On April 18, 2007, a series of five car bombs hit Baghdad, killing almost 200 people. Showing his customary lack of restraint and his trademark political opportunism, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, attempted to score partisan points. Seeking out a gaggle of press microphones the next day, Reid proclaimed, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week." Reid's comments, so close on the heels of a massacre, provided a tidy snapshot of how the vultures of the left operate. Whether in, the mainstream media, or even the U.S. Senate, they wait for bad news from Iraq and then swoop in with abandon to derive political benefit from a tragedy.
Reid's declaration of defeat would be an especially poignant embarrassment were the left capable of embarrassment. First of all, the intemperate and ludicrously premature comments in question came not from some 20-something blogger who lives with his parents and lives on Chinese take-out, but from the Senate majority leader! Furthermore, Reid was audaciously careless with the facts. When he declared the surge a failure in April 2007, it hadn't even fully begun. A large portion of the surge troops had yet to arrive in Iraq. The strategic changes that General David Petraeus was implementing were still in their nascent stage. Reid doubtless knew all of this, and yet still called the surge a failure.
But Reid's cravenness in this episode plumbed still greater depths. A ranking member of the U.S. government, Reid responded to a major terrorist attack by calling for surrender. If Reid had any concerns about how our enemies might take such a response and how it might incentivize their future actions, he didn't let those concerns slow his rush to criticize the Bush administration.
The vultures of the left habitually hover, waiting for bad news from Iraq. Whatever bad thing happens becomes their propaganda item du jour. For instance, the 4,000th American casualty in Iraq triggered a paroxysm of "commemoration" in the leftwing blogosphere and other anti-Bush outposts.
Some people insist that those on the left who mark such "grim milestones" do so because they are sincerely grieved. While it's impossible to know what lies in the hearts of the vultures, an objective look can't help but raise questions about just how grief-stricken they are. In the days before the 4,000th casualty occurred, one could almost sense the anticipation. When the time came, some left-wing websites chose to "honor" the fallen by running a portrait of George W. Bush and John McCain composed of tiny pictures of the 4,000 fallen. One wonders whether those involved in the project asked the families of the fallen if they felt this was an appropriate use of their loved ones' images.
What Reid and his fellow vultures reveal is that much of the American left reached its conclusions about Iraq long ago, even though the picture was fluid. These people won't let new facts disturb their settled view. Regardless of any results of the surge, Reid had his story and he was sticking to it. Even if the surge reduced civilian casualties by, say, 80 percent, Reid knew he would never concede its effectiveness.
In a fascinating piece in World Affairs, war correspondent George Packer took note of this phenomenon at a less lofty level. In his article he wrote, “Once, after a trip to Iraq, I attended a dinner party in Los Angeles at which most of the other guests were movie types. They wanted to know what it was like 'over there.' I began to describe a Shiite doctor I'd gotten to know, who felt torn between gratitude and fear that occupation and chaos were making Iraq less Islamic. A burst of invective interrupted my sketch: none of it mattered--the only thing that mattered was this immoral, criminal war. The guests had no interest in hearing what it was like over there. They already knew.”
It's one thing for a bunch of Hollywood airheads and future alcoholics to cherish a reckless ignorance. The worst they can do is make execrably boring movies that no one will pay to see. But it's quite another thing when this attitude finds a home among leading politicians.
After the fighting in Basra wound down last week, the vultures of the left once again took flight, and once more Harry Reid led the flock. While people of good will on both left and right were trying to figure out what the fighting in Basra meant, Reid needed no time to gather facts. Instead, he leapt to his usual conclusions, insisting that the Basra fighting foretold disaster and exposed Bush administration mendacity and incompetence. "Instead of making our own country safer," Reid droned, "we are greasing the pockets of corrupt Iraqi politicians and buying their temporary cooperation."
Elsewhere, other observers were trying to add something constructive to the conversation, an act that holds no interest for the vultures of the left. Writing in the New York Times, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, for example, offered a sober description of what lies ahead in both Iraq and Afghanistan. "The American people must continue to be patient," Nagl wrote. "In the 20th century, the average counterinsurgency campaign took nine years. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to run longer, and other commitments loom in this protracted struggle against Al Qaeda and its imitators."
Nagl is an expert on counterinsurgency and a supporter of the war, but his piece was no exercise in cheerleading. It was a good faith effort to level with the American people. It is precisely this kind of dispassionate and informed analysis that the events in Iraq require and that the American public deserves.
It is a sad commentary on the state of the political discourse that analyses like Nagl's have a hard time competing for attention in a marketplace dominated by the hyper-partisan squawking of the vultures of the left.
