How a supporter of Bush’s Iraq policy became an opponent

After he wrote to me the other day, I asked Rick Darby of the Reflecting Light blog to tell what exactly had changed his views on Iraq. His answer will be of interest to many of us who, each in our own way and at our own pace, have gone through a similar experience. In explaining his prolonged support for Bush after the point when he began to have doubts about him, he has coined a neat expression, Reverse Bush Derangement Syndrome, meaning the hyper defensiveness toward Bush that Republicans have developed in response to the left’s crazed hatred of him, a phenomenon that has been frequently remarked upon here.

Briefly, here is how I changed my mind about the Iraq mess:

First, although I was dubious about George W. Bush as a candidate in 2000, following Sept. 11 it seemed at the time that he rose to the occasion. In retrospect, I believe he made some mistakes that eventually came back to bite us—for instance, not making it clear that we were at war and what the goals of that war were.

Still, for a while (say, up through the Afghanistan campaign) the President seemed on the ball, and he won my respect and gratitude. I realize now that I formed an almost permanent opinion that should have been a provisional one.

Then, beginning with the occupation in Iraq, I acquired a bad case of what might be called reverse Bush Derangement Syndrome. That is, the loony left subjected him to so much abuse, and the media were so obviously out to bash him, that I reacted by placing too much faith in his judgment. Much of the criticism of him was so crazy that I just assumed Bush was the shrewd one.

I was slow catching on, but I began to question what was going down when I saw how we were dealing with the insurgency in Iraq. Even though I despised the people who said we were in a quagmire and a rerun of Vietnam, because their only motive was Bush hatred, I began to get the same queasy feeling myself. Tactically our forces acquitted themselves very well (no surprise), but it was harder and harder to perceive any overall strategy other than the quixotic one of trying to win the world’s good opinion. “Staying the course” is not a strategy.

Bush and his advisers began to seem incapable of any flexibility, unlike the U.S. military in Iraq, who did learn from experience. Instead, Bush’s goal became more grandiose—democracy in the Middle East—even as victories in Iraq itself were largely limited to symbolic ones, such as elections.

After months of confusion, I had to acknowledge that our continued large-scale presence in Iraq doesn’t appear to be accomplishing anything. Your postings at View from the Right certainly influenced me, partly because I agreed so much with other things you wrote. Randall Parker at ParaPundit also contributed with his lucid arguments. It finally dawned on me that intelligent people who were not flaming leftists could still argue that Bush had gone off the deep end.

Unfortunately, Bush has staked so much on staying the course, whatever course that may be, that it is hard to get out at this point without looking like we’ve been defeated. Keeping a few military bases in Iraq might help avoid that perception.

Are there risks to withdrawal? Of course. All kinds of nasty things could happen. But what is the alternative? Occupying the country indefinitely? If the Iraqis are so inherently unwilling to live with one another, if underneath their show of modernity they think in terms of ancient tribal feuds, can they create a nation no matter how long we stay?

That aside, I don’t think we can afford to keep such a large percentage of our fighting forces tied down in Iraq. I don’t refer only to the human cost, nor the financial cost (although that’s a pretty penny, added to the $300 billion national debt), but to the possibility that all those assets will be needed somewhere else. Our resources are impressive, but so are the potential demands on them. God knows what we are going to do, for instance, about the head case in the top job in Iran, a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or North Korea’s leadership going completely demented. Whatever the answer is, though, we’d better be dealing from unquestioned military strength.

There is much more I could add, but I said I’d keep it brief!

Thanks again for the link. Your referral has brought me more traffic than Reflecting Light has ever received before.

I thank Mr. Darby again for his excellent contribution to this debate.

Meanwhile, Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist with whom I correspond in an e-mail list (the arrangement works because we keep to specific points and avoid ideological arguments), is powerfully impressed by Rick Darby’s post. He writes:

I almost never spam articles out indiscriminately, but in this case I’m going to make an exception. I’m going to send this to every single person I know in the anti-war movement.

If we’re serious about ending the war, and not just hearing the sound of our own voices, Rick Darby is exactly the kind of person we need to be reaching and convincing. We reached him, all right. We reached him so well that for several months (years?) he continued to support the war against his own better judgment and the evidence of his own eyes, simply because of the tone of the people who opposed it.

I’d read the theory that the anti-war movement prolonged the Vietnam war by a couple of years through exactly this mechanism. Sometimes I believed it, sometimes not—depends who was telling the story. But it’s something else again to see it up close, in an immediate first-person account, and know that the result of our best efforts is exactly the opposite of what we intended.

I wrote back to Mr. Hechtman:

Well, good luck.

For years, people on the pro-war side have been discussing in amazement the left’s crazed hatred of Bush and how destructive it was to the left itself, saying things like, “Make my day,” and “Nominate Dean; Please.” After the 2004 loss, the left engaged in much public soul-searching about their extremism that had brought them down. Yet despite all the commentary on the left’s craziness and how it drove out any rational criticism of Bush’s policies, the left, instead of snapping out of it, became more insane than ever. They went from making a hero out of Michael Moore, to making a hero out of … Cindy Sheehan?

So, if all that sensible criticism and advice did not get the left to snap out of their Bush Derangement Syndrome, I don’t know that Rick Darby’s post will do so.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 20, 2005 08:58 PM | Send