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January 24, 2007

What Might Have Been

I see Howard Kurtz is thinking along the same lines I am after President Bush's State of the Union address last night.

The President pushed the bipartisanship button hard last night, a logical decision given our currently divided government. But for the first six years of his administration, with few exceptions, the President has been about as partisan as anyone could be, pushing legislation through Congress with the help of the Republican majority and running roughshod over the Democrats. Now that he has to deal with a Democratic majority (and I'm surprised more Democrats didn't comment on his use of the term 'Democrat majority'), suddenly he's Mr. Bipartisan. That may make sense politically, but having sown the wind, President Bush is a fool if he believes he's not about to reap the whirlwind.

Yet it didn't have to be this way. While I don't subscribe to the claims that the world was behind us following the September 11 attacks, I do believe that the American people were united for a time in the interest of defending the country. Those who date back to that time in the blogosphere probably remember wistfully a time when Glenn Reynolds could cite Markos Moulitsas and Oliver Willis with approval and vice versa. There was still going to be disagreement, because we all want different things from our country, but there was an opportunity to go beyond that disagreement when it came to the war. Imagine an alternate history in which on September 12, 2001, President Bush invited both Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders to the White House to discuss the war and solicit their input. Not to run the war by committee, but to develop some general areas of agreement on what needed to happen in the war, and to work with both sides of the aisle to ensure that whatever course of action America undertook, it did so with the full support of the American people.

Instead, President Bush decided to use the war as a partisan issue, with predictable results. Instead of a war that we all agree we must win, we have a war that is seen as a Republican war and that, therefore, too many on the left would be all too happy to see the U.S. lose because it would hurt their political enemies. People on the right want to blame the left for that, but it was President Bush who insisted on running the war without any consultation of the Democrats, President Bush who pushed for the vote on Iraq to be held prior to the 2002 elections, and President Bush who has consistently demonized Democrats who don't support his plans. I am much more surprised by the many Democrats who, despite all this, are willing to set that aside and hope against hope for a U.S. victory in Iraq than by the comparatively few who have reacted to the President's actions in kind.

It is too late for this President. Even assuming he suddenly begins to work with the Democrats in Congress, he has burned so many bridges that the best he could hope to do in the time he has left is rebuild a few of them. This is a tragedy for the U.S., which will almost certainly go down to defeat in Iraq, a failure that will lead to more American bloodshed in the future, and it is an even greater tragedy for the people of Iraq, who will pay the price for American partisanship for many years to come.

There is little point in dwelling on what might have been for its own sake. Doc Brown's DeLorean is not warmed up in the driveway so we can shoot back to 2001 and fix these mistakes. But this war will go on after America has left Iraq. It will go dormant for a time, I suspect, as we pull back, but our enemies will merely use that time to prepare their next strike against us. Based on al Qaeda's past history, we can expect that the next attack on our soil will be even more devastating that September 11. Which means that some future President will be faced with a choice similar to that faced by President Bush on September 12, 2001. It is to be hoped that we will have learned the lesson of President Bush by that time, so we do not repeat that mistake again.