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In the run-up to the Iraq war, I tried hard not to be partisan. I distrusted the Bush administration and feared it would be politically empowered by the war. But such thoughts felt petty and limited at such an important time. And so I evaluated the arguments for war on their merits, irrespective of my feelings about the people making them. Doing so made me feel superior to the Democrats, who, I suspected, would have supported an Iraq war waged by Al Gore, and to the Republicans, who had opposed the Kosovo war because it was waged by Bill Clinton.
But, in retrospect, my efforts not to be limited proved limiting. Partisanship, it turned out, was an extremely useful analytical tool in understanding the Iraq war. Had I not tried so hard to cleanse myself of it, I might have seen some of the war's problems earlier than I did.
This was a partisan war. By partisan, I don't mean that it was led by Republicans. It was partisan in the sense that the people who formulated it prized group loyalty above all else. They divided the world, the country, and even their own administration into people who could be trusted and people who could not. And, unfortunately, the people who could be trusted knew much less about how to build democracy in Iraq than the people who could not.
Digby has some comments.
- For some of us, it was enough to watch the "conservatives" engage in a decade long smear campaign, impeach a president over a private sexual matter and then steal an election to prove that they are "not as we'd like them to be." But, those were such fun times for the press, when they all got to pretend like they were happenin'--- talkin' 'bout the nasty 'n shit, all the while cluck clucking like a bunch of women's temperence workers over the horrors of sexual incontinence. They just couldn't bear to see the party end. The deification of Bush after 9/11 was just the latest chapter in their lazy acceptance of GOP political propaganda.
It was, in fact, another example of that which Beinert finally realized perpetuated the failure in Iraq --- myopic, group loyalty so profoundly disdainful of anyone outside of it that they cannot be trusted to even carry out their own plans successfully. The modern GOP lives in a little world of its own, made even more parochial by the advent of its own media infrastructure. The people who are in charge are second rate thinkers who rose to the top because the pool was so small to begin with.
As a partisan Democrat, would I have been more likely to have supported a war pushed by President Gore? Sure, but it's really quite irrelevant. The dishonesty and incompetence of this administration with respect to Iraq was on display for all to see. I may have been more likely to trust "Al Gore's war," but I sure as hell wouldn't have supported "Al Gore's war" if the Gore administration had behaved anything like the Bush administration did.
There were a lot of factors in the timing of the runup to the war, but the Nov. '02 elections was a prime one. It was dispiriting that few in the press could bring themselves to believe that the administration would play politics with something so serious. It was dispiriting because it was so obvious they were playing politics, and as Beinart finally notices, used it to be as divisive as possible.
It was no way to unite a country to go to war.