IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION THEN YOU MUST BE PART OF THE PROBLEM
Good soldier finally defies the bad war
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
With 71 percent of the American public now opposing the president's handling of the disaster in Iraq, that Oregon maverick, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., finally realized "the current course (of the war) is unacceptable."
With the election long over and the rejection of his party almost complete, Smith, a "student of history, particularly military history," suddenly remembered an 80-year-old Winston Churchill quote that compared Iraq to "an ungrateful volcano."
And with the ABC lights and This Week's George Stephanopoulos in his face Sunday, asking about his "dramatic change of heart," Smith allowed that, yes, he remembers "every day that I sit in the seat of Mark Hatfield."
Give Smith credit: He just illustrated the dramatic difference between sitting in that seat and actually filling it.
To compare Hatfield's storied opposition to the war in Vietnam and Smith's belated protest of the war in Iraq is a glorious stretch. Hatfield was voting against Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in 1965 when that stance was both inconvenient (Bob Duncan used the issue against him in the '66 gubernatorial race) and unpopular. He condemned the administration's "consistent policy" of "misleading the American public" long before the '68 Tet offensive fixed public opinion against the war.
Gordon Smith? He sat on his hands when it mattered. He didn't search out the Churchill quotes until the Iraq Study Group laid its cards on the table. He remained quiet while life in that "ungrateful volcano" degenerated into the deadly carnage of sectarian violence, which has steadily escalated since the February 2006 bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra.
"I have tried to be a good soldier in this chamber," Smith explained last week. "I have tried to support our President, believing at the time of the (2002) vote on the war in Iraq that we had been given good intelligence and knowing Saddam Hussein was a menace to the world. . . . I have been rather silent on this question ever since."
Silent? "Our lives begin to end," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "the day we become silent about things that matter." But Smith was hardly quiet. Last June, he rose on the Senate floor to condemn an amendment calling for a phased deployment of U.S. troops, arguing, "As I have studied history, I have never found an instance whereby victory is won by announcing retreat."
"Al-Qaida is counting on us to go home," Smith said then. "Al-Qaida is counting on us to set a date." He invoked the terrorist group six times, and Sept. 11 once, to insist -- even at that late date -- Iraq was a test of American will in the war on terror, rather than an increasingly barbaric civil war.
There is no future, Smith said Monday, "in the crossfire of an ancient civil war. It's not our problem. It's not something we can fix. . . . That's why the American people, in their wisdom, ceased to support this conflict."
Thirteen months ago, former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., reached that very conclusion. He opened his mea culpa with the words, "I was wrong" -- in voting for a war that was sold on the basis of deeply flawed and politicized intelligence -- and hit most of the themes Smith touched on last week.
Smith said he stayed "silent" at the behest of an Oregon soldier in Kirkuk. "I believe even that soldier would now tell me to speak up, when I can make a difference," he said Monday.
A month after the election? Six months after casting the war as a referendum on al-Qaida?
"If I wanted to effect change, I had to speak now," Smith insisted. "I had a duty to speak now. The confluence of events -- the election, the Iraq Study Group, the new secretary of defense -- definitely makes it much more likely that I can effect change."
I imagine quite a few of the legendary strategists in Washington would agree with that sense of duty. Mark Hatfield just isn't one of them.
Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 steveduin@news.oregonian.com http://steveduin.blogs.oregonlive.com
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
With 71 percent of the American public now opposing the president's handling of the disaster in Iraq, that Oregon maverick, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., finally realized "the current course (of the war) is unacceptable."
With the election long over and the rejection of his party almost complete, Smith, a "student of history, particularly military history," suddenly remembered an 80-year-old Winston Churchill quote that compared Iraq to "an ungrateful volcano."
And with the ABC lights and This Week's George Stephanopoulos in his face Sunday, asking about his "dramatic change of heart," Smith allowed that, yes, he remembers "every day that I sit in the seat of Mark Hatfield."
Give Smith credit: He just illustrated the dramatic difference between sitting in that seat and actually filling it.
To compare Hatfield's storied opposition to the war in Vietnam and Smith's belated protest of the war in Iraq is a glorious stretch. Hatfield was voting against Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in 1965 when that stance was both inconvenient (Bob Duncan used the issue against him in the '66 gubernatorial race) and unpopular. He condemned the administration's "consistent policy" of "misleading the American public" long before the '68 Tet offensive fixed public opinion against the war.
Gordon Smith? He sat on his hands when it mattered. He didn't search out the Churchill quotes until the Iraq Study Group laid its cards on the table. He remained quiet while life in that "ungrateful volcano" degenerated into the deadly carnage of sectarian violence, which has steadily escalated since the February 2006 bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra.
"I have tried to be a good soldier in this chamber," Smith explained last week. "I have tried to support our President, believing at the time of the (2002) vote on the war in Iraq that we had been given good intelligence and knowing Saddam Hussein was a menace to the world. . . . I have been rather silent on this question ever since."
Silent? "Our lives begin to end," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "the day we become silent about things that matter." But Smith was hardly quiet. Last June, he rose on the Senate floor to condemn an amendment calling for a phased deployment of U.S. troops, arguing, "As I have studied history, I have never found an instance whereby victory is won by announcing retreat."
"Al-Qaida is counting on us to go home," Smith said then. "Al-Qaida is counting on us to set a date." He invoked the terrorist group six times, and Sept. 11 once, to insist -- even at that late date -- Iraq was a test of American will in the war on terror, rather than an increasingly barbaric civil war.
There is no future, Smith said Monday, "in the crossfire of an ancient civil war. It's not our problem. It's not something we can fix. . . . That's why the American people, in their wisdom, ceased to support this conflict."
Thirteen months ago, former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., reached that very conclusion. He opened his mea culpa with the words, "I was wrong" -- in voting for a war that was sold on the basis of deeply flawed and politicized intelligence -- and hit most of the themes Smith touched on last week.
Smith said he stayed "silent" at the behest of an Oregon soldier in Kirkuk. "I believe even that soldier would now tell me to speak up, when I can make a difference," he said Monday.
A month after the election? Six months after casting the war as a referendum on al-Qaida?
"If I wanted to effect change, I had to speak now," Smith insisted. "I had a duty to speak now. The confluence of events -- the election, the Iraq Study Group, the new secretary of defense -- definitely makes it much more likely that I can effect change."
I imagine quite a few of the legendary strategists in Washington would agree with that sense of duty. Mark Hatfield just isn't one of them.
Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 steveduin@news.oregonian.com http://steveduin.blogs.oregonlive.com
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