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COMMENTARY
February 18, 2007
Slow bleed
This column will not be about Iraq, directly. I think it is about something more fundamental. You know me: I’m a fundamentalist. My attempts to make sense of the world around me, in which I invite my reader to share, do not restrict themselves to the news as conventionally reported, especially on Sundays. But then, they usually start from there. Consider the following news report:“Congressional Democrats will work with anti-war groups to pursue a ‘slow-bleed’ strategy on Iraq. Instead of voting to abandon Iraq, directly, they'll use their control over budgetary processes to gradually choke off U.S. military resources, leaving the remaining troops stranded, and blaming President Bush for their fate. This will be combined with a vast TV advertising campaign, to target the seats of vulnerable Republican incumbents.” Now, that was a paraphrase. I have taken several wire service reports and boiled them down to these salient points. The reports themselves gave a much different flavour, superficially, because they were filled with suggestive language of exactly the kind that would be supplied by persons who, almost certainly, vote Democrat. The anti-war position is presented as a moral one, against a pro-war position that is not presented, but assumed to be animated by the worst imaginable human motives. My reader may know that I support the fairly aggressive prosecution of American (and by extension, Western) interests in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. On the other hand, the argument for getting right out of Iraq and leaving its inhabitants to butcher one another, can be presented plausibly from a Western point of view. I could present it myself, fairly articulately, were I a sophist. But I’m not, and I can see what the other consequences would be of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq, around the Middle East and around the world. Therefore I’m against it. Still, I can understand why reasonably well-intentioned people could argue for the “cut and run” strategy. I have intelligent friends, by no means anti-American or even viscerally anti-Bush, who hold that view. But I cannot begin to understand the position I paraphrased, above. Let me be clearer. I do understand how it might be adopted, cynically and irresponsibly, to advance the Democratic party in American domestic politics, at the expense of every conceivable American national interest. But I can’t understand how the people who adopted it could claim to be morally superior to the people they are opposing. I can’t even understand why they advance their strategy so openly. For while their own description of what they are doing resembles the roseate account in the wire reports, no intelligent person, with rudimental powers of reasoning, will fail to grasp the sense conveyed in my paraphrase. I present this as pure mystery. I cannot explain it. I look at the face of such as Rep. John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, and chairman of the House appropriations defence subcommittee. He is a man who makes much of his former service as an officer in the U.S. Marines; who has a bronze star from Vietnam. A man old enough to know how the world works, and with his hands on an important lever of power: for he can actually do things through that subcommittee to leave U.S. Marines in Iraq up the creek. And my question for him is, “How can you even consider it?” More generally, since Mr Murtha is hardly alone in advancing this strategy of “slow bleed” (a term even its supporters have employed), how can adult men and women act so indifferently to the consequences of their actions? It is the same point I have made in many other connexions. For instance, in Canada, I have written about radically innovative court decisions made by judges who, in their reasonings, refuse even to consider the breaches they are making in the fabric of received law, or the extraordinary fallout from the implications of their decisions. As Ted Byfield has written, one might guess they were children who did not understand the consequences of their acts, or that they were revolutionary saboteurs who did not care. But there is no third possibility. Here is the hole in so much political argument today. It depreciates what was called “prudence” -- the “mould and mother of all virtues” in the antiquated, but still correct, view of the greatest philosophers of the past. And when that is lost, everything is lost. Prudence requires that we acknowledge the likely consequences of our acts, at least to ourselves. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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