IF ONLY I DARED TO YAWN!

By Edwin Cooney
Dated July 20th, 2007

I don’t know about you, but I’ll guess: this Iraqi war makes you just as tired as
it does me. Even more, this war seems to have brought out the worst in all of
us -- supporters and opponents, Congress, the media, and the Bush administration.

We who oppose the war want to judge the outcome of the “surge” before General David Petraeus does. To us, a surge is only an escalation in a hopeless struggle.

Supporters of the administration and its Iraqi policy look to any improvement on the proverbial battlefield for encouraging results. They try to ignore what the government is not doing and what the various dissident groups are doing to one another.

In Congress, House Democrats appear to be deliberately out of touch with much of their liberal constituency which very much wants both President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney impeached. As for their Senate colleagues, there seems to be a pre-occupation with a proposed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq which a combination of minority Republicans and conservative Democrats have the votes to prevent.

President Bush continues to stay the coarse — of course. While waiting for a glowing report from General Petraeus on the success of the recent surge, the President, speaking as usual before a handpicked audience, informed us that he was sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East for the purpose of opening up talks which will lead to a two state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Real success in this area, the President knows, would be a great achievement for his administration. Even better, it would silence a lot of smug, self-righteous, noisy people.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, all of the Democratic Presidential candidates and Libertarian GOP candidate Ron Paul of Texas oppose the Bush administration’s Iraqi policy. Most of their efforts are designed to demonstrate to the public how they — individually as President -- would be more effective than their opponents in bringing about an advantageous result out of the seemingly endless and hopeless Iraqi conflict.

As for GOP candidates, most of them, while generally supportive of the President, want us to understand (without directly saying so of course) that they individually could fight the war on terror, which they see as the legitimate reason for our being in Iraq, better than President George Bush has.

So the question is: where does this leave you and me — that is — “we the people of the United States” to whom all of our leaders and potential leaders say they look to for their wisdom?

Speaking for myself, drawing--as I do--a distinction between our struggle with Radical Islam and the evil Saddam Hussein, I opposed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I also draw a distinction between our legitimate concerns as to the ambitions of Radical Islam and their strategy of “terrorism.” Terrorism is after all a strategic tactic as was poison gas in World War I and our use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. As I’ve stated before, the British demonstrated that Irish terrorists could be negotiated with when Sinn Féin settled in 1998 following twenty-nine years of domestic terror in England which snuffed out the lives of “commoners,” members of Parliament, and even Royalty in the person of Lord Mountbatten.

Thus, I’ll go on record asserting that, while there is a violent conflict with Radical Islam, there is no such thing as a War on Terror. Terror is a tactic. In every conflict, one side seeks to have an advantage over the other which is designed to demoralize the enemy. I also insist that our invasion of Iraq was actually a step backward. Before March 19th, 2003, there was in Iraq a cruel but effective deterrent to Al-Qaida as well as to Iranian expansion. His name was Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1980s, our President (I believe his name was Ronald Wilson Reagan) treated Saddam Hussein if not like an ally than certainly like a most useful and valued helpmate despite Hussein’s treatment of his people. Nor was President Reagan the first to misjudge a foreign leader. The practice of such misjudgments goes back to FDR who believed he could manipulate “Uncle Joe Stalin” with his charm. Even further back, Woodrow Wilson treated his European colleagues during the 1919 World War I Peace conference with detached contempt.

It seems to me, therefore, that the solution to the Iraqi conflict is one for a concerted worldwide effort with Americans playing a supporting rather than a lead role. There is merit to President Bush’s decision to pursue a two state solution to the political Gordian knot in the Middle East. There is also merit in the policy of forcefully responding to the violence of militant Islam.

As for you and me, our job is to take it all in. Watch and listen to the political pundits whether they come from Fox News or CNN. We must endure it when Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff predicts a possible terrorist attack on us sometime this summer. At the same time we, the American people whose wisdom is so relied on by the President and Vice President, must listen as Mr. Cheney insists that Al-Qaida is on the run. Never mind if one or all are seriously confused. For the next eighteen months, these men have responsibility for our safety.
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As for impeachment, skip it. Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent liberal who votes with the Democrats in the Senate, made the observation that if we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate to establish a timetable for withdrawing our troops from Iraq, how can we expect to get sixty-seven votes to convict President Bush were he impeached by the House?

Hence the liberals will continue to fill the airwaves and cyberspace with complaints that the Democrats have broken faith with the worthy voters of the Fall of 2006 and threaten to permanently abandon the world’s oldest political party forever. Republicans will continue to justify the Iraqi conflict as a necessary evil while asserting that Democrats have always been for appeasement—even though conservative-oriented folks cheered the loudest when Neville Chamberlain made his bargain with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. (Back in the thirties, conservatives called themselves “Isolationists”!)

Many years ago, comedian Jim Gordon, who played the character Fiber McGee on radio, used to say of his antagonist Dr. Gamble: “He makes me tired.”

As I said at the outset, this war makes me tired, but its outcome is so important, I really and truly do not dare to yawn.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY