Ruminations of an Expatriate

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Saturday, February 2nd, 2008...5:36 pm

Submissive Democrats Enabled Iraq Invasion

Fomer Rhose Island Senator Lincoln Chaffee’s political memoir, entitled “Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President” will be released April 1, reports the Providence Journal’s Scott MacKay. The report to which I was led from Brad DeLong’s excellent blog.

Chaffee was defeated for reelection in 2006 by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, largely, it seems, due to dissatisfaction with the Iraqi adventure.

MacKay’s report includes this:

“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president,” writes Chafee. “Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill.

“They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. “The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.

“Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish,” writes Chafee. “That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over.”

Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”

I think Chaffee is absolutely right when he observes that “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world,…”

This is the Democratic Leadership Council, DLC, orthodoxy, which stems from the so called “Reagan Revolution”, when republicans branded democrats as weak on defense and democrats immediately rolled over and wet themselves in submission to Reagan and crew, while alpha dog Reagan chewed on their necks.

Senator Clinton and President Clinton are a charter DLC members; and, I think, the Senator’s fear “that Republicans would label [her and her coming campaign as] soft in the post-September 11 world” motivated her vote to authorize the Iraq adventure. Likewise her vote for the feel good Kyl-Lieberman Act which, amongst other things, designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

Her votes “should be a career-ending lapse[es] of judgment”.

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