I visited The Moving Wall this weekend. The Moving Wall is a half-size replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that travels around the country so those who can not make it to Washington D.C. can experience the power, and hopefully the healing, of the memorial. As I was reflecting upon the wall, contemplating all the names, the sacrifice, the suffering, the bravery, and the controversy surrounding the war, I began to wonder what sort of memorial we will have for the veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The entire country was unified and clear in purpose for Operation Enduring Freedom, which is the military’s operational name for the invasion of Afghanistan. We knew why we were there and we knew what the goal was: to overthrow the Taliban and to destroy Al-Qaeda. It is a just war. And a just war deserves a memorial that befits the moral certitude of that war.

What the Afghanistan War memorial will look like is still shrouded in the future, but I imagine it will evoke a strong sense of pride and unity in our nation and in our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters who fought there. No one will ever question whether their sacrifices were in vain.

What the Iraq War memorial will look like is being shaped right now by the actions we as a nation take over the next couple years.

Unlike the previous war, the Iraq war was morally suspect from the start and the evidence to justify it circumstantial at best. We were attacking a country that had not attacked us. But President Bush had shown such strength and certitude after 9/11 and during the morally just Afghanistan war, he had earned our benefit of the doubt. There were nuclear weapons to find and support to Al-Qaeda to disrupt. We would be greeted as liberators and we would pay for the whole war with Iraqi oil proceeds that would no longer be sanctioned. We rallied around President Bush’s battle cry and largely supported the invasion.

The American military invaded and destroyed Saddam’s military and security infrastructure and took over Iraq, freeing the people from a truly horrible tyrant. The American military did a brilliant job. They then turned control over to President Bush’s hand-picked civilian leadership in the Coalition Provisional Authority. And that’s where it all went to hell. Why? Because President Bush never had a plan for the aftermath.

It was clear early on that the CPA had no idea what it was doing. Their time in power produced an inexcusable litany of massive bureaucratic incompetence: dismantling the Iraqi army, disbanding the Iraqi police force, not allowing former Baathists to work in the new government, failure to restore utilities destroyed in the war in a timely manner, behaving in manners that were patently offensive to the local culture, bringing in American contractors to do work that Iraqis could, would, and wanted to be hired to do, and the list goes on and on.

Why was the CPA so incompetent? Two reasons- they had no post-invasion plan to implement and the CPA was staffed not based on experience or skill, but on loyalty to President Bush. This is precisely how President Bush has staffs his own administration.

If Iraq is to be lost, it will be lost because President Bush and his caravan of ideologues have shown themselves not only to be inept in running our government but tragically destructive in trying to run Iraq’s. It’s as if we dug a hole, threw the Iraqi people into it, and then asked them why they’re in a hole. There’s no doubt the current Iraqi government is not doing much to help itself but we did a damn good job of hobbling it before it even got started.

We may have gone in for the wrong reasons but we must stay for the right ones. The Bush administration’s cronyism and sheer incompetence led us to this tragic point but that is not as important as where we go from here.

If we leave Iraq in the hole we dug for them, we will shame ourselves. If we pull out with the same rashness and lack of planning that we went in with, Iraq may not survive as a country. The chaos that would ensue will be our legacy in the region. Nobody will care that we toppled Saddam. All they will remember is how we abandoned the very people we claimed to liberate. Whatever moral high ground we once had will have been lost. America will be left with a somber and caustic national memory of what we had done to Iraq. Why would any nation ever trust us after that?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was designed to not reflect a position on a war that was so divisive to our nation and our military. It is a meditation on the people who wore the uniform, rather than on why they were there and what they did. If we abandon Iraq, there will be a push to have another war memorial designed with the same idea in mind.

Our military in Iraq has done everything it has been asked to do and done it supremely well. Though the fight for peace in Iraq may ultimately end up being lost, it won’t be because our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. The battles they fought and the war they waged deserves recognition for what it was- a complete and just victory. They overthrew a bloody tyrant and freed an oppressed nation. Our Iraq war veterans deserve a memorial that reflects that.

Those of you who read my July 2nd post knows that the Libby commutation was the final straw in my sincere, perhaps naive, hope that President Bush would rise above politics and bring something -anything- that I consider of value to his Presidency in the second term. I have also laid out where the President has placed his loyalty in spite of vowing to be loyal to the Constitution.

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s reached the end of their patience with the President.

A visibly angry Keith Olbermann, anchor of MSNBC’s Countdown news program, came right out and demanded President Bush and Vice-President Cheney resign after the President’s commutation of the Vice-President’s former Chief of Staff. In a ten minute special commentary on his show, Olbermann used clear and direct language to accuse President Bush of “subverting the Constitution” among a number of other things.

Actually, Olbermann insisted on calling him “Mr. Bush” throughout his commentary. That may seem small, but it’s a damning detail of disrespect for the man who occupies the oval office. Some may say it’s disrespectful to the Office of the President as well but I think his point is clear.

Olbermann also illustrated a parallel between President Bush’s commutation and President Nixon’s firing of the Watergate Special Prosecutor as the defining moment in a failed presidency where they crossed the point of no return and crystallized America against them.

It’s a ten minute video but I strongly urge you to take the time and view it. Whether you agree with him or not, his impassioned argument is worth a listen. The text can be found here.

The only positive aspect of the commutation I can see for the President is that he passed (sort of) the Republican Loyalty Test. The especially sad part is his actions demonstrate that he considered that to be more important.

Political euphemisms are used to describe commonly understood concepts so that they align with one’s political viewpoint. Sometimes the political agenda embedded in the phrase is obvious and strident. Often times a term is used to make an unpalatable concept seem acceptable, if not desirable. Most insidious is when a euphemism is used to conceal the reality of the concept and make it appear to be something it most definitely is not.

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language“

Frequently we aren’t even aware of the political undertones embedded in the phrases and words we use because we are not the one’s who developed them. They were handed to us predefined and packaged. We are a 24 hour mass media culture living at a frenetic pace where fast news has taken on the same qualities of fast food: pre-shaped, pre-packaged, easy to get, easy to eat, predictable flavor, and requiring minimal thought or effort while leaving you satisfied even though it was devoid of nutritional content.

Think about political euphemisms like a gift that is handed to us. What is the gift? It is a bare, neutral concept that comes gift wrapped. If someone handed you a gift inside a beautifully wrapped container with bright colors, ribbons, and attached balloons, you’d likely be happy and perhaps even excited to accept it simply based on how wonderful it appears. How would you react if that same gift was wrapped in used, greasy, newsprint that smelled strongly of fish and stained your fingers with ink when you held it? Are you still excited to accept that gift? Keep in mind that inside the gift wrap is the exact same bare, neutral concept. Perhaps that gift is something you’d like but it’s wrapped in such an unappealing way that it’s hard to imagine wanting whatever is actually inside. Maybe the gift is something you really don’t want but it’s wrapped so attractively that you feel compelled to accept it. This is how politicians use language to manipulate public discourse.

The political euphemism glossary, which will be non-partisan and built gradually, will be a catalog of the tools, words, and phrases used by political minds to shape how we think or worse, lull us into such a complacency we fail to critically think at all.

The first euphemism to enter the glossary is below. Click on the word for more information.

Pro-Choice

Loyalty to the Republican party apparently has begun to eclipse loyalty to the law. With Scooter Libby, VP Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, now convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, rallying around him has apparently started to become a litmus test of Republican loyalty.

Most of the Republican presidential candidates have avoided giving any sort of answer about whether Libby should be pardoned. Five of the eight candidates who were asked in the last debate wouldn’t give a straight answer because to say Libby should not be pardoned alienates the Republican conservative base and to say he should be pardoned alienates the rest of the country. Only Tom Tancredo, Jim Gilmore, and Ron Paul had the courage to take a clear position.

The GOP, which prides itself on being the law & order party where criminals get their due punishment and leniency is left to the bleeding-heart Democrats, is in an uproar that one of their former senior officials, now a felon, may actually have to serve time for perjury and obstruction of justice. It is notable that while loudly complaining about the unfairness of the sentence, very few have actually argued that he’s been wrongly convicted.

The same group of people who argued for impeachment of a sitting president for perjury and obstruction of justice related to a personal sexual adventure now argue that serving time for a conviction on the same charges related to an issue of national security is a travesty. William Kristol, staunch conservative that he is, undermines his own conservative credentials by questioning if President Bush is still to be respected if he won’t pardon Libby. How do conservatives who argue for the pardon expect anybody else to take them seriously about the rule of law when they don’t want it applied to one of their own? The International Herald Tribune even quotes conservatives with close ties to the administration about their incredulity.

I don’t understand it,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group with close ties to the White House. “A lot of people in the conservative world are weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness here.”

A conservative with close ties to the administration, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, put it another way: “Letting Scooter go to jail would be a politically irrational symbol to the last chunk of the 29 percent upon which he stands,” a reference to the low percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they support Bush.

Perhaps it would be “politically irrational” but it would be legally rational. All the outcry and maneuvering for a pardon makes it appear like more of a quid pro quo where Libby takes one for the team and protects the administration and in return the President either commutes his sentence or pardons him.

As I explored in an earlier post, I used to think the most disturbing aspect of all this was that the Bush administration continues to value loyalty to fellow Bushies over loyalty to the law and the Constitution from which it flows. Now I’m even more disturbed that President Bush’s Republican base agrees with him and are using that as a litmus test of Republican loyalty as chronicled in the conservative blog, First Things.

Still, this much is true: From the moment Scooter Libby was indicted, all the way down to this moment of his sentencing, I have judged the character of many acquaintances in the worlds of writers, public intellectuals, and conservative politicians—their courage and their trustworthiness—by a simple measure: whether or not they stood up for Scooter Libby.

There is a silver lining in the Iraq war cloud. After spending almost $400 million thus far at a cost of nearly 3500 U.S. military lives with no end in sight after four and a half years, it’s easy to name the numerous ways that the war has been bad for America. But what about the ways it’s been good for the country? Mind you it’s a silver lining in a very large and foreboding storm cloud, but still a lining nonetheless.

1. Sensitized the population to the very real risks, costs and dangers of going to war. The relative ease with which the U.S. won our battles over the last 25 years has made it seem to the general population that going to war was about as risky as going shopping. In 2000 only 12.7% of the adult population had ever served in the military in some manner. This has been declining dramatically since 1980 when veterans made up almost 18% of the adults. Nobody knows the true cost of war like a veteran, whether they were in combat or not. The more veterans there are in the country, the less likely the country will mobilize itself for war without a clear compelling reason. We just created a whole new batch of veterans who understand very well what war is and educate those around them just by living their lives.
2. Decreased the likelihood of war with Iran. I believe the Bush administration’s original long term plan, sketchy though it may have been, was to develop democracy and a friendly Arab ally in Iraq which could serve as a launch point for future military operations into Iran. Had Iraq gone in accordance with the wishful thinking the administration uses in lieu of actual planning, Iran would have been effectively surrounded on three sides (Iraq, Afghanistan, & the Persian Gulf) by American forces. This would’ve given the administration considerable leverage in which to try to bring about regime change which probably would have developed into outright war. Iran has a strong sense of national identity going back thousands of years, very rugged and mountainous terrain almost four times the size of Iraq with nearly three times the population, and a battle-seasoned military that has credible and homegrown ballistic missile capabilities that can strike far into Europe. War with Iran would make the Iraq war look like a lazy evening stroll.
   
3. Demonstrated that ideology is neither a strategy nor a capability. The presidency has always been a bit of a jobs program for the those who knew the winner well. This is not unexpected nor necessarily a bad thing. Good leaders bring their best people with them. Unfortunately President Bush has defined “best” as loyalty to him and his ideology rather than on capability or experience when selecting people for key positions. Even worse, he appears to evaluate their performance more on their ideological loyalty than their actual success. This has led to a rash of poorly conceived or poorly executed strategies over the past several years of which Iraq is only the most prominent example. Think FEMA, Justice Department, Defense Department, Veterans Affairs, World Bank, Coalition Provisional Authority, etc.
4. Added credibility to future threats of war. We all know the person who is constantly making empty threats. At first you take them seriously but after a while you realize that the person never actually throws the punch and is nothing more than a paper tiger. We also all know the ones whose threats everybody takes seriously because they’ve acted on them before. Even Saddam, despite his experience with the Americans during Operation Desert Storm, still believed until the final weeks before the war “that the United States and the United Kingdom lacked the stomach for war” and that the Americans “would not fight a ground war because it would be too costly.” It has been extremely costly but I think it’s fair to say that U.S. threats are taken far more seriously now.
5. Stimulated for the American economy in the short term. Back in January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected that percentage of the GDP spent on defense would actually shrink from 3% to 2.7% by 2006. As a result of the Iraq war and the Global War On Terror, defense spending has risen to 4% of GDP. Perhaps you’re thinking, “So what?” Ok, let’s put it in real terms that anybody with a wallet can understand. Since 2001, the U.S. has poured over 530 billion more dollars into the economy via defense spending than originally planned in 2001. Those are inflation adjusted dollars too. Since defense spending largely goes into American companies due to the nature of the industry, it has likely done a lot to minimize the economic impact of the burst tech bubble and the 9/11 attack. A lot of manufacturers, and by extension their employees, have drank mightily from the government spigot for the past five years. This doesn’t even begin to count the rest of the increased government spending on homeland security, intelligence, other ballooning budgets. A recent economic analysis report suggests that the benefit to the economy is short-lived though and will become a burden after five years. We may have funded all that spending with a spectacularly huge amount of foreign-owned debt, but when you’re searching for silver linings, you have to look at very dark, dense clouds.