The Democrats' Message on Iraq Is Confusing--And Should Be
The only certainty among Democrats is that they don’t stand united for immediate withdrawal and, following that, they can’t figure out what should be done in Iraq. All of this probably explains why while President Bush’s poll numbers plummet, the Democrats’ numbers don’t float upward.
Critics on the left are ready for battle and armed with moral clarity. MoveOn is talking about a “tipping point” and getting signatures for a petition calling to “bring the troops home.” They must feel vindicated: The organization stood against the war from the beginning and now they watch as the American public catches up.
But vindication after the fact doesn’t always help. It’s just too late in the game for ethical clarity on this issue. Once you’ve gone and invaded a country and destabilized it to the point of pandemic violence, you lose any chance of washing your hands of it. The German social thinker Max Weber called this the first lesson of an “ethics of responsibility”: When you create a mess, any quest for an immediate and clear-cut solution vanishes.
Two prior situations in our country’s past come to mind: slavery and Vietnam. It was originally Northern opponents of slavery who wanted to secede from the union in order to wash their hands of the situation and find moral clarity. They felt complicit with evil and felt better turning their back on the situation.
Now, Iraq isn’t Vietnam and it’s just too early in the war to draw parallels. Nonetheless, Vietnam does offer us the obvious lesson that sometimes staying involved in a difficult situation can itself become ethically dubious. And repeating the mantra that everything will turn out fine — here George W. Bush has taken an ironic cue from Lyndon Baines Johnson — is not ethically credible. We have to listen closely to what’s happening on the ground and listen to those who argue that remaining involved has become a detriment, even while we accept that we can’t just wash our hands like those earlier Northern secessionists wished.
Democratic Party confusion, seen in this light, is not a sign of weakness but a sign of the inherent ethical complexity of the situation. Sure, some of the debate among Democrats is political posturing. But most of it is legitimate confusion. In fact, Democratic confusion is the right message — if explained to the American public in the right way.
After all, a major problem in Iraq all along has been Bush’s style of leadership — a steadfast determination based on an absolute faith that things will turn out OK. And there is also the Republican Party’s iron-fisted unity that deems any ethical questioning of the war as unpatriotic. Now is the time to lead while admitting confusion and disagreement. And now is the time to say that the admission of complexity and the search for a middle ground between two viable ethical positions is a noble cause.
So here’s my message to the Democratic Party: Lead as if citizens of the United States of America are able — amazing as it might sound in this day of ideological certitude — to hold two contradictory thoughts in their minds at the same time. Continue to debate. It’s not a sign of weakness and it doesn’t send the wrong message to our troops or the citizens of Iraq. Rather, it sends the message that there’s typically no easy answers to difficult situations, even if the self-righteous left and right might hope so.
This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner and is reprinted with permission.