Democratic congressmen, Jim McDermott, David "Baghdad" Bonior, and Mike Thompson went to Iraq in September 2002, denouncing the United States and President Bush on enemy soil. They weren't just criticizing Bush, but supporting a U.S. enemy in a way reminiscent of Jane Fonda's trip to Vietnam to support the Viet Cong.

McDermott said he believed President Bush was willing "to mislead the American people" about Iraq. "I believe that sometimes they give out misinformation," said McDermott ". and they've shifted. First they said it was al Qaeda, then they said it was weapons of mass destruction. Now they're going back and saying it's al Qaeda again." Not only did McDermott trash his own president while in Iraq, but made statements supportive of Saddam Hussein's position on WMD. "[Iraq] said they would allow us to go look anywhere we wanted. And until they don't do that, there is no need to do this coercive stuff where you bring in helicopters and armed people and storm buildings." He said we "should take Iraqis on their face value."

Bonior, the second highest-ranking House Democrat, implied moral equivalence between Iraq and the United States. He said, "We've got to move forward in a way that's fair and impartial. That means not having the United States or the Iraqis dictate the rules to these inspections." No one was alert enough to point out to Bonior that the rules had already been dictated to Iraq as a part of the treaty Saddam agreed to after being defeated in the Gulf War.

Not only did the Democratic hierarchy fail to reprimand these misfits, other top party officials were busy competing to make similarly destructive statements. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said that the White House was "too narrowly focused on terrorism and Iraq and has steered the economy into the worst trouble since the Great Depression." Senator Robert Byrd said that President Bush's plans to invade Iraq were a conscious effort to distract public attention from domestic issues. Senators Hillary Clinton and Bill Nelson said Byrd's remarks were "the height of patriotism."

The Big Lie

Next came the Democrats' big lie about the big "lie": "Bush lied about Iraqi WMD." This claim has been particularly exasperating both because of its preposterousness and its effectiveness. As Norman Podhoretz said, "What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and arguments alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what."

Democrats, who prided themselves on not caring a whit about presidential falsehoods during the Clinton scandals, suddenly had a collective epiphany over Bush's alleged lies about Iraq. His lies were different, they said, because people died as a result. Bush hadn't lied-and Democratic Party leaders knew it. But they were in a pickle. Most of them had supported the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, which they insisted be brought to a vote, and needed to explain away their votes to their rabid antiwar base.

(Continues.)