A Surge Of Distortions
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Speaking of the “surge,” I heartily recommend my TAC colleague Kelley Vlahos’ post on the “surge”-as-Republican loyalty test, but I would just add that there is nothing terribly new about this test. From the moment that the plan was announced, it became an article of faith among the tiresome enforcers of movement and party purity that any elected Republican who expressed any doubts or qualifications of support, no matter what they were, were to be denounced and targeted for primary challenges. Hugh Hewitt was only the most vocal and obnoxious of the movement conservatives who insisted on applying this strangest of litmus tests in the wake of the ‘06 electoral debacle in an effort to make the GOP more or less unequivocally a party identified with the Iraq war and with nothing else.
Back then, even such reliable pro-war Senators as John Warner and Sam Brownback were chastised for advocating surrender, and it was during this phase when Chuck Hagel (who had voted to authorize the war and had kept his complaints about the war muted until the midterms) was declared to be persona non grata at the White House. Even Romney’s modest wait-and-see approach for most of 2007 was turned into a liability for him on the eve of the Florida primary, when McCain shamelessly lied about what Romney’s position had been. Something that I think most analysts of the recent debate over the “surge” have missed is why McCain is sticking so doggedly to arguing over who was right a year and a half ago: it was his use of the “surge” to break Romney in the primaries that paved the way for his nomination, and I expect that he believes that he can ride this issue all the way through the general election by using it just as unscrupulously against Obama as he did against his main primary rival. The press will allow this to happen, because it is now commonly accepted wisdom that “McCain was right about the surge,” which somehow gives him license to distort his opponents’ views while officially retaining credibility on matters of national security.
Cross-posted at The Daily Dish
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Seems like the way to counter “surge-mania” by McCain and his trained poodles, is to change the terms of reference, recalling a trillion dollars spent, 4,000 plus dead and tens of thousands wounded, and for what? : “McCain – RIght on the Surge, Wrong on the War.”
Of course, no one looks too closely at the surge – what a big part of it consisted, not only of more American troops, but actually the US funding (i.e. bribing) and arming of Sunni radicals like the tribal leaders of the Anbar Awakening to “switch sides” and fight the overreaching jihadists of AQM. This makes good counter-insurgency sense and, of course, copies the tried methods of Saddam Hussein (and other past rulers in Iraq going back centuries) of wooing these Middle Euphrates Sunni Arab tribes like the Dulaymis to maintain order and keep the “regime” in power – in our case, the regime of Bush, McCain, Petraeus and their Arabian misadventure.
This conveniently leaves aside the almost guaranteed certainty that the USG armed and paid tribesmen who may have participated in the past killing of American soldiers. Certainly that kind of realpolitik is not something the GOP would want to talk about.
[...] Trivial as they seem, these episodes sum up both campaigns and the media’s treatment of both remarkably well. As he did in the primaries, McCain is simply making things up about his opponent’s positions and actions, and just as his campaign did during the primary fight against Clinton Obama and his supporters are pushing fantastic claims that McCain is exploiting racism. (As with Clinton, McCain may be benefiting from prejudice, but attempts to show that they are actively exploiting it have been laughably weak.) Remember the memo the Obama campaign circulated documenting the instances of how the Clintons allegedly politicized racism? Then as now, the things that have provoked criticism have typically been entirely or mostly unrelated to race, and even when there is some small connection it requires hysteria and hypersensitivity to find something malevolent in that connection. This line of attack on Obama’s opponents is not a new one, but the Obama campaign may be making a serious mistake in assuming that this attack will work as well in the general election as it did in the Democratic primary. Regardless, it will receive more attention and gain more traction in the press on the assumption that they have been using all year long, which is that whatever race-baiting the Clintons were supposedly employing, the GOP would use it even more extensively. [...]