Are they Dummycrats?

Or why looking for leadership on impeachment from the Democrats is not going to get us very far...

The Boston Globe reported the other day on growing congressional discontent with the continuing American military presence in Iraq. There are a couple proposed resolutions that would set limits or deadlines that would lead to military pull outs.

Towards the end of the Globe report is a quotation attributed to Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley. Berkley supported the original Bush war resolution, and now claims that "nobody would have voted for this resolution" if they knew then what we know now about Iraq's WMDs. This is not the first time we have heard this fantastic claim of course. It is an often repeated refrain from Democrats who gave away their Constitutional powers to declare war.

Kerry and other Democrats have continued to insinuate without ever actually saying so that their support for the invasion of Iraq resulted from Bush mendacity, not their own common commitment to Bush war aims. Indeed, Kerry's entire campaign hinged on his successfully promoting this his own Big Lie. To this day many voters believe Kerry was the "antiwar" candidate. And now Berkley and others of Kerry's kind continue in the same vein in spite of the ABC-Nightline Senate poll revealing that virtually all the Senate Democrats (including the in-crowd of the foreign relations committee ( senators Clinton, Biden, and later Kerry himself) who supported the invasion resolution would, contrary to Berkley's claim, have supported the invasion no matter what the intelligence on WMDs!

In the meantime, the franker and unabashedly hawkish Biden (the Kerry campaign's "foreign policy advisor"), who opposes withdrawal resolutions, wants the president to explain fully to the public the reasons [presumably the REAL ones] why we are in Iraq and must remain there.

What are the war aims of these pro-war Dummycrats? Certainly they involved some conception of the national interest that had oil at its center... but what, precisely. A common progressive answer that we read on many blogs is that greedy U.S. and British oil companies seek to re-establish primacy in the Iraqi oil industry they lost decades ago, or that a handful of Cheney cronies wanted to line their pockets with Halliburton contracts, or that a stupid religious fanatic named Bush was manipulated by neocons determined to liberalize world markets.

Such analyses, if one can call them that, share with the Bushies a view of history that has it driven not by social forces but by the wisdom and goodness, or the ignorance and evil intent of individuals. The demonization of Bush by the Democrats during the last campaign was every bit as calculated as Bush's of Saddam, allowing the Democrats, or so they thought, to finesse their own pro-war position past the liberals and anti-war voters.

So... while we await the fruit of Biden's pleadings, what, say you, were the war aims of the U.S. government, and particularly of the supportive of war resolution Democrats? That is to say, the aims of almost all in the government save the Kucinich people in the House and the anti-war dozen in the Senate?

I believe the main idea was to relieve the U.S. of its dependence upon the Saudis by establishing a military and oil base in Iraq. In addition to the military and economic advantages anticipated from Iraqi regime change (a goal both parties supported during and since Clinton), such a result would free the U.S. to pursue more vigorously the terrorist threat seen to be rooted in Wahabi Islam. This is Iraq's link to terrorism in the mind of official Washington, and which is why they feel justified in connecting Saddam's fall with the "war on terrorism" in their war propaganda. Wolfowitz as much as admitted this general approach in an interview, and Saudis' behavior since the invasion seem to confirm that they view the matter similarly.

As for the Democrats, we ought not underestimate the importance of the most crass kind of political calculation after votes and public support. They had little to lose initially by supporting Bush's folly of a war. Kerry and Clinton could support the war resolution in the Senate and look like patriots, and if things didn't go well blame everything that goes wrong on Bush's incompetence, which is precisely what Kerry did during his campaign. And what most of us have talked about ever since. Rather than admitting that the Democrats are to blame, even if less so, than the Republicans and Bush for this meaningless war.

And we expect this group to provide positive pressure and leadership on impeachment of Bush? Can anyone straighten me out on the Democrats thinking here?