Slouching Out of Iraq

Generations of Americans have to take it on faith that wars can be won. Not since V-J Day in 1945 has there been dancing in our streets and strangers kissing in joy and relief.

With the mission in Baghdad far from accomplished, the last U. S. combat troops leave behind 4415 dead, billions of dollars spent (or stolen) and come home to a nation that is much less safe or united after seven years of sacrifice.

As the New York Times sums up the departing soldiers' mood, the war has been "not a glorious cause or... an adventure" but "a job that remains unfinished."

This echoes a Times report 35 years ago: "The last American troops left South Vietnam today, leaving behind an unfinished war that has deeply scarred this country and the United States.

"There was little emotion or joy as they brought to a close almost a decade of American military intervention."

The difference between then and now is that there is no foreseeable close. The 50,000 in so-called advise and assist brigades that remain behind, a military commander admits, although they "do not have a formal combat mission will, however, be combat capable. Some of those forces that will be embedded with Iraqi forces could indeed be drawn into combat."

What Barack Obama in his campaign called a "dumb war" is winding down not with a bang but a whimper of indefinite occupation in a country that was supposed to possess Weapons of Mass Destruction and to have harbored the 9/11 terrorists, neither of which turned out to be true.

With our human sacrifices continuing in Afghanistan, the American mood resembles that immortalized by William Butler Yeats at the end of World War II:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats ended "The Second Coming" with

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In this century, a "rough beast" of anarchy is being gestated not only in the Middle East but here at home. Its coming is no cause for celebration.

Obama Buys a Used War

When the President unveiled his vehicle for getting from here to there in Afghanistan last night, it was not, as W's chief of staff described the Iraq invasion in 2002, a "new product" but an eight-year-old jalopy retooled for an even longer, bumpier ride.

As Barack Obama "assumed full ownership," there was no shortage of tire-kickers, starting with John McCain, who judges wars on durability (i.e., 100 years in Iraq). The President reportedly placated his rival in last year's race by assuring McCain that the 2011 trade-in date could be modified by "conditions on the ground," a warranty loophole big enough to drive another Surge through.

The post-purchase debate will be all the livelier for an aging gas-guzzler that has none of the curb appeal of George W. Bush's choice, the Saddam Hussein 2003 model with such then-new features as WMDs and a shock-and-awe startup for quick acceleration.

At a pre-speech lunch, the President failed to sell even such an avid buyer of that previous rollout as Tom Friedman, who now complains the new transport has too many "moving parts," that "Afghans, Pakistanis and NATO allies all have to behave forever differently for this to work."

With so much sales resistance, Obama may want to look back at Lyndon Johnson's experience. LBJ was moving along just fine with his newly unveiled war on poverty until he switched off for a side trip aboard the sputtering Vietnam buggy, which eventually took his presidency over a cliff.

Obama: War and Peace

Next week Barack Obama will announce he is sending tens of thousands more troops to fight in Afghanistan as he prepares ten days later to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway.

This juxtaposition raises questions about the "new climate in international politics" for which the Nobel Committee has cited him, observing, "Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts."

But such instruments will not work against those committed to fight a Holy War to the death, and the President now says he "will finish the job" of what he deems "a necessary war" with some yet-to-be-disclosed combination of diplomatic and civilian efforts as well as military force.

When he tells the American people exactly how next Tuesday night, he will be facing a public that is deeply divided about the war. No matter how skillfully Barack Obama explains his decision, an older generation will be thinking of Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam.

Bill Moyers, who worked in the White House back then, speaks for all of us:

"(O)nce again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

"Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

"And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

"And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

"We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes."

LBJ never won a Nobel Peace Prize and left office a broken man. In a new century, Barack Obama can learn much from his fate and write a different ending to the story.

Afghanistan: Could We, Should We Go?

We have been here before--fighting and occupying countries with ancient hatreds and no history of anything resembling democracy--in Vietnam and Iraq. Lyndon Johnson's pride led to humiliation, George W. Bush's stubbornness to stalemate. Can Barack Obama's rationality save us from more of the same in Afghanistan?

In the New York Times today, as the cheerleaders for the Surge argue for an encore, Leslie Gelb makes the opening argument in the case for "How to Leave Afghanistan." It is an alternative the President should hear and consider.

The voters did not choose John McCain's approach to fighting terrorism, and the Obama Administration has a moral obligation to explore other choices than the policies that bogged us down in Iraq and will keep us there indefinitely, no matter what the timetables say.

"Our strategy in Afghanistan," Gelb argues, "should emphasize what we do best (containing and deterring, and forging coalitions) and downgrade what we do worst (nation-building in open-ended wars). It should cut our growing costs and secure our interests by employing our power more creatively and practically. It must also permit us--and this is critical--to focus more American resources and influence on the far more dire situation in Pakistan."

His proposal is to increase money, arms and training to friendly Afghans as US troops withdraw gradually while trying to buy away less extreme elements of the Taliban from their leadership and Al Qaeda and keeping available the option of air strikes to keep them bought.

Most important, Gelb argues, "Obama must do what the Bush team inexplicably never seemed to succeed in doing--stop the flow of funds to the Taliban that comes mainly through the Arab Gulf states. At the same time, he could let some money trickle in to reward good behavior."

What's important now are not the details of any particular proposal to keep us from putting more and more American lives at risk, but a mindset that will explore other options than those that served us so badly in Vietnam and Iraq and threaten to do it again in Afghanistan.

Mission Creep in the Middle East

John McCain's hyperbole about keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years is alarmingly echoed in a Washington Post OpEd by one of the saner foreign policy experts on the Washington scene.

"What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common," Anthony Cordesman writes, "is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.

"Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020."

Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.

Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.

Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.

We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?

The Obama Mystique

Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California, whose husband is backing McCain, comes out for Obama.

Alma Rangel, the First Lady of Harlem, whose husband, Congressman Charlie Rangel is backing Hillary Clinton, comes out for Obama.

Susan Eisenhower, whose grandfather was a Republican legend, comes out for Obama.

Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, the Senator from Missouri, the Governor of Kansas... The list of prominent women who are choosing Obama over the potential first woman president keeps growing.

Last month, one of the icons of the Movement, Gloria Steinem, argued for the election of Hillary Clinton in a New York Times OpEd piece, asserting "the sex barrier (is) not taken as seriously as the racial one."

But her counterpart who started it all with "The Feminine Mystique," might not agree. If she were still alive, Betty Friedan would be out there for Obama.

In 1968, Friedan and I were working together for Eugene McCarthy to stop the war in Vietnam. She would not be likely to back Hillary Clinton, who voted to start the one in Iraq, over Barack Obama, who spoke out against starting it.

There are times when bloodshed trumps both gender and race.

Stoning Bush

If ye have tears for George W. Bush, prepare to shed them now. Oliver Stone is going to make a movie about him.

On the other hand, that may be the Decider's best chance for an upgrade in history. In some quarters, such as this one, there is great sympathy for the subjects of Stone's blow-torch reinventions of the truth, as in his lie-filled "JFK" about the assassination.

"It's a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to 'Nixon,' to give a sense of what it's like to be in his skin," Stone tells Variety. "But if 'Nixon' was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone. People have turned my political ideas into a cliche, but that is superficial. I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being..."

Stone's empathy is illustrated by his description of the theme of his projected "fair, true portrait of the man: How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

This new project will replace Stone's attempt to immortalize Iran's Ahmadinejad, who turned him down last year because he is "part of the great Satan."

Stone began his career as a moviemaker in the 1970s after returning from Vietnam, in his words, "very mixed up, very alienated, very paranoid." If his goal has been to make us all that way, he has been doing very well. Whatever he does to George W. Bush won't change that.

War Over War Movies

Before Vietnam, war movies were either gung-ho patriotic starring John Wayne or philosophically anti-war, starting with “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

This week the Los Angeles Times has been OpEding an argument prompted by a conservative’s contention that today’s Hollywood “stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year streak of working against the United States' strategic objectives at a time of war.”

That’s a mouthful of accusation: 40 years of celluloid treason, and most Americans failed to notice. While there are legitimate questions about Brian DePalma’s latest opus, they don’t begin to support a collective indictment of Hollywood film-makers as disloyal to their country.

Looking back at decades of the best war movies, from “Paths of Glory” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to “Saving Private Ryan” and “Flags of Our Fathers,” what’s most striking is how apolitical they have been, evoking horror over the brutality, hypocrisy and waste of lives and/or celebrating the bloody gallantry of young people under fire.

Until now, even in time of war, serious film-makers were not propagandists with “strategic objectives” but artists trying to get at universal truths.

Just before Iraq, a number of conservative contributors to National Review named as their favorite war movie “Patton,” the 1970 biopic of America’s red-white-and-blue World War II general, co-written by Francis Ford Coppola.

Seven years later, Coppola made “Apocalypse Now,” which ideologues would see as a savage indictment of our involvement in Vietnam.

But both were made years after the wars were over and neither was intended as a political statement, any more than “The Godfather,” which came between the two.

Hollywood people have always had strong political beliefs, but few expressed them during working hours. There was too much money at stake.

Dan Rather's Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas’ fierce poem must have influenced Dan Rather in adolescence, as it did me, and now he has taken it to heart by suing CBS and its executives for the dying of his TV light sooner than deserved.

His $70 million lawsuit claims the network violated his contract by not giving him enough airtime on “60 Minutes” after he was forced to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005 and that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” investigation of the broadcast about George W. Bush’s National Guard service and thereby “seriously damaged his reputation.”

If it goes to trial, the suit should shed light on more than Rather’s treatment by CBS. The piece of journalism in question played a part, potentially crucial, in Bush’s 2004 reelection and diverted attention from the truth about the President’s service during Vietnam to the shaky reporting about it by CBS.

By calling into question the authenticity of one letter, it allowed the Rove Smear Machine to drum up sympathy for Bush’s “mistreatment” by the media rather than continuing the inquiry into his evasion of combat service during the war.

Skeptics will note that Rather’s action comes only after Don Imus extracted a settlement from the network of his contract and that his hurt feelings have been consoled all along by continuing to collect his $6 million annual salary. But CBS’ casual willingness to sacrifice his lifetime of good work as a respected reporter to placate Bush yahoos is a subject that deserves an airing.

It certainly won’t get it on “60 Minutes.”

Bush's Plan B

For years, the Administration ducked and weaved to avoid allowing the morning-after pill called Plan B to become available to Americans facing the consequences of imprudence, mishaps or poor judgment.

Now President Bush, faced with his own need for a Plan B in Iraq, is unwilling to abort his misbegotten war.

The crux of the analogy is that the man who self-righteously wants individuals to take responsibility for their mistakes keeps denying his own and letting innocent young people pay for them with their lives.

Tonight he will again insult our intelligence by claiming success in Iraq and then take credit for bringing home the additional troops he put there this year who were scheduled to leave in any case.

When Vietnam was failing, a shrewd old Republican Senator from Vermont, George Aiken, said, “There's only one way out of there, that's to declare victory and just leave."

For the Iraq disaster, Bush’s answer is to declare victory and stay.

Truth-Tellers Who Lie

Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."

He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary of a soldier to convey the horrors of the Iraq war.

Only one tiny problem: The film, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is a “docudrama,” blending fictional techniques with all that unvarnished truth. "Everything that is in the movie,” he says, “is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."

This is in the tradition of that other great Hollywood truth-teller, Oliver Stone, who filled the heads of a generation with his own paranoid fantasies about the death of a President in “JFK.” The truth ran a distant second to Stone’s inventions.

De Palma and Stone talk about art but their work is propaganda to blow-torch viewers’ minds. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Iraq have left scars on the American psyche that are bad enough without the self-righteous, self-serving efforts of Hollywood “artists” to dig into them with their overheated imaginations.

Coppola told us truths about Vietnam in “Apocalypse Now,” but he didn’t call it journalism.

If the media have whitewashed Iraq, what purpose is served by a blackwashed version? Where are the shades of gray? If he read the polls, De Palma might see that most Americans don’t need him hammering at them to understand what has been going on in Iraq.

Iraq and Vietnam, Bush and LBJ

Now that the Decider is invoking Vietnam as the touchstone for Iraq, he may want to consider the fate of the man who presided over that war.

Like Bush, Lyndon Johnson believed passionately in the necessity of his conflict, in the domino theory that losing Vietnam would lead to the fall of Southeast Asia, just as this President is certain that success in Iraq will determine what happens in the whole Middle East.

Johnson was wrong. We lost. Southeast Asia did not go Communist. Bush went to Vietnam last year and at a banquet offered a toast to “strengthening our ties."

The President should look at what happened after LBJ left office. He lived the remaining four years of his life in a depression so deep that he couldn't write his memoirs and died of a heart attack the day his successor, Nixon, admitted defeat and withdrew from Vietnam.

Had LBJ survived, he would be marking his 99th birthday next week and might have some advice for Bush, his fellow Texan. A misbegotten war can undo a lifetime of achievement such as a landmark Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty.

But then, Bush would have no idea of what Johnson was talking about. In six and a half years so far, his domestic achievements have been zero, unless you count tax cuts for the rich and denying health care to poor children.

Swift-Boating Congress

The man who wouldn’t fight for his country in Vietnam yesterday gave those who did false analogies about their war to the one he is now waging with the lives of another generation.

Be thankful for smalls favors that President Bush did not dress up in the flight jacket he wore for his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but his Iraq comparisons to Vietnam and World War II had no more reality than that Commander-in-Chief moment in 2003.

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Sen. John Kerry said after the speech.

Kerry knows first-hand about the Bush big-lie machine that is now gearing up to swift-boat Congress as it did his war record during the 2004 Presidential election and, before that, John McCain’s Vietnam experience in the primaries of 2000.

Now advertising will be aimed at lawmakers, especially Republicans, who face re-election next year. An interest group, Freedom’s Watch, is beginning a month-long, $15 million campaign to pressure wavering members of Congress to stay the Surge course. Ads will run in 20 states, in more than five dozen Congressional districts.

This bunch has no idea of how to run a war, but it is very good at smearing those fought one and those who want to stop the senseless carnage they started and can’t finish.

If George Bush ever takes time out from comparing himself to great leaders of the past, he might want to take a look at what a real military commander, Dwight Eisenhower said when leaving the Oval office:

“People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

Another Draft to Dodge? Not Likely

Talk about political non-starters: The President’s “war czar,” Gen. Douglas Lute, asked yesterday on NPR about a return of the draft to ease pressures on the U.S. military, answered, “I think it makes sense to certainly consider it, and I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.”

Not to worry. According to the AP, the Army is pulling out all the stops to get new volunteers with sign-up rewards that may include up to $45,000 tax-free to help buy a home or build a business as well as money for college and to pay off student loans.

At the same time, recruitment is loosening rules on age and weight limits, education and drug and criminal records.

Before asking today’s privileged young people to emulate George Bush, Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton in finding ways to avoid going to Iraq, the government will try to sign up all the overweight, financially strapped drug users it can find.

Smart People, Dumb Choices

As an antidote to Bush fatuity, we now have the thinking man’s explanation for supporting the war and getting it totally wrong.

A former Harvard professor now a member of the Canadian parliament, Michael Ignatieff writes in the New York Times Magazine today:

“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us...What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror...

“I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds...I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying...”

Ignatieff is more than a bit glib, but shrewd on the differences between academics and politicians: “Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.”

But Ignatieff is too easy on himself. Going back to David Halberstam’s dissection of the intellectuals who misled JFK into Vietnam, the ironically titled “The Best and the Brightest,” it has become fashionable to dismiss thinking in favor of instinct in matters of war and peace, life and death. We need both, and we need them in people who admit human fallibility and still have the courage to make the best decisions they can.

Informed emotion may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s our best hope.

Liberal, Progressive, Whatever

In the YouTube debate, Hillary Clinton said she would rather be called “progressive” than “liberal.” As usual, her judgment is poll-perfect.

Later in the week, the Rasmussen Reports asked voters and found:

“Just 20% said they consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically liberal while 39% would view that description negatively. However, 35% would consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically progressive. Just 18% react negatively to that term.”

Irving Kristol, father of Bush’s best media friend William, famously described a neo-conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” a snappy definition with a touch of sly racism. In today’s political atmosphere, a progressive might be defined as a liberal who has changed his (or her) name out of ambition.

Until the Ann Coulters of the world worked so hard to make it a synonym for godless and goofy, liberal was a badge of honor for those who valued people over property and, in the last century, helped create Social Security, unemployment insurance, civil rights for minorities and opposed the war in Vietnam on the same principles that they now oppose the war in Iraq.

Even today, the most-educated Americans, including college professors, describe themselves as liberal and (hold the snickering from the cheap seats) so do I.

It’s saddening that Hillary Clinton, as her husband did, feels compelled to change her political name.

Honoring the Dead, Conveniently

As Americans turn against the war in Iraq, the deaths of our young people there are getting harder to bear. At one Army base, Fort Lewis in Washington, the Commander has decided to honor the fallen, instead of with services for each soldier, a collective memorial once a month.

“If I lost my husband at the beginning of the month, what do you do, wait until the end of the month?” asks the wife of one soldier in Iraq. “I don’t know if it’s more convenient for them, or what, but that’s insane.”

From the Gettysburg Address on, Americans have been torn between gratitude and grief for the young men, and now women as well, sent to die for such abstractions as freedom and honor. But until the past half century, those words had weight and meaning.

Now on Memorial Day, when the President says “patriots from every corner of our Nation have taken up arms to uphold the ideals that make our country a beacon of hope and freedom for the entire world,” how many of us believe that?

Vietnam changed everything. In a movie 20 years ago, “Gardens of Stone,” about old soldiers who tend graves at Arlington National Cemetery, one of them says, "In this war, there is no front. It's not even a war. There's nothing to win and no way to win it."

Now Iraq makes that seem an understatement. But even in the most senseless and brutal of wars, dying is the same solemn reality it has always been. Politicians can debate whether our young men and women are giving up their lives “in vain,” but those deaths can’t be “disremembered.”

The Ft. Lewis Commander will probably feel too much pressure to go on with his wholesale remembrances once a month, and so he should. If we are to stop the deaths and prevent more in the future, we can’t conveniently avoid grieving over them one at a time.

“Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead,” Susan Sontag wrote. “Heartlessness and amnesia go together.”

New Kind of Washington Wake-Up Call

With their sleeping cots and general disarray, Senate Democrats are evoking images of protests past against an unresponsive government. Granted that demonstrations of old were not by elected officials, the symbolism is familiar.

In 1932, with World War I veterans starving during the Depression, more than 10,000 came to D.C. and camped out, demanding the bonus that had been promised them. They ended up being rousted by the Army under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur who ignored President Herbert Hoover’s order to go easy. Generals were feistier then.

In 1969, a quarter of a million peaceful protesters against the war in Vietnam converged on the nation’s capital, holding candlelight vigils until morning. “I do believe,” Sen. Ted Kennedy told them, “this nation is in danger of committing itself to goals and personalities that guarantee the war's continuance.”

The dramatic difference this time is that anger and frustration are directed, not against the government, but by one branch of the Washington power structure against another.

Only a President with the insensitivity and arrogance of George W. Bush could have driven the Congress of the United States to such expression of enraged impotence. Even Herbert Hoover was incapable of that.

The McCain Mutiny

With mass departures today from his campaign staff, it may be time to write John McCain’s political obituary. The captain of the Straight Talk Express deserves to go out on his shield like the honorable warrior he has always been.

In an eerie parallel to Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” the Senator from Arizona morphed from a lifelong by-the-book career serviceman to the unhinged Capt. Queeg of the popular 1950’s novel, play and movie.

In the anger over his support for an insane war, it would be an injustice if McCain’s service to his country were swept out with the Iraq wreckage. Unlike Bush, Cheney and, yes, Bill Clinton, he served and suffered through Vietnam, another unjust war not of his making.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, an Admiral, was stationed, John Sidney McCain III went to Annapolis, was wounded in Vietnam, and captured and tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner, most of it in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

As a Senator, he has advocated gun control, campaign finance reform and a humane approach to immigration legislation.

McCain might have been a quirky President, but unlike Bush, an honorable one if he hadn’t been derailed by the Rove smear machine in 2000 and his own mistakes for 2008.

But the Republican field of candidates he leaves behind provides the best possible contrast to his integrity.

Ave et vale, Senator.

"My Country, Right or Wrong"

John Boehner is a living metaphor for the political muddle in Washington over Iraq.

During a meeting of the Republican Congressional caucus yesterday, the House Minority Leader reportedly characterized Senate colleagues as “wimps” for backing away from unquestioning support of the Bush policy.

He was rebuked by Rep. Heather Wilson, a former Air Force officer, who expressed admiration for Sen. Richard Lugar’s speech about rethinking Middle East policy.

Boehner is an emotional man. In May, before debate about the Surge, he wept openly as Rep. Sam Johnson talked of his years as a POW in North Vietnam, describing how his captors would play tapes of antiwar protesters back home over prison loudspeakers.

The Minority Leader was strongly moved by Johnson’s analogy of his experience in hearing that opposition to any expression of Congressional disapproval of the policy in Iraq.

There is no reason to question Boehner’s sincerity or patriotism, but his judgment is another matter. He embodies a classic American debate.

In 1816, after a victory, Naval Commander Stephen Decatur proposed a toast: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”

In 1872, Sen. Carl Schurz, a former General, amended that declaration: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

George Bush has complicated that difference by re-defining patriotism as support for a mindless, belligerent foreign policy that has alienated our country from almost all of the civilized world.

In Boehner’s heart, it may simply be a question of patriotism, yes or no. But someone should explain to him that Bush’s Neo-Cons have hijacked American patriotism and that some of those in both parties who truly love their country are fighting to get it back.