The Democrats in Congress have come up with yet another way to register their displeasure with the war in Iraq.
Those if us who take note of the positive news coming from Iraq, despite its conspicuous absence from the MSM, with the surge barely underway (significantly decreased violence in Baghdad, downward slope in sectarian killing, increasing agreement on the distribution of oil revenues, a revitalized political process, the disappearance of Muqtada al-Sadr, etc) must question the behavioral underpinnings of the Democratic party's manifest behavior. A few facts are irrefutable:
• The Senate will never vote to defund the troops.
• The President will veto any bills that do pass that threaten his ability to conduct the war.
• The Senate, including most Democrats, voted for General Petraeus, the architect of the surge which they have been trying to undermine since, without a dissenting vote.
I could continue delineating the overt contradictions in the Democrats' behavior but I am more interested in what it might say about their less conscious motivations. Certainly politicians are rarely able to withstand the temptation to grandstand with symbolic votes but why should the Democrats be so committed to depicting themselves as the party of defeat; with the early reports that the surge is having a positive effect, their smartest move would be to lay low and allow events to play out; the surge works they can claim they were supportive of the troops carp about why we didn't do it sooner, and continue pressing the meme that Bush has been an incompetent steward. If the surge fails, which is still a good possibility, they could simply say "I told you so" and stroll into the White House and full control of Congress in 2008. The absolutely worst approach would be to loudly proclaim their opposition to the war, do everything they can to undermine it, fully attach the label of defeat to themselves and leave themselves exposed whether we win or lose in Iraq. Yet that is precisely what they are doing!
As always, the present derive from the past and, as Freud famously noted, there is no sense of time in the unconscious. The Democrats are still struggling to come to terms with the terrible crimes they abetted in the 1960s and 70s.
When Walter Cronkite famously proclaimed Vietnam a hopeless cause, the anti-war movement in America had a great triumph. The combination of committed anti-American leftists and their legions of useful idiots (a group in which I include myself) had conspired with the sophisticated propagandists on the left to turn the Tet Offensive from a disastrous North Vietnamese loss into a North Vietnamese victory. The logic bomb set off by Cronkite fully detonated when a Democratic Congress overwhelmed an insecure and weak Republican President to cut off funding from the South Vietnamese after all American troops were out of the country. This sealed a military victory for the North Vietnamese Communists from which the people have suffered ever since. Close to a million South Vietnamese, mostly Christian, allies and friends of the United States, ultimately died at the hands of the Communists. Further, our defeat allowed the Khmer Rouge to take over in Cambodia and murder, in the name of communist purity, approximately 2 million Cambodians.
Few Democratic leaders, who had made our craven abandonment of our allies complete in 1974, ever acknowledged the blood letting, let alone apologized for their behavior.
(The relative silence on the depredations, the evil at the core of Communism, in the MSM is not new; the New York Times passed on a chance to redress some of Walter Duranty's evil opacity in recent times; the denial goes on.)
To this day, anti-war heroes such as Jane Fonda, who can barely mouth an expression of regret for her maligning of the troops at the time, has never begged for forgiveness from those faceless victims in Southeast Asia she wronged. John Kerry, who famously impugned the professionalism, morality, and ethics, of our soldiers in Vietnam and led the charge to abandon the South to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese Communists, has never repudiated this act of betrayal.
When one cannot admit an error of this magnitude, it has longterm effects. Those who attempt to forget the past often are driven to repeat it. In order to deny the guilt of complicity in the deaths of so many South Vietnamese and Cambodian innocents, the Democrats must deny that a present day bloodbath, which they insist is occurring because of our presence, will be exponentially intensified if we leave.
And beyond the denial, the guilt lingers.
A person who suffers from unconscious guilt often behaves in self-defeating ways; their guilt insists on expiation. How else to explain the Democrats tieing themselves in knots in order to "own" our defeat in Iraq?
At this point, the only way the Democrats can win is if our country and the Iraqi people lose. The price of their political victory will be a disastrous international scene, increased violence throughout the Middle East, a resurgent al Qaeda fortified by their victory over the hated and feared Americans and severe limitations on the next President's ability to confront Iran. Even if the Democrats win, they lose. Such is the price of guilt.
NB: Dr. Sanity thinks that BDS (displacement) can explain a great deal of the Democrats' behavior:
We see something similar in much of the rhetoric of today's left and their political mouthpieces in the Democratic Party. If only Bush were gone, they insist, everything would be perfect! None of these awful things--like 9/11, for example-- would have happened and the U.S. could go back to the idyllic days of the Clintonian utopia.
...
Pelosi, Murtha and the others may very well and truly believe what they say they believe. But by making the enemy President Bush, and focusing all their energy on fighting him, they do their country and the principles they claim to represent great--and possibly irreparable--harm.
As in all things, the explanation for any behavior will include multiple determinants. Displacements of anxiety producing situations is certainly a part of the Democrats' manifest behavior. At the same time, I think their behavior is so self-defeating that we need to add to the explanation.
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