It is safe to come home

Two notes: First, this post is one of my soapboxes. Those of you only interested in travelogue may defer. Second, Blogger recently changed their software and I'm having a devil of a time uploading photos. Still working on it, but as I'm headed to Chicago in a week in may be at least that long before the Egypt photos make it up.


I haven’t been a fan of the party for a long time, but out of some kind of paternal deference I often find myself biting my tongue about the Democrats, not really fearful of the wrath of my father’s ghost as much as eager to avoid the mental image of him shaking his head at me. He was something of a pragmatist, a charge yet to me leveled at me to my knowledge, but the Democrats were his party. He was also a child of the depression, though, so for him the party evoked FDR, a colossal, supernatural figure so far from my mind when I think of Hillary Clinton or Harry Reid that he might be from another planet, not only another century.

Of course I’m delighted that a significant slice of the American electorate has woken up and smells the IED smoke from Iraq: there’s certainly no shortage of it. I think our armed forces have deserved much better than Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush - or Peter Pace for that matter- for a long time, and most hopeful of all is the fact that the majority of voters actually thought that Iraq was the central issue of the election.

Why not celebrate, then? I guess I’d be breaking out the Karl Rove Piñata I’ve been rat holing these past six years if I felt the Democrats had won for some positive trait of their own. I like Barak Obama’s joke: “People say the Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s totally untrue. They do stand for anything.” For the party out for power, and especially one for which the forthcoming accession battle portends to be so very bloody, its difficult to have a cohesive foreign policy: they don’t speak with one voice. But it is possible to have a foreign policy, and they don’t.

At first my knee jerked predictably when some rightwing blowhard said during his Wednesday morning postmortem that the Democrats didn’t win, the Republicans lost. “How egotistical,” I thought, “it just has to be about you.” But on more sober reflection he’s quite right. The Democrats have been handed power- considerably, decisively- by simple virtue of not being the Republicans, and that depresses the hell out of me, for a couple of different reasons.

First, it justifies a very passive political strategy. I think the better minds in the Democratic party saw the Iraq war’s unraveling well ahead of this past election cycle (those of you inclined to irony may pause here for laughter). They knew that this thing would go to pieces sooner or later. In retrospect it’s obvious: all the best advice from the pentagon was to go in with no less than a third of a million troops, but the people who insisted on that were quietly fired and replaced with Rumsfeldians, while half that number marched toward Baghdad. “Don’t do anything,” the Democrats seem to have learned, “say as little as possible, and when the house of cards comes tumbling down, they’ll turn to us. Any port in a storm.” They remind me of Prince Jeffrey in the classic film The Lion in Winter, who conspires brilliantly to smear his two more favored brothers so that his father will name him heir by default, then in his moment of triumph is shocked to learn that nobody likes him much or thinks he’d make a good king. Well, the Dems may not be smear artists, but all the same Jeff got his crown this time, and that is cause for concern. Whether any politician will see the benefit in taking a stand on anything in the foreseeable future is doubtful at best: he’d have to have spent the last six months under a rock.

Second, it was a missed opportunity. Why not use this chance to point out (just to choose one of many possible examples) the staggering growth in the rich-poor gap in America over the past six years, and the direct, undeniable role Bush’s tax policies had in it? This was the chance to saddle all the best horses in the Democratic stables: good old fashioned pocketbook issues. People were dying to vote against Bush, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have something to vote for, too. James Carville says the Democrats should have got fifty seats in the house, and he may be right. Or leave that aside, and merely mention that, gee, it sure looks like fighting preemptive wars is a bad idea, or, maybe spreading freedom and democracy with a sword in hand doesn’t make sense.

We could have used the election to articulate something other than “Bush Bad.” I feel like the Incredible Hulk’s effeminate and sarcastic PR man crafting spin after one of the green giant’s more productive rampages. “Good job, big fella. But if ‘Yeee-hah’ isn’t a foreign policy, ‘Hulk smash little Texan’ isn’t one either, mmm-kay?”

Third and perhaps worst of all, it makes me fear the Democrats for the same reason I fear night swimming in an unlit Jacuzzi with a ninja. What you can’t predict can hurt you. I don’t know what the Democrats will do or what they take their mandate to be: keep on not being Bush? Without a mandate other than that, without a campaign promise to keep other than that, their newfound power seems not just a blank check, but a gargantuan stack of small bills (pun intended).

Given the choices they were handed, the American people did A Good Thing in this past election, and if I’m complaining that they could have done A Better Thing, well, that’s a nice problem to have. Twenty-first century elections, given our sample size of three, tell us things could have been much worse indeed. A buddy of mine wrote me a six word email last week: “It’s safe to come home, Peej.” It’s safer, I’ll give you that. But the Patriot act (that many of these would-be savior Democrats voted for) is still chipping away at the “Freedom” at home that Bush is supposed to be spreading abroad. Gitmo is open for business and any future adversary of ours who thinks they have an obligation to live up to the Geneva accords when dealing with US soldiers is either a saint or an idiot.

Most important and underreported of all is the recent Lancet (think Britain’s New England Journal of Medicine) report that as many as three quarters of a million Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. Many republicans have denied the study’s conclusions, but to the best of my knowledge, none have scaled an assault on its methods or data. Where was this powerful fact in the Democratic talking points? Where’s the outrage? Do we not think the blood of foreigners matters to the American electorate? If we don’t, all the more reason to make a stink about it.

And the IEDs are still going off under American soldiers, for what reason no one can say.

I wouldn’t expect any political party to solve these things overnight. But a political party that can only define itself in opposition to someone else on the most pressing issues of our lifetimes is a frail peg on which to hang your hopes. And yet, home here I come. I would beseech the old man’s ghost to look after his party along with the rest of us, but I think that would be an insult to his pragmatism. Besides, that’s our job.