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September 26, 2006

What Have We Learned?

After a devastating attack on the American homeland that resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, the United States plunged into war on two fronts. Despite widespread support for the war, one Senator stepped forward to take a hard look at how the United States was spending its money. What he found appalled him, and he spent the next two years rooting out corruption and mismanagement from the budget, going after military contractors who were taking advantage of the war to line their own pockets with little concern for the goods and services they were providing to the military. The crusading senator saved the government as much as half a trillion dollars and helped to ensure quality products were provided to the war effort.

Obviously I'm not talking about today's war, nor a modern senator. History buffs will recognize this crusader as none other than Harry S Truman, who would become FDR's last Vice President in 1944 and his successor only 82 days into FDR's fourth term, largely on the strength of the work he put in as head of what became known as the Truman Committee. Truman supported the war, of course, but he understood that he had a job to do as a United States Senator, and he did it exceedingly well. He understood that supporting the war and the troops didn't mean uncritically accepting what he was told. Today's Congress would do well to follow his lead and do a lot more investigating of issues like military spending and administration conduct. While I happen to think the administration has the best of intentions regarding trying to protect the United States from terrorism, good intentions tend to run afoul of our unfortunate tendency as a species to make mistakes. And with a supine Congress and a political culture that emphasizes success at the polls over anything else, when the President makes a mistake (or many), he can really put the country in a hole.

Sooner or later, (probably sooner), the country will have another President who wants to take the nation to war. When that time comes presumably (hopefully) he will go to the Congress and request a declaration of war, or more likely an authorization for the use of force. When that day comes, I wonder if that future Congress will have learned anything from our experience in Iraq. While most Republicans who voted in favor of the AUMF in Iraq have stood by their votes, there were plenty of Democrats who voted for it in 2002 because they feared voting aganst it would hurt them at the polls, and who have since repudiated their vote by claiming that they were in some way misled. Yet Congress has the power and the responsibility to oversee America's intelligence agencies. They had and have the power to request everything the CIA produces, not just to see what the President wants them to see. If they were misled, they are not blameless in that, for they chose to accept what the administration claimed without doing their due diligence. Personally, I don't think anyone was misled; I think they believed that their vote might hurt them politically and so chose to vote against their beliefs. Might a vote against the war have hurt them? I'm sure it would; the Republican party has demonstrated an impressive bent for demagoguing the war issue. But part of being in Congress is supposed to be a willingness to act on behalf of one's constituents, if only once in a while. And if there is any vote more important than one that will send the country to war, I cannot imagine what it might be. Conversely, it was simply unconscionable of the Republicans to play politics with the vote by holding it just prior to the 2002 elections.

Had many of the issues that have been raised since the Iraq invasion in 2003 had been brought out in 2002, perhaps the AUMF could have been defeated. Even if not (and I think it was unlikely), Congress could have pushed the administration to do a better job of planning for the invasion and the occupation, rather than passively accepting the 'three months and out' concept SecDef Rumsfeld advocated. Instead, the country went to war on a very weak foundation of votes that were cast out of fear of political consequences rather than the belief war was the proper course of action. The result was predictable, albeit made worse by the Bush administration's impressively poor planning for the war: when things got tough, as they will in war, the Representatives and Senators who didn't really think Iraq was a good idea in the first place began speaking their mind. While I don't object to anyone speaking their mind, the decision to do so once the mission was begun provided the worst of both worlds: the illusion of support for the mission that allowed it to go forward combined with an almost-immediate undermining of the war. I do not believe for a second that the Iraq mission would have been much more successful, if at all, if all the Congressmen who voted for the war put their minds to trying to win it rather than how to get out of it, but their about-face certainly didn't help things. The country would have been better-served had they simply voted their conscience in the first place.

So...will this experience change anything in the future? Will a future Congress press the administration harder on its case for war before agreeing to commit U.S. forces to combat? Will those Congressmen who don't agree with the rationale for the war speak out before the vote, rather than voting out of fear of negative electoral fallout? Iraq has cost our country thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and incalculable prestige in the international arena. In all likelihood we will eventually lose the war in Iraq, barring a significant change in the Iraqis' willingness to come together as a people. It would be nice to believe that at least we might learn something from the failures that brought us to this point.