Loving the Troops to Death

In his NYT column, Frank Rich looks at the behavior of "unreconstructed Iraq hawks" who hide behind the troops as they continue to defend their colosal mistake. Noting the paralells between this administration and Nixon's -- with their lies, cover-ups, and addictions to secrecy -- Rich finds a few distinctions, including the fact that no one died in Watergate.

There is another significant difference as well. Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.

The context-free invoking of "the troops" and ""nine-eleven" has become an uncontrollable tic with war supporters, who seem to feel the mere uttering of the words makes them so.

Which makes sense, I suppose, when "the troops" you're supporting are really just GI Joe figures in your head, and not the actual people you believe should be sent off to fight in an endless, pointless war. Given that crucial distinction, there is no need to explain why a "troop supporter" should block funding for body armor, reinforced Humvees, or Farsi translators -- what does that have to do with it? My GI Joe action figure doesn't need any of those things!

Rich argues, though, that the few remaining dead-enders are having increasing trouble blinkering reality, as support for the war wanes, and their jingoism, name-calling, and non sequiturs lose their power. Jim Webb calls out Lindsay Graham on Meet the Press for putting his political views "into the mouths of soldiers." The public -- and even active military -- turn against the war. Walter Reed Hospital becomes a national scandal.

My question remains, why has it taken this long for the tide to turn? I remember joining a crowd of tens of thousands of people, stretching from the steps of the Capitol in Austin all the way across the Town Lake Bridge, in March of 2003. (The local news said "hundreds" of people were there.) It seemed everyone there realized the administration was lying about the pretext for war. Millions of people around the world marched on that day -- Bush called it a "focus group."

And the press, with its embarrassing tolerance for being lied to, lent their resources to the proaganda effort. Now that the inevitable consequences of those lies are all around us, the Washington "consensus" has shifted, and it's so safe to aknowledge it that even Democrats are willing to say so.

But why did it take so long? And why does Bush still have the ability to coerce Congress into giving him ever more concentrated powers? I guess the Kool Aid in Washington is a hard addiction to break.