So the emotional and crucial American elections of 2006 are over. The Democrats won big.
If you look back at the errant stupidity of these last six years–the arrogance, hubris and wastefulness of leaders who haven’t yet figured out that they have destroyed an entire country in the Middle East–you come out thinking that these elections must mean a lot. Out of Iraq, with some fig leaf of military dignity! A united Congress striking out at real policies! A country where citizens sit down and talk to one another again! But will they mean anything? Unfortunately, the questions still trump the answers.
Will the Democrats coming into power, given their incompetence since the spirit of the party was virtually destroyed by “their” Vietnam War, be capable of addressing this related war that they almost all supported? Will the White House and the Pentagon be able to comprehend that something has gone terribly wrong, even while their loyalty-challenged rats, the war-happy neocons, desert a sinking ship? Finally, will the American citizenry continue to care, as apparently we did Tuesday–or will we just go back to private lives of professional ambition and public lassitude?
Today, much more than after the elections six years ago and two years ago, we know where we are. Iraq is a morass, a fiasco, probably a historical sin. More than 2,800 Americans have died, and approximately 20,000 are maimed. Another 50,000 suffer lifelong results of concussions, and about 40,000 or more have serious psychiatric problems. (Nobel Prize economics winner Joseph Stiglitz estimates it will take $2 trillion or more in our lifetimes just to care for the victims.)
The war itself will cost in congressional outlays alone about $500 billion and, in the impact on our country, between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.
All for nothing.
In truth, we didn’t know a thing about Iraq. We destroyed it on one of our heavy-handed stomps around the world to save people from themselves. It’s just an updated Vietnam War version of “We had to destroy the village to save it.”
So the new Congress cannot pretend that it doesn’t know. Some particularly apt Americans are saying it is America that is near to becoming a failed state.
As professor Harlan Ullman, a perceptive columnist with The Washington Times, wrote just before the elections, his own “pessimism stems from a political system crippled by the worst excesses of partisanship, ideology and animosity, and overwhelmed by an array of problems as numerous, complex and unyielding to solution as at any time in our history. Government is badly broken. And, worse, too many issues … have no obvious or viable solutions, irrespective of which party is in command.”
“Broken” is a perfectly good word, but I prefer “disconnected” to talk about America today. This is why 30 men, mostly those now-retreating neocons, could get us into a war that the American people barely noticed.
Still, there is hope. The report of the Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton should be released soon. With the sober intelligence and superb strategic and tactical–and human–judgment of these two great Americans and their team, we can expect the best–if President Bush will listen to them. But then again, why should the president listen to his poor minions–unless this new Congress tells him he has to?
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And now–would you believe it?–Donald Rumsfeld, a man of futile wars, of cruel wars, a man who has demeaned all the institutional rules that kept this country and the world reasonably civilized, has finally resigned. That makes the future more hopeful.
But it’s just the beginning of a change that will come only with more suffering, more struggling, and then a long period of making up for all the mistakes. That is why I’m hopeful, but cautious.
Or as President Ronald Reagan always said, “Trust, but verify!”
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