I'm grateful and encouraged when conservatives such as Rod Dreher openly express their disgust with the Bush Administration, when formerly loyal allies in the press and pundit worlds who have slavishly backed God's Own Party and its Leader finally begin to react to the chaos and craziness their devotion has helped spawn and enable.
It's especially revealing that said dissenters are now employing words like "fraud" and "mendacity" in addition to words such as "haplessness" and "incompetence". It's even more riveting when the Republic Party's ground-troops are going so far as to wonder if those dirty, commy hippies they long criticized might end being right after all, or at least worthy of engagement and consideration instead of blanket condemnations and concentration-camp style imprisonment.
But I do worry, at least a little, that this change of heart on the part of some conservative spokespersons is the product of the Iraq war now being seen as a "failure" for America and by Americans. In other words, I wonder whether their political awakening stems from their embarassment over America's image.
I wonder, though, if, let's say 150,000 Iraqi's had been killed in the invasion and the WMD's had not turned up, but within a few months or even within a year a reasonably stabile coalition government had been set up in Baghdad that was sufficiently, publically grateful for America's war of choice, would these arm-chair warriors feel the same disappointment? Is the growing disenchantment with the Iraq war a reflection of Americans' shameful of the fact that America has launched a war it is now destined to "lose"? Do we care more about winning or losing or how our acts have affected ordinary Iraqis?
No comments:
Post a Comment