The political euphemism glossary, which is non-partisan and being built gradually, is 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 next euphemism to enter the complete glossary is below. Click on the phrase below for the political definition and description.

Support The Troops

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.

The political euphemism glossary, which is non-partisan and being built gradually, is 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 next euphemism to enter the glossary is below. Click on the word below for the political definition and description.

Surge

Our political leadership, congressional and presidential, has turned the most urgent and critical issue facing our nation into a an exercise in sound bite governance and diplomacy. “Cut and run” and “stay the course” compete with “bring the troops home” and “support our troops” as empty slogans masquerading as policy. The nation deserves a well developed and nuanced approach towards this very difficult problem but instead we are getting simple minded pronouncements that are more political posturing rather than leadership, statesmanship, or governance.

All parties concede the following about the Iraq quagmire:

• a reasonable level of safety and security must be established.
• safety and security cannot be established by military action alone.
• safety and security requires a comprehensive diplomatic and political solution.
• a full military withdrawal before safety and security are established would be a debacle likely resulting in the catastrophic failure of the Iraqi state.
• a failed Iraqi state would descend into unrestrained civil war, become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, and possibly lead to an unraveling of what remaining stability there is in the Middle East.
• this scenario would likely require our military involvement again.

Yet the debate inside the beltway, if you can call it that, is whether to bring the military home or not. It has been already established that withdrawing the military from Iraq before there is a sustainable level of safety and security is only going to cause larger problems for the U.S on a global scale and probably here at home also.

Democrats need to stop trying to sell immediate withdrawal. Offering the opposite of what the Republicans propose is not policymaking. It’s knee-jerk politics. Republicans need to stop offering empty platitudes about staying the course. Continuing to repeatedly do the same thing while hoping for different results is not policymaking either. It’s desperate wishing while in a state of denial. It’s also the mark of a fool.

The President needs to swallow his pride, accept that U.S. is unable to unilaterally impose security in Iraq, develop a coordinated diplomatic and political solution, and make that the administration’s primary thrust. That means dealing with Iran and Syria to a certain degree. It may be distasteful to do so but they are the regional players with the most at stake in the outcome and an unrestrained Iraqi civil war is not in their best interest either. Keeping a low-grade civil war brewing that bogs down the U.S. military is.

We can’t immediately withdraw, though I wish we could. America made a promise to the average Iraqi to not leave them to the wolves, be they Sunni, Shia, or Al-Qaeda. We would do even more damage to our battered reputation and integrity to abandon Iraq after having gone in roughshod the way we did.

I’m not suggesting we go in with overwhelming force either, ala the Powell Doctrine, because President Bush repeatedly missed those opportunities long ago and it is now simply too late for that. Both nations are running out of patience with the war.

The reasons we invaded Iraq were thin, twisted, and resulted in bait and switch justifications from the Bush administration. However there are compelling reasons to stay in Iraq until we can reasonably expect that it’s not going to implode. But we must forge ahead with a sensible and nuanced policy that is rooted in diplomacy, realpolitik, and a more thoughtful application of military force.

If we leave Iraq to descend into civil war and wash our hands of the whole mess, it will be the harbinger of America’s permanently decreased moral stature in the world. Our credibility would be heavily damaged. Our ability to lead would be hampered by the global memory of what we did for generations. We would no longer be the world’s policeman, but rather its dirty cop.

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.