Editorial - 

The Right-Wing Was And Is Wrong,
But We Can’t Back-Out Of Iraq Now

If there is any one thing that the Bush Administration excels at it is chutz pah, which is of course Yiddish for brazenness or gall. George Bush and his GOP allies have achieved mastery of this dubious quality to such a degree that collectively they may well surpass the old, humorous but cynical definition of the concept as the ability of the child who has just killed both parents to beg for the mercy of the court because he or she is now an orphan.

Mr. Bush and his radical GOP associates have turned common sense and established values upside down by consistently declaring that they are correct while in absolute defiance of the facts and reality at hand. The most recent example of course is Mr. Bush’s television address on Sunday night December 18^th and his subsequent press conference Monday morning, December 19^th, when he again sought to rearrange history regarding the initiation of the Iraq war. This time he admitted mistakes were made, but then moved to aggressively defend his actions in Iraq.

In the next breath, he sought to defend his ordering the National Security Agency to spy on Americans in contradiction to established federal laws.

Mr. Bush, in his folksy way, and Vice President Richard Cheney, ever more bluntly, assert policies and actions that conflict with American standards and, increasingly, with United States laws. Pres. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their radical associates in and out of Congress and the administration, all have one thing in common; they seem convinced that when confronted by their misuse of power, the first line of defense is a strong offense. They simply declare they are right and everyone else is wrong, and wrap themselves tightly in the flag.

So with great chutz pah they invoke Super-Patriotism – currently they are sporting even larger flag lapel pins – to mask what in reality is a right-wing administration that is bent on domination and is totally cynical about everything, including the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, respect for individuals and their liberties, freedom of religion and speech, and protection of the environment.

But by default they have one thing right.

We cannot now walk away from Iraq.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies, and the Supreme Court that elected Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney in the first place, got us into the miasma, and they did so by a campaign of lies and distortions, a process the radical Republicans have developed over the past quarter century and mastered in the past decade.

Yet the reality they have created is the reality we are now dealing with, and we cannot simply walk away, no matter how tempting that reaction to their policies might seem. This does not mean that we should any longer follow Mr. Bush, et al, without putting every single idea, policy or issue he or his radical allies put forth through the most vigorous public debate, but it is to say that the current reality that the radical Republicans have created in Iraq is such that we cannot walk away without dishonoring ourselves, and our nation, further even than what the Bush pre-emptive war already has accomplished.

It was our country that broke Iraq, for fuzzy, half-baked goals that bespoke idealism while cloaking pseudo intellectual, master-plan adventurism. It was a minority, radical core that pushed us into this by misleading many Americans, but it nonetheless was us as a nation who did it, and now that Iraq is broken we cannot just walk away. We have to at the very least try to put that nation back together.

There is a small chance that Iraq might emerge from the miasma we created in a way that will allow it to move into the modern age, but there will be no chance for that if we arbitrarily leave.

And anyone, Democrat or otherwise, who suggests an immediate withdrawal must be willingly blind to an understanding that the radical GOP has unleashed long repressed forces in Iraq. These forces were set free either through the radical GOP’s ignorance of that nation’s creation and 20^th Century history, or by purposefully ignoring the very knowledge that kept Bush the father from overthrowing Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War was won.

How the Republican radicals can profess ignorance of that history when many of them participated in it, is a question that should be pursued; let Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Rumsfeld explain how they somehow didn’t understand the geopolitics of why mainstream Republican George H.W. Bush left Hussein in power after the Gulf War. The geniuses of the far right, including Paul Wolfowitz, ought to have their feet held to the fire on that question.

Yet while withdrawing from Iraq arbitrarily might feel good as a repudiation of the lies and tactics of the radical GOP, it would be shortsighted and in the end, wrong.

The chutz pah of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Pearl, Mr. Wolfowitz, and a parade of other radical Republicans, including such non-elected dark figures as Grover Norquist, has left America in this untenable situation.

So now all of us must somehow come together and try to learn again from our Vietnam mistakes and from our naïve willingness to listen to Mr. Bush, et al, and come up with a way that we can systematically pull back from Iraq while assisting those Iraqi’s who want to live in the modern world so that they may be able to hold their own against internal and external repressive forces.

If we leave abruptly Iraq will undoubtedly fall backward to the Middle Ages and become either an autocratic and violent theocratic nation, or devolve into a series of independent enclaves – Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish - that will likely be dominated by the Islamo-fascist nations that border them.

Assisting those Iraqi’s who want to become part of the modern world into a position where they can hope to stand against the powerful Islamo-fascist and theocratic forces from within and without won’t be done overnight, and we must recognize this hard fact and come to an agreement as to how we will proceed. And that process cannot be left in the hands of the radical right-wing Republicans; it must involve all of us.

We must have a national dialogue and this is where the Democrats and traditional, old-line Republicans have their opportunity not to retreat in frustration and anger, but to come together and move beyond and away from the right-wing radicals.

In an odd way, we may have a chance to redeem our own nation as we seek to rescue Iraq from falling backward into the dark ages.