Yesterday Mickey Kaus, writing on Slate, referred to “this week’s coming CW [conventional wisdom] sigh of relief that the campaign is finally about something important, namely Iraq.”
Kaus’ prediction proved accurate. Since John Kerry’s Monday speech, in which he took on President Bush over Iraq, highbrow pundits and opinion writers have rushed to let us know how pleased they are that we can finally have a substantive debate over the war, instead of dwelling on the events of 30 years ago.
“Perhaps the presidential campaign is finally underway,” rejoiced the New York Times editorial board yesterday.
On the opposite page, columnist David Brooks echoed that sentiment: “This country has long needed to have a straight up-or-down debate on the war. Now that Kerry has positioned himself as the antiwar candidate, it can.” (In fact, Kerry has positioned himself as someone who can better make the cause of fixing Iraq an international one, and Brooks’s paean to our newfound ability to honestly debate the war relies entirely on a distortion of Kerry’s meaning. But we’ll let that go for now.)
Today, the celebration continues. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post writes, “Iraq could supplant Vietnam as the campaign’s big issue, which would make it about something big, important and real, as opposed to who did what to whom 30 years ago.”
The New York Times editorial board was so overcome with joy that it felt the need to weigh in a second time: “[I]t’s a relief to see both the candidates and the electorate focusing on the major issues. For a while it seemed as if extricating the candidates from the morass of their military records was going to be as difficult as extricating American forces from Iraq.”
And in a front-page analysis, the Times‘ David Sanger writes:
Beyond the mutual accusations, something has changed in the last 48 hours. The question is whether it lasts. Finally, after months of arguing over their Vietnam-era service and their plans for taxes and health care reform, the two candidates are arguing about a war that has taken more than 1,000 American lives.
With their first debate, devoted to foreign policy, little more than a week away, they are now engaging the question of who has a better plan to make Iraq stable and democratic enough to pave the way for an American exit.
Now we’re as happy as everyone else that the candidates are talking about 2004 and not 1970, but don’t get out the champagne just yet. Yes, Kerry laid out a substantive vision for Iraq on Monday, but the response from the Bush campaign was to send out a press release proclaiming: “John Kerry’s latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror.” (The “retreat or defeat” rhyme, predictably, soon became ubiquitous on cable news shows.) To which Kerry replied, in a speech Tuesday afternoon, “The president needs to get to the world of reality.” Bush responded by declaring to the UN yesterday that Iraq is on the path to being “secure, democratic, federal and free” — sloganeering that does little either to describe the current Iraq or to respond to Kerry in any meaningful way.
In other words, what we’ve seen is the usual volley of sound bites, using Iraq as a vehicle to attach negative characteristics to one’s opponent. In terms of the level of dialogue, the incipient Iraq “debate” doesn’t look so different from the Swift Boat and National Guard flare-ups.
Now, given, these guys are running for president, and one can’t blame them for doing so in the manner they deem most effective. But the press is setting its standards pretty low if it’s willing to pretend that this back-and-forth bears any meaningful relation to “a straight up-or-down debate on the war,” or that the candidates are actually “engaging the question of who has a better plan to make Iraq stable and democratic.”
We’ll take that premise seriously when we hear candidates honestly discussing some or all of the following issues: Why have we had such trouble securing the peace in Iraq over the last 18 months? How do we defeat the insurgents who currently control significant parts of the country without turning average Iraqis even further against us? Must Iraq be a functioning democracy before we withdraw, or is mere stability under an iron-fisted, U.S.-backed leader acceptable? And what are the implications of all of this for the future of the region, and for the war on terror?
A presidential campaign, as currently run by the candidates and covered by the news media, is the last place one should expect to find those questions honestly addressed. But so long as that’s the case, we wish the press corps would stop pretending that everything’s fine now that the sound bites and slogans are about Iraq instead of Vietnam.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.