AT crucial moments over the past three-plus years, American politicians and American voters have been forced to pass judgment on the war in Iraq – not by pollsters asking a tiny fraction of them how they feel, but through actual votes, either in Congress or at the ballot box. And every time they are asked to pass judgment, they have chosen to wage it, to validate the politicians who supported it, to pay for it and to continue it.
That’s what happened yesterday in the Senate. Two proposals sponsored by Democratic politicians – one requiring the outright removal of U.S. forces by next year, the other putting the Senate on record as calling for a significant drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq – went down to ignominious defeat. Both were landslide losses – 86-13 for the outright pullout, 60-39 for the big drawdown.
This follows similar votes last week in the Senate and the House of Representatives – not to mention votes cast on a fairly regular basis in both bodies since October 2002.
In October 2002, remember, the Congress voted to give the president the authority to go to war by huge margins in both houses. In November 2002, only weeks later, voters in midterm elections strengthened the standing of President Bush and the Republicans.
In 2003, despite the difficulties after the end of major combat operations and the huge amount of money requested by the president, Congress approved a $87 billion package for our military and for reconstruction in Iraq. In further legislation in 2004, 2005 and 2006, Congress approved spending more colossal sums to support the war and associated efforts.
Some might object that this sort of thing would not have happened with Democrats in charge of Congress. But consider this fact about the Democratic Party: In early 2004, faced with the possibility that it might nominate a candidate for president who was stoutly anti-war, Democrats pulled together and nominated a dull and self-regarding senator one of whose principal virtues from an electoral standpoint was that he had voted for the war in 2002.
That nominee, John Kerry, managed to win 59 million votes in November 2004 – a genuinely remarkable achievement that ought to have suggested his vote for the war had actually been astute.
But with the same backtracking political instincts that led Kerry to think it would be a successful gambit to say he’d voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it, Kerry actually authored yesterday’s proposal calling on the United States to pull out all forces by next year – the very proposal that failed by an embarrassing vote of 86-13, meaning that he only got a third of Senate Democrats to side with the idea.
And while Kerry garnered those 59 million votes, he lost only because George W. Bush – the architect of the war – got 62 million in the biggest referendum of them all on the Iraq war.
This all tells us something very valuable. Polls may say the war is wrong and was a mistake. But politicians, whose careers live and die not by polls but by actual votes cast in elections, are clearly being guided by a different understanding of what the people who do their democratic duty on Election Day truly believe.
Americans want to win this war. And when push comes to shove, the officials they elect are nowhere near ready to try and pull the plug.
There will be another referendum in November. If that goes very badly for Republicans, maybe Democrats will try again. But for now, Congress has spoken, and spoken loudly, in favor of seeking victory rather than retreat.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com