Harry and his fellow liberals support the president by opposing his policies.

Chapter 9:  September 11, 2001 — The Day the World Changed Forever (well, at least for some of us)

As George Bush was sworn into office as the 43rd president of the United States, I tried to get Harry off the subject of the “stolen election” and on to other contemporary political topics. 

I’d had my fill of charges that Algore simply wanted a “fair vote,” that every Bush action was a partisan assault on our liberties, and that every Democratic maneuver was a pure-as-the-driven-snow effort by a dedicated band of patriots to preserve the Constitution. 

But this was not to be.  Not only did Harry continue his rant, consistency quickly became another casualty in our ongoing war of words. Harry was absolutely convinced in the early days of our post-election day debate that the U.S. Supreme Court would stay out of this “local” matter.  However, the convoluted logic that Harry used on December 8, 2000 to assert that “the U.S. Supreme Court will not touch this [purely internal Florida] issue” became on December 9, “SCOTUS has stooped to pure political partisanship” to hand Bush the election.  In less than 24 hours Harry had changed his argument 180 degrees to fit the latest facts of the day, all the while maintaining that he was now, as he always had been, arguing from a principled position regarding the High Court’s actions.

The closest I ever came to understanding Harry’s logic that the Supreme Court was now an instrument of Republican policy was a remark he made in one of a half-dozen emails we traded back and forth. Justices Thomas and Scalia, Harry insisted, should have recused themselves from any decision involving Gore v. Bush because, “Bush used them as a political issue during the campaign.”  In other words, because Bush said that if elected, he would appoint non-activist, strict constructionist justices like Thomas and Scalia to the Court, this meant that Thomas and Scalia would automatically reject their own deeply-held principles regarding the strict interpretation of the Constitution and in this case only deliberately, and illegally, act like judicial activists and throw the election to Bush.
 
As ludicrous a notion as this is about Thomas and Scalia, it speaks volumes about Harry and his fellow liberals.  Were the situation reversed, and Gore had made a campaign reference to Ginsburg and Stevens, Harry would have seen no such inherent conflict of interest.  I’d be subjected to arguments that ‘they can’t control what’s said about them by any political candidate;’ that ‘they take an oath to fairly and impartially interpret the constitution;’ that ‘they are men and women of high integrity;’ and that ‘there was no reason to assume they would act any differently in this matter than they would in any other case.’  Any new law that was created from the exercise of their honest and impartial legal brains that just happened to benefit Gore would, like the actions of the Democrat-controlled Florida Supreme Court, be nothing more than a “fair” and “just” way to resolve a vexing political dilemma — unlike those mean-spirited Republicans who keep their political enemies in their place by strictly interpreting the U.S. Constitution without the added benefit of what Harry liked to term “common sense.” 

The real reason that Harry was exercised about these two Justices, I believe, is that without them there would have been enough liberal Supreme Court Justices to invent another Constitutional right to give Gore the election.  By the time the Court’s decision was issued, Harry had come to the conclusion that not just Thomas and Scalia, but all five conservative Justices had gone into the matter from the start with their “minds made up” to vote as a “block” to help George Bush steal the election.

Harry: The U.S. Supreme Court has stooped to pure political partisanship.  The end justifies the means as your goal was to simply have Dubya win any way at any cost . . . You have five justices getting involved in a purely local matter that is reserved for the States.  The Conservative majority on the Supreme Court is voting as a block.  Their minds are made up as oral argument is really superfluous at this point.

There were other bonehead comments and predictions from Harry too, based on previously solid liberal-logic that changed on a dime when the old line of reasoning wouldn’t hold up in the face of current events. 

● Gore will definitely win the official recount (December 9).

● Well, maybe not the official recount, but he’ll definitely win an impartial, third-party recount conducted by some impartial news organizations (December 19). 

● Bush would be unable to govern due to outrage by the Right-Wing of the Republic Party that would “bolt” for some reason or another I never fully quite understood (December 19). 

● We were headed for a major recession in 2001 because “Dubya got C’s throughout his four years at Yale and of course the lowest grade was ‘C’” (December 18).  (I looked to find some reference by Harry in our emails about Gore’s academic prowess, but couldn’t find any.  I guess he must have been a straight-A student.) 

I had a few predictions of my own, which I summarized in an email on December 11, 2000.

1. “Harry and the Democrats will keep finding a way to bring up the popular vote in an attempt to de-legitimize Bush’s presidency, even though Harry and the Dems acknowledge that this is not relevant to getting elected.”

Fast forward to the present year: The disparity in the Bush-Gore 2000 popular vote is still being touted among Democrat bloggers as evidence of the “illegitimate election” of George Bush.

2.  “Even though Harry and the Dems will accept the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, they will [complain] about a 5-4 decision.”

I was absolutely sure about this one in light of Harry’s December 9 email to me where he stated emphatically about a preliminary Florida Supreme Court decision that favored Gore, “what difference does it make if [the vote] was 7-0 or 4-3?”  Not to leave the U.S. Supreme Court out of this same reasoning, Harry went on to state in the same email that “Roe v. Wade was 5-4 as I recall, but it is still good law.” 

Once it became clear that SCOTUS would in fact intervene in the dispute contrary to Harry’s earlier contention, and only days after their decision went in Bush’s favor, Harry was railing about the fact that only five justices of the Court — a bare majority — had thrown the election to Bush, demonstrating the Court’s clear partisanship since none of the liberal judges had joined in the decision.

3.  “Whatever happens (including a Bush victory) will be claimed by Harry as a victory and proof that he was right (and consistent) all along.”

No further comment is needed on this one.

Bush was sworn in as President at the end of January 2001.  It was still 8 months before the September 11 attacks, and the focus of all our emails was on U.S. domestic politics, where the Republicans held a one-seat advantage in the Senate. 

The first few months of the Bush administration passed predictably enough.  Anti-Bush forces marshaled to make his life a living hell, and just as Harry said there was a defection from the President’s ranks. “Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords” bolted from the Republican Party, throwing the Senate into Democrat control.  But it wasn’t the wholesale desertion from the Right that Harry had predicted.  In fact, Jeffords wasn’t even a conservative.  Unlike Phil Gramm from Texas who switched parties in the 1980s, then immediately stood for election as a Republican (which is the honorable way to act on one’s convictions), Jeffords campaigned as a Republican, got himself elected to a new six-year term, then left the party.  Voters would have to wait until 2006 to register their approval or disapproval of his actions.
 
Moreover, Jeffords’ action wasn’t a revolt against Bush’s tainted election. It was an ideological realignment of the U.S. Senate.  Jeffords simply felt more comfortable casting his lot with the Senate Democrats for whom “principle” was just another 9-letter word, and “consistency” was in the mind of the beholder.  Besides, when Bush got creamed in the 2002 mid-term elections and Democrats took back the House as well, there would be a high place of honor for Jumpin’ Jim in the new political order.

So in our email exchange through the first few months of the Bush Administration, neither of us debated U.S. policy towards Arab terrorists. The focus, like that of the country, was entirely on domestic issues.  Harry blamed Bush for allowing Enron to defraud the public and its investors even though Clinton was president at the time.  The illegal activity occurred prior to Bush assuming office, but as Harry pointed out, Enron was based in Texas, and Bush did know Ken Lay and even had a nickname for him, which proved Bush’s complicity. 

There was also a debate about Bush not implementing the Kyoto treaty that the Clinton Administration never implemented; about Bush wanting to poison our children by refusing to implement the outgoing Clinton Administration’s arsenic-in-water standards — standards that the Clinton administration itself never implemented during its eight years in office; and a Bush-proposed tax cut for the “rich” at the expense of the “poor” who didn’t pay taxes.  And then, as April rolled around, we had our first foreign policy debate over a little matter involving China and the downing of a U.S. aircraft.

Up to this point Harry had been lambasting me with Bush’s alleged failure to spend sufficient taxpayer funds on social and environmental issues important to the Democrats, and therefore the country.  When a U.S. surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese jet in the spring of 2001 and was forced to land on Chinese soil, Harry saw another opening for attack.  According to him, Bush had underfunded the military and was forcing our brave servicemen and women to risk their lives in antiquated, multi-million dollar aircraft filled with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, instead of expensive, outdated, super-sophisticated aircraft like the decommissioned SR-71 blackbird.

If you’re having trouble following this logic, don’t be concerned.  The problem, as they used to say when I was younger, is not with your television set, but with the broadcast. Never mind that the purpose of that particular reconnaissance mission was to fly low and slow to monitor Chinese military communications, and the high-speed Blackbird took overhead satellite-style photographs.  Bush was endangering the lives of the very men and women whose absentee ballots Al Gore wanted to disqualify from the Florida recount, and Harry and his fellow Democrats weren’t going to stand for it.

To make matters worse, Bush’s refusal to apologize for transgressing China’s self-proclaimed territorial limit showed weakness and indecision on his part.  Further, his refusal to stand up to the Chinese and demand the immediate return of our downed aircraft and its crew showed additional weakness and indecision, and further embarrassed the country in the eyes of the world.  Bush, as a result of getting us into this spot in the first place, and/or not apologizing to the Chinese for it happening, and/or going to war (or not going to war) with China to get us out of it (pick one), was showing the world that he was “totally unprepared to lead this nation.”

This charge, written by Harry on April 7, 2001, came less than 4 months after a December 19, 2000 email where Harry finally professed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling that, although he didn’t like it, “Dubya is President and I want to rally behind him as our President as do many other Democrats.” 

The genuinely gracious, magnanimous gesture from Harry in December 2000 was welcomed and accepted by the three amigos (myself, my brother Dan, and Chris Jefferson), since the rhetoric we had all been using in the preceding weeks had grown rather passionate.  But none of us really expected Harry’s professed support to last for any length of time, or even to be a serious statement of his beliefs in the first place.  Like most Liberals, it’s important to sound good and be perceived as fair, just, and kind to those around you.  If that means conceding the point that Bush is the legitimate President on Monday, and then arguing that the election was stolen by him on Tuesday, there’s no contradiction.  Monday’s statement was Monday’s statement, and Tuesday’s was Tuesday’s.

Besides, it was Harry’s constitutional right to criticize the President.  The more criticism he bestowed on Bush, the more consistent his actions were with those provisions of the U.S. Constitution he supported (Amendment 1, for example, but not necessarily Amendment 2).  By condemning Bush for his craven disregard for the environment, his encouragement of the Enron-like corruption that his administration was currently prosecuting, and for Bush’s overwhelming incompetence in foreign and military affairs, Harry and the Democrats were actually supporting the Constitution, and by extension supporting the office of the presidency — and therefore by extension the President himself.  There was no contradiction to this or any other liberal actions or logic.  The only problem was my conservative-reactionary Neanderthal-like inability to understand the subtleties and nuances of the American political process.

So we burned up another few kilowatts of energy shooting emails back and forth between Florida and Texas arguing about the specifics of Bush’s arsenic-laden, environmental-killing, tax-cutting, antiquated military aircraft foreign policy debacle.  But even this rich field of Bush-abuse had its limited life cycle, and by the end of April 2001 we were on to bigger, and more demonstrable examples of Bush’s inability to govern.  Less than four months in office, Harry and the Liberal Democrats felt confident enough to conclude that the new President was a colossal failure, and tell me that the country was headed straight to hell.  And why was this true?  Well, according to Harry:

Harry: George W. Bush is incapable of independent thought and must be scripted.  He consistently misspeaks and yesterday was a real beauty.  Phil, you have lost all credibility in my eyes defending this buffoon.  I can understand that you support his conservative stances, but this guy is a loose cannon and he is dangerous out in public.  He has no conception of what he is saying or doing.  It goes to the issue that I raised back in September, and that is “gravitas.”

“Gravitas!”  Now where had I heard that word before?  Oh yes — it was the mainstream media phrase-de-jour during the 2000 election, contrasting that dumb guy Bush with that really smart Alpha Male Gore. 

The mind-meld between Harry’s last vestiges of independent thought and Liberal Democrat talking points was complete.  The coordinated public charge by Democrats and the media that Bush lacked the “gravitas” to lead the country was now Harry’s issue as well, albeit a few months late.  But there was more from Harry.

Harry: This is not Texas.  This is the big leagues.  His cute charm is worthless when if flies in the face of our allies and disregards the Kyoto treaty, and allows five times the arsenic levels in our drinking water. One European newspaper called him the “Texas Terror.” Please tell me which of our allies is pleased with him?  Who has offered support for him?  Seems like he pisses everyone off except for Republican apologists.

Well, if I had any doubts before, it was clear to me by now that Harry/Liberals/Democrats didn’t much like George Bush.  And even though this was pre-9/11, I knew that Bush wasn’t very popular with the socialist governments in Europe either.  It was true that he occasionally mangled his words, and that he hadn’t passed or implemented the same environmental regulations and treaties that the Clinton Administration hadn’t passed or implemented.  And it was just as true that the newspapers and political leadership of France, Germany, and China would have preferred Al Gore to hold the office of President, instead of Bush.

To which I replied, so what?  Most of these issues I considered to be a mark of Bush’s superior intellect and policies, not a personal defect.  I had also grown numb over the years to the only quiver in the Harry/Liberal/Democrat bow when it came to making a political point.  If you can’t defeat conservatives and Republicans in the arena of ideas, slime them with irrelevant, personal attacks.

It’s been over 30 years since conservative and Republican policies took social security away from old people and made them eat dog food.  And it’s been ten years after the oceans died from a conservative/Republican plot to pollute the water and poison the air so big business could make obscene profits selling their goods and services to all the people they killed.  On the other hand, it’s been five-plus years since the President who lacked the “gravitas” to lead the country has waged an increasingly successful world-wide war against terrorism (not that you’d know it by mainstream press accounts; just by the lack of additional domestic U.S. civilian deaths). 

Liberal political strategy continues to assume that the American people are too stupid, or too misinformed, to see beyond their current hyperbolic statement that replaced the old hyperbolic statement from the day before.  As I wrote to Harry back in 2001, forget about the Democrat blunders (like Al Gore failing to recognize the bust of Thomas Jefferson); the phony Liberal predictions about the environment, the draconian solutions they always propose to solving world problems (Gore’s attack on the internal combustion engine, and the Kyoto treaty that punishes U.S. growth but places no limits on China and other third world nations); the fact that liberal environmentalists insisted in the 1970s that we were entering a new ice age and are now equally convinced that it’s global warming instead; and the fact that while our guy can’t pronounce “subliminal,” he does know what the definition of “is,” is.   Bush misspeaks, and by God that’s where we draw the line!  As I continued at that time:

Phil: What do I think about all of this?  I think that liberals, in general, are ends-justify-the-means opportunists who don’t give a rat’s ass about anything except preserving or expanding their own power, and who mouth politically-correct platitudes in place of actually attempting to deal with real world problems.

The pissing match between Harry and myself continued throughout the summer of 2001.  We were locked in a titanic struggle of half-truths and irrelevancies disguised as liberal Democrat criticisms to which I dutifully responded each time, only to have my challenges ignored or brushed aside as another new crisis de jour erupted in the minds of Harry and the Democrats.  However, all that was about to change.  My convictions about Bush, and my conclusions about those who opposed him, as well as Harry’s reasoning on these same matters, were about to be put to the test.  On September 11, 2001 an unprovoked attack against U.S. civilians plunged us into war. 

The shock and magnitude of the terrorist attack on U.S. soil momentarily united the country.  Harry and I were no different as we dropped the quibbling arguments we were having and united around a common goal of hunting down and punishing those responsible.  National unity lasted through the invasion of Afghanistan, and my conversations with Harry fully reflected this.  We had taken to calling each other on the phone instead of writing a lot about it, so my recollections of this period are from memory only. 

Despite the predictions of several liberal commentators and reporters, the Afghanistan war was short and U.S. casualties were minimal.  During this time the Democratic Party was solidly behind the President.  As long as the U.S. military was winning, and public support for the president remained high, there was no short term gain in criticizing Bush. 

Harry and I gradually began to gravitate back toward email exchanges, and here I have his actual words again to back up my memories.  The immediate aftermath of the 9/11 strike was, like the Liberal Democrats upon whose talking points he modeled his opinions, Harry’s hawk phase.  No man held a candle to him in support for the defense of HIS COUNTRY, not even me or the other two amigos.  In fact, during this time even the slightest suggestion of a threat against HIS COUNTRY was enough to prompt a call from Harry for pre-emptive military action.  Once we vanquished the Taliban in Afghanistan, to protect HIS COUNTRY, there was only one thing we could do.

Iran was a menace, and had to be dealt with.

No, that was not a typo. Iran, not Iraq, was the next major threat to be dealt with in Harry’s view of the world.  Yes, like Libya, Syria, and Iraq, Iran was a promoter and/or financier of international terrorism.  But they had neither the standing army, nor purported nuclear program at that time, that the world was convinced Saddam Hussein possessed.  Nor had they directly fought the United States and its allies in 1991, and then violated countless U.N. resolutions demanding that they come clean on their weapons of mass destruction. 

So why was Iran the next target for Harry?  The answer is quite simple.  For you see despite Harry’s protestations to the contrary, “his country” was Israel more so than it was the United States.  As Harry wrote me on January 30, 2002, “why hasn’t the wrath of the U.S. come down on Iran for sending the 50 tons of armaments to Arafat that Israel intercepted?”

Why not indeed?  Forget about the fact that the United States was seeking allies among the Arab nations and other Arab sympathizers (France, Germany and the like) to enforce existing U.N. sanctions against Iraq.  Forget about the fact that we were still mopping up resistance from the bad guys in Afghanistan. Forget about the fact that attacking Iran at this point served a lesser purpose for U.S. national interests than dealing with a more immediate threat against the West perceived from coming from Iraq.  Iran, North Korea, Libya — all were enemies of the United States, but even the world’s only remaining superpower has to prioritize its battles. 

Preparing for a possible war against Iraq did not mean that the U.S. would neglect these other countries.  But strategically, there was a logic to the confrontation that had to be followed.  We could not allow the focus on Iraq’s failure to comply with U.N. demands concerning the accounting for, and elimination of, weapons of mass destruction to become lost in Arab retaliation for Israeli retaliation against homicide bombers.

Certainly a policy that artificially restrained U.S. or Israeli actions against Iran (which was arming the Palestinians) was not good for Israel.  But it was in the best interests of the United States.  And despite my support and affection for Israel in its battles against Arab terrorism, I had no trouble remembering which country deserved my absolute loyalty.  If we could help Israel in the short- or long-term as we helped ourselves, that was ideal.  But if fundamental U.S. national security interests collided with those of Israel, Great Britain, Italy, France, or any other nation of the world, then I didn’t have a moment’s hesitation regarding which set of interests I wanted to prevail.

For Harry, though, his only concern was that Bush do the right thing, regardless of his critics.

Harry: I do not understand why we can’t fight another front such as Somalia or Iraq, [or Iran].  I sure hope we are not doing the politically correct thing and not attacking another Arab nation right away.

However, when the focus was exclusively on the U.S., Harry urged a bit more caution.  Unlike the threat to Israel, which was obvious and imminent and required both the U.S. and Israel to take immediate action against all the nations supporting Arafat, when it came to the aftermath of a terrorist attack that left over 3,000 innocent Americans dead, Harry thought that discretion was the better part of valor.  

Sure Al Qaeda was bad.  And Harry, like the Democrats, wanted to see Bin Laden dead — but only as long as he was in Afghanistan.  Iraq was, well, a different country, much like Germany and Japan were different countries in 1941.  Japan attacked us, and we didn’t go bombing Germany, now did we?  No wait, we did attack Germany too.  In fact, the majority of our war effort was aimed at defeating Hitler, not Hirohito. 

But unlike Bin Laden who has still not been found, we knew that Hitler was defeated because we captured him and put him on trial, or at least had his body to show that he was dead.  No wait, that wasn’t exactly true either.  So there must be something else here that made Harry and the Liberal Democrats cautious about Iraq and critical of Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror.  But for the life of me, I have absolutely no idea what it is, other than an abject hatred for Bush and instinctive opposition to everything he supports, regardless of the merits.

So you can see that I’m not very good at the kind of mental gymnastics it takes to be a Liberal Democrat supporting a fight against specific terrorists in Afghanistan, but opposing a fight against terrorism’s sponsors in Iraq.  Instead of trying to summarize their talking points for them — whatever they happened to be that day — I’ll return instead to using Harry’s own words as a living example of this type of convoluted logic.  

Despite years of deriding the President’s father for not “finishing the job” in 1991 and marching into Baghdad, despite their overwhelming support for President Clinton’s “regime change” policy toward Iraq, and despite their universal acceptance of the fact that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a clear danger to U.S. interests in the Middle East, these same liberals and Democrats now weren’t so sure that war with Iraq was a good idea. 

It’s one thing to rally around the Clinton rhetoric and support an occasional cruise missile attack against a vacant building or mistaken military target.  After all, no one really believed that the President who presided over the first World Trade Center bombing, the Somalia “Blackhawk down” fiasco and subsequent U.S. retreat, the unanswered bombing of our overseas embassies and ships, and who treated all these incidents as criminal referrals to a grand jury instead of an act of war, was really going to take on Saddam.  Clinton’s idea was to bomb targets from aircraft flying at 15,000 feet so no U.S. servicemen would get hurt.  In a real war soldiers might die, and then what would everybody think about the politicians who sent them there?  Real people dying in a real war made for very bad cocktail conversation.
 
So as not to give you the same kind of headache I normally get in trying to sort through all the false bravado, mental contortions, and blatant inconsistencies that make up a typical Liberal Democrat position, let me point out the context in which these self-justifying rationalizations should be evaluated.  Then things become much easier to understand.  Rather than base their policies on core principles, Harry and the Democrats saw an opportunity to lay out an alternative course to military action that they thought would benefit their party in the 2002 mid-term elections.  Even Liberal Democrats couldn’t oppose retaliating against Bin Laden for the September 11 attacks, though they could — and did — criticize Bush for not trying to arrest him instead of shoot him.
 
But Iraq was an entirely different opportunity for the Democrats to demagogue U.S. foreign policy for their own personal gain.  In 2001-2002 they couldn’t quite come out and oppose all military action for fear of reinforcing the “it’s not safe to vote Democrat” stereotype that plagued them during every national security crisis.  But they could do the next best thing: support and oppose a military solution to the Iraq problem at the same time. 

This was a variation of the Clinton regime change strategy from 1998; speak loudly and carry a little stick.  Sound tough and committed to win votes (or distract attention from Oral Office perjury), but find a hundred different reasons not to act decisively when push came to shove.  To do this it was necessary to ratchet down public expectations and tie President Bush’s hands.  However, Bush was a particularly dirty opponent in their eyes since he didn’t play “fairly” by the rules.  He actually believed the things he said and acted upon those beliefs, if you can imagine such a thing.  So joining with the French and German governments, the Democrats made “unilateral, pre-emptive war” against Iraq a major campaign issue.
 
The wedge Harry was looking for that allowed him to both support and oppose Bush on Iraq came in mid-2003.  During his State of the Union address, Bush “lied” about Iraqi efforts to procure yellow cake uranium essential to building a nuclear weapon.  Much has been said about this matter, from Joe Wilson’s unbiased, non-political objective report (which were later proven to be lies by the same special prosecutor going after Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff), to faulty U.S. (and U.N.) intelligence concerning the existence of WMD in Iraq.

I won’t rehash the tortured history of Bush-bashing here, other than to focus on Harry’s main complaint in July 2003.  Bush had deliberately misled the American people about the reasons for war with Iraq by knowingly using false and misleading information to make his case.  The war with Iraq was still a good thing for Harry, mind you, as he repeated often.  It’s just that we should have gone after Iran first to protect Israel.  But Iraq was an enemy of Israel too, so Harry wasn’t going to withhold support from bringing Saddam down.  But Bush lied about why the war with Iraq was good, so that made it bad — but still worth supporting.

And what was the lie?  Sixteen words from the President’s State of the Union Address: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Phil: Yep. It’s pretty clear Bush trumped up all the evidence for going into Iraq.  Co-conspirators seem to have been the United Nations (which concluded in 1999 that Hussein had existing biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax), the International Atomic Energy Agency (which confirmed in the 1990s that Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program), U.S. Intelligence sources (which, under the Clinton Administration, affirmed the same information), and the British Government.  Despite all the evidence Bush presented in his SOTU address, Bush’s “only” reason for war was the quote from the British Government — which still insists that it is absolutely true!   So Bush is guilty of what: quoting a still-valid piece of British intelligence? 

And you wonder why your arguments are never taken seriously?

But like a dog with a bone, or a drowning man grasping for a life preserver, Harry wouldn’t let go of the point.  It would be as fruitless now as it was then to rehash the particulars of this issue, since nothing would convince Harry that Bush wasn’t a liar.  My frustration was compounded because while, on the one hand, Harry excoriated Bush for misleading the nation into war, on the other hand he professed to be 100% supportive of U.S. military action in Iraq, even though he preferred war with Iran. 

I can only explain this — other than in clinical psychology terms — by the fact that the future of Israel was also being debated at the same time.  Israel was under increasing attack from without and within, which was not a good thing.  Harry needed to support Bush to support Israel, without actually supporting Bush.  It was hard to completely condemn “unilateral” action by Bush when Israel had a habit of acting unilaterally itself.  It was even harder to do this when “unilateral” for Bush was defined as having the active military support of Great Britain, Australia, Poland, Spain, and quite a few other countries. This latter fact didn’t stop the Democrats and Liberals from making this charge, mind you.  And it didn’t stop Harry from writing in lock-step with this position from time to time.  But it did cause him to jump through a few extra hoops to excuse Israel for the same exact actions he thought were reprehensible when practiced by the Bush administration.

All this culminated in an attempt by me in July 2003 to force Harry to confront the illogic of his own positions.  To avoid being accused of putting my words into his mouth, I excised his own words from previous emails, and used them to build a hypothetical conversation on these points.

I’d seen this done successfully during my academic days, most notably with Ralph Dahrendorf, a German sociologist who wrote a brilliant book in 1959 called Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society. Before Karl Marx died he started, but never finished, another key work on capitalism, one that was to tie up many of the loose ends of his previous writings.  Die-hard Marxists who were being slammed with the charge that utopian Marxism bore very little relationship to the real-live workings of a capitalist society took refuge in the fact that the Great Man himself had not actually written such a treatise.  Since Marx’s work was theoretical, if one misapplied his tenets to contemporary society, it was the fault of the student, not of the teacher.  Dahrendorf, if I remember my studies correctly, thought this was a lot of crap.  Marx’s utopian writings held many practical applications of his theories that could be measured and tested.  Dahrendorf would pose a question, then use Marx’s own words to answer it.

Well, I didn’t see a lot of difference between the hysterical Left of the early 21st century and the deluded reasoning of Uncle Karl, so I gave it a shot and applied the same methodology to Harry.  I thought of it as my own forensic effort to extricate the wildflower seeds from a steaming pile of buffalo turd, and then let them germinate in the sun so we could appreciate them for what they were in their own right.  Devoid of the obfuscation and irrelevant side-comments of Harry’s typical emails, we could perhaps use this method to discover what he actually thought.  At least, that was the theory, since the underlying assumption was that he did actually think something, instead of stringing together a random series of words in order to react to that day’s perceived Bush atrocity.

Below are the key parts of a number of July 2003 email streams between myself and Harry that speak to this point.  The questions are my own.  The use of quotation marks identify Harry’s exact words from an earlier email(s).

Phil: Does Harry support the invasion of Iraq?

Harry: “I am glad that Saddam is gone whether we find weapons of mass destruction or not.”

Phil: So you really do support the invasion of Iraq, no ifs, ands or buts?

Harry: “Yeah, big time, and that has been stated ad nauseum times!”

Phil: Are you really, really SURE you support the Iraq invasion, Harry?

Harry: “I am not stating that we should not have attacked Iraq as Saddam was a friggin’ butcher and he deserved to be overthrown, but we needed proof of a connection to Al Qaeda and that would have been our smoking gun not this bulls**t with WMD.  

Phil: Okay, I think I understand now.  The justification for attacking Iraq would be a clear cut case that Saddam was linked to Bin Laden, not WMD.  But you contend that there is no proof of an Al Qaeda/9-11/Iraq connection (the “smoking gun”), and there was no WMD found.  However, you’re still “glad that Saddam is gone whether we find weapons of mass destruction or not.”  So the only real issue you have with the invasion of Iraq is that it would have been better to have a “smoking gun” and/or find WMD, but the absence of each causes you no fundamental problem in supporting the war.  Right?

Harry: “The mistake that I see this administration made was using the WMD card to get public approval for the war.  It was not necessary!  All we had to do was show him in violation of numerous U.N. resolutions and that was enough.”
 
Phil: Good, we’re in agreement.  All we needed to do was point out that Saddam violated 19 separate UN resolutions over 11 years and we were good to go.  So you are fully on board with the President, right?  Invading Iraq was the right thing to do?

Harry: “Will you deny that back in March 2003, the Iranians posed a much greater threat to U.S. security, as did the North Koreans, than Saddam?"

Phil: Wait a minute, I thought we were justified in going after Iraq and the butcher Saddam?

Harry: “Why doesn’t George in pursuit of his war on terror take out Syria as they and Iran are to me the biggest state sponsored terrorist states which I doubt even you would doubt?”

Phil: You want us to attack Syria now too?  What about the aftermath of that war?  We wouldn’t have a highly detailed post-war plan in place.  Going after Syria and Iran too, in addition to Iraq, would take a lot of post-war planning and coordination.  And we may not know in advance how long we’d have to stay there. So I guess you wouldn’t criticize Bush then if he acted on your suggestion without all these questions fully answered.  Right?

Harry: “In the years before WWII ended, the U.S. had elaborate plans and detailed blueprints of how we would administer post-war Germany and Japan, including rebuild-ing their economies, to law enforcement, to what form of Government they would have.. . . Bush has not an inkling of how long our troops will remain in Iraq.”

Phil: You’re ignoring the fact that we had 4 years after Pearl Harbor to plan for post-war Germany and Japan (and even after Hitler’s defeat, Nazi guerillas still attacked our troops).  Perhaps Bush should consult with Clinton, who allegedly DID know that our troops would be in Kosovo for only 6 months.  That was 5 years ago, and still counting.  Did I miss your outrage over this planning failure too?

Harry: “Your comments to there being four years between Pearl Harbor and V-E day for justification of no peace plan is weak at best and lame at worst.”

Phil: The Iraq war only took 3 weeks to fight, not 4 years.  Isn’t that a factor?

Harry: “We had plenty of time to establish contingency plans to keep the electricity running, police on the streets, and try to jump start the economy.”

Phil: We were unexpectedly attacked on 9/11 and then fought an unanticipated war in Afghanistan.  On the heels of that we had our showdown with Iraq.  Much of the intervening time was spent mobilizing troops and countering French and German efforts to subvert us at the U.N. (Remember France’s foreign minister going overseas to Security Council nations to lobby against us?).  You also said that our intelligence about Iraq was flawed.  The media was predicting a prolonged fight against the crack Republican Guards, not a three-week rout.   How and when were we supposed to draw up these detailed, specific, post-war plans?
 
Harry: “Hey, it’s not like we don’t have contingency plans somewhere in the bowels of our Pentagon if Mexico or Canada were to attack us so we’d know what to do.  We were Ill prepared and you simply won’t admit it.”

Phil: So, we should never go to war, even one where the 9/11 attack sets events in motion (i.e. Bush pledges never to allow the U.S. to be attacked again, even if he has to act proactively), until we have all of our post-war plans in place?

Harry: "I support a war [in Iraq] but I do not support an Administration that perhaps was hell bent on getting us into war sooner rather than later.”

Phil: So, we should have continued passing resolutions at the UN, which would be ignored by the “butcher” Saddam you are personally glad to see deposed, but we shouldn’t have acted until we knew who would be running the Baghdad police and fire department after the war?  And to top it off, we should have waited further for the U.N. to back our actions, instead of going it alone?

Harry: “Wouldn’t it be nice if NATO and the U.N. were patrolling along with us in an actual plan of operation?”

Phil: Wouldn’t it be nice if my farts smelled like perfume?  But they don’t.  I don’t want to ask the U.N., France, or NATO for permission to defend my country against the obvious threat you previously acknowledged.  So I just want to get one thing clear.  You do support the present war in Iraq, correct?
 
Harry: “I clearly stated that I supported the action in Iraq with or without WMD’s and with or without proof positive connections with Al Qaeda.”

Phil: Good, that’s settled then.  You’re glad we went to war. But not necessarily against Iraq before Iran, Syria, or North Korea; and not as quickly as we did it; and not without detailed post-war planning.  You don’t criticize Bush for attacking Iraq and discovering there was no WMD.  But you are highly critical of Bush for attacking Iraq because he thought there was WMD when there was none.  It doesn’t matter to you whether a direct (or even indirect link) between Al-Qaeda and Iraq existed before the Iraq war began, but it does bother you greatly that there are electrical shortages in Baghdad after the war because Bush didn’t plan adequately.

This is the logic of Liberal-think.  You deposed the bad guys, which was the morally, politically, and practically correct thing to do.  But you didn’t do it the way I think you should have, or with the people I think you should have done it with, so I’m going to go into hyperdrive criticizing you.

The Mexico and Canada contingency plan reference above may have seemed like just another irrelevant, gratuitously foolish comment nestled among so many others, but I resurrected it here to illustrate the completely false premise of most of Harry’s criticisms.  As a political scientist with direct lobbying experience locally, nationally, and internationally, I do have an appreciation for the actual workings of the political process that allows me to offer certain opinions and judgments.  But it also helps me understand the limitations of my own abilities in this area. 

I thought then, and still do now, that U.S. involvement in the Bosnian war was a politically motivated decision by the Clinton Administration — not something that was genuinely in our national interest.  And yet, once U.S. troops were committed, I never again publicly questioned this action.  The decision was made to go to war from 15,000 feet, and U.S. troops are still there today.  My only references to Kosovo and Bosnia in my email exchanges with Harry were to elicit an understanding of Harry’s criticism of U.S. military action in Iraq.  It wasn’t a slam against the U.S., but a slam against Harry’s obvious refusal to acknowledge the same criticism in one area that he liberally spoons out in another.
 
Harry can sit back in the comfort of his home and criticize Bush, Rumsfeld, and anyone else he chooses for not having a fully executable post-war reconstruction plan on the shelf before invading Iraq, but it’s all just a bunch of hooey.  His observations about what should, or could, have happened are pure fantasy, and bear no resemblance to the real world at all.  In other words, like the liberal spokesmen he emulates, it’s a hollow criticism designed only to let him slam the President while professing to support his actions. 

Look for the next chapter coming soon — “What Shape is the Star on Your Country’s flag?”