Yesterday Mara Liasson, an NPR reporter and regular commentator/panelist on Fox News, with a long established liberal pedigree, remarked to Britt Hume that positions on Iraq have become so hardened that she thought bipartisanship would not be possible; people in Washington were talking past each other rather than to each other.
I think it is safe to say that no one's mind is going to be changed by anything as insignificant as facts. In part, this is because so many people have fixed their positions in relation to beliefs that are divorced from facts. As Thomas Sowell puts it today:
* The people who are scariest to me are the people who don't even realize how little they know.
No one is surprised these days to meet people who have deeply held opinions based on deeply held ignorance about the great issues of the day, about Iraq, the greater war on terror, the existence and significance of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and a host of other issues. Our pedagogy has been based on treating self-esteem rather than imparting a body of knowledge and the ability to reason that we are increasingly a nation of people more adept at feeling good than at thinking well.
The Democrats explicitly demean the intelligence of Republicans and Conservatives (when they are not impugning their motives) and the Republicans implicitly seem to accept the characterization. Our MSM, which remains our primary mode of disseminating information, out of their own ignorance, laziness, or animus, fit all news into pre-existing templates that distorts the news (most often by what they don't report as well as in their more obvious bias) and leave the less information hungry among us in a state of ignorance about our ignorance that is dangerous.
Most would naively believe that our elected officials, who represent us, would take the time and spend the energy required to inform themselves of the great issues of the day. This might seem to be the least one could hope for in a representative democracy, but it appears that our elected leaders are not only ignorant of their ignorance but indeed revel in their own ignorance.
Lawrence F. Kaplan , writing in The New Republic, bemoans the tenacious ignorance of the Democratic leaders in Congressional Leaders are Illiterate on Iraq:
Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. But, when Nancy Pelosi confessed last year that she felt "sad" about President Bush's claims that Al Qaeda operates in Iraq, she seemed to be disputing what every American soldier in Iraq, every Al Qaeda operative, and anyone who reads a newspaper already knew to be true. (When I questioned him about Pelosi's assertion, a U.S. officer in Ramadi responded, incredulously, that Al Qaeda had just held a parade in his sector.) Perhaps the House speaker was alluding to the discredited claim that Al Qaeda operated in Iraq before the war. Perhaps. But the insinuation that Al Qaeda's depredations in Iraq might be something other than what they appear to be has become a staple of the congressional debate over Iraq. Thus, to buttress his own case for withdrawal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "We have to change course [away from Iraq] and turn our attention back to the war on Al Qaeda and their allies"--the clear message being that neither plays much of a role there.
What is going on here? There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don't know what they're talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. In this, of course, they're hardly alone. The Bush administration's wretched Iraq literacy has been well-chronicled. But, with Congress demanding a louder say in the management of the war, the same knowledge gap that plagued our arrival in Iraq looks like it will be revived just in time for our departure.
Kaplan is no liberal-bashing conservative; he is a card carrying member of the liberal elite; read it all.
I think it is fair to say that almost everyone was ignorant about the nature of our enemies prior to 9/11, save some rare prescient thinkers, but there is absolutely no excuse for this level of foolishness five and a half years after that terrible day.
When liberals like Kaplan and David Broder begin to express their angst at the fecklessness of the party they have always supported, it is time for concern.
The Democrats may well win the elections in 2008 and if they continue on their current course and sabotage our best efforts to stabilize Iraq, ceding the initiative and the field to al Qaeda and Iran, the next President, Democrat or Republican, will be faced with a markedly worse strategic situation.
The strategic implications of an American defeat in Iraq are breath taking:
• Iraq will descend into mass murder and chaos, fertile ground for tyrants and sociopaths to establish terror states on the order of the Taliban led Afghanistan or Hamasistan.
• Afghanistan will follow Iraq into chaos on short order as Iran and al Qaeda turn their attention to that field of battle.
• al Qaeda will reap a bonanza of recruits eager to join the winning side.
• Iran will almost certainly have a free hand to develop/buy nuclear weapons.
• Pakistan, always one bullet away form an Islamist coup, will be further destabilized, with the risk of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of people who have minimal compunctions in their use.
• Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, et al, will become involved (more involved?) in a nuclear arms race, and face destabilization form emboldened Islamists.
• Islamist demands for special treatment in Europe will erode the EU's ability to maintain order and defend themselves.
• Terrorism in Europe and throughout the world (which has decreased outside of Iraq int he last year, evidence that al Qaeda has indeed made Iraq the central focus of their Jihad) will increase, almost certainly, with more lethal WMD.
These outcomes are easily predictable from an American defeat.
If the Democrats merely disagreed on how to proceed to fight this war and had some reasonable ideas for ameliorating the effects of an American draw-down, their almost willful ignorance would not be so frightening. Yet their remarks show that it is not simply that they disagree with the Bush approach but that they seriously misunderstand the war we are engaged in.
While this relates to the Bush administration's disastrous approach to the information aspects of the war (including their appalling lack of awareness of the need to engage the American people in the fight) and Bush's adherence to an approach that was failing for far too long, attempting to assign blame and mandate defeat in the middle of a war can only worsen the next President's options.
If the elections were in two or three months, the present rancor and defiant defeatism of the Democratic leadership would not be of great concern. After all, politicians regularly take office only to "discover" that conditions in reality are far different from what they had been campaigning on. (Recall the nonexistent Missile gap of the JFK campaign and "no new taxes" from George Bush the elder; or just consider how many of the present anti-war Democrats, previously strident in their conviction that Saddam represented a danger serious enough to warrant an American policy of regime change in Iraq, now demand a mulligan once the job was done and proved more difficult than expected.)
Unfortunately, the elections are still a year and a half away and choices made now will resonate long past November 2008.
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