[iwar] [fc:The.Rearguard.Action.Against.Debate]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-03-06 07:23:26


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Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 07:23:26 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Rearguard.Action.Against.Debate]
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Boston Globe
March 5, 2002
The Rearguard Action Against Debate
By Thomas Oliphant
WASHINGTON - THE FAMOUS FOG of war has begun to take on new and downright
weird dimensions.
Far from the traditional confusion emanating from distant battlefields, the
war against terrorism has begun to morph into a campaign to stifle the
debate that sets this country apart from its murderous adversaries.
For several days, a nondebate that was said to be about the war was
''waged'' with the kind of vigor that only an out-of-touch capital mired in
politics can summon. It ended up mostly as a debate about whether to have a
debate.
What is already forgotten is the simple fact that the alleged debate began
as nothing more than a short screech in a Senate committee hearing that was
notable for its almost complete absence of substance.
In the course of that meeting on Feb. 27, Senate Appropriations Committee
chairman Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, began bellowing that there
could be no ''blank checks'' written for indefinite commitments abroad that
contained neither clear strategy nor some indication of duration. In trying
to fathom some notion of how victory against terrorism might be defined, the
famously quirky senator said that to fight until the last terrorist had been
killed would by definition last until Doomsday.
That's all he said. His comments were utterly inconsequential and were
initially treated as such. The only thing that changed the situation was the
fact that majority leader Tom Daschle was asked about them the next morning.
Lo and behold, the Democratic leader chose not to disagree publicly with his
Appropriations Committee boss and uttered a few mild phrases about the need
to understand the reasoning behind recent additional Bush administration
commitments to operations in the Philippines, Yemen, and the Republic of
Georgia.
Again, no big deal, no coordinated assault on administration policy or the
president's behavior, not even a revived discussion of the already exhausted
subject of the State of the Union's ''axis of evil.'' Daschle also had the
temerity to suggest that actually hunting Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar
down was still a valid part of any definition of success.
What produced the headlines was not the thrust but the parry. First
Republican leader Trent Lott, then House Republican hit man Tom DeLay, and
then House GOP campaign chairman Tom Davis of Virginia erupted in fury that
the war effort was being subverted by supposedly vicious attacks on the
commander in chief.
From Lott came a vintage ''how dare Senator Daschle'' riff; from DeLay came
a single word, ''disgusting''; and from the chronically political Davis came
a silly screed about aid and comfort to the enemy. From this tempest came
tirades that featured wounded expressions of outraged innocence, attempts to
suppress free discussion, and counter-counter-offensives about supporting
''our boys overseas.''
The sterility of this content-free exchange of childish tirades was
underlined by the end of the weekend as a real battle broke out in eastern
Afghanistan that included serious American casualties.
It was a battle, moreover, that pointed directly to a discussion topic
obscured by all the preceding baloney - the size and disposition of American
forces in the country. For several weeks, several US leaders in both
political parties have been arguing that we do not have enough soldiers on
the ground given the continuing dangers posed by an almost omnipresent
instability.
It is a point made by figures like Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, who have emphasized the need to
expand the international peacekeeping force significantly, with Americans
included, to avoid a regression to anarachy. And it is a point made by the
likes of John McCain, who has questioned the size of the US troop commitment
simply from the standpoint of its adequacy to get the antiterrorist job done
in Afghanistan.
Other analysts, including some inside the government, have argued that we
may have been trying to do our recent fighting too cheaply, with too much
reliance on air power and local militias and not enough on American ground
troops.
As the weekend's events have shown dramatically, this is a debate that the
country would directly benefit from - right now. The other debate, the phony
one, was a revealing and dangerous distraction. 

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