Campos: The elites' war

Published May 29, 2007 at midnight

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Last week I had lunch with a former student of mine. Her boyfriend, a Marine, is about to be deployed to Iraq. She spoke candidly of how he's using his own money to buy higher quality body armor than that provided him by the military, and how she doubts their relationship will survive his deployment, even if he does.

She's not a particularly demonstrative person, but it was easy to detect the rage, frustration and anxiety in her voice as she described the logistics of what's involved in getting shipped off to fight George W. Bush's war against Islamoterrofascism, or whatever it's being called this week.

It can't be repeated often enough that the only reason we're still in Iraq is because the American elites have almost no personal investment in this war. A president who displays the emotional sensitivity of a serial killer as he sends other people's children off to die is being enabled by a cowardly Congress, many of whose members are willing to sacrifice the lives of American soldiers in return for slightly increasing their already astronomical odds of re-election.

It's a sickening and shameful spectacle, made all the more so by the total cynicism that envelops the political debate about Iraq, with all its phony posturing about "deadlines," and "benchmarks," and "the next few months."

Consider the following quotes from a story by David Ignatius, a Washington Post reporter who was an enthusiastic proponent of the invasion, and who has spent much of the last four years in Baghdad: "How are things going in Iraq? The honest answer is 'not very well.' The American-led occupiers haven't yet found a way to put Iraq back together - politically, economically or socially. The administration doesn't have a lot of good alternatives left . . . The paradox of Iraq is that the security situation is actually getting a bit better, even as the political path remains blocked."

And so on and so forth. The grim punch line is that this story, which Ignatius could have filed last week merely by changing a few proper nouns, is from January of 2004. Since then, the level of violence in the country has increased by a factor of five (from fewer than 1,000 attacks on coalition forces per month to nearly 5,000), and the country is more politically fractured than ever.

But for a good portion of our political and media elites, the security situation in Iraq is always "getting a bit better" from what it was last month, or last week, or yesterday - a conclusion that is much easier to reach when it isn't your child or husband or father whose life continues to be put on the line, in the pursuit of goals those elites no longer even bother to define except in the vaguest and most implausible terms.

The most revolting argument made by proponents of the Vietnam War was that "we" (and by "we" they always meant someone else) couldn't withdraw from that country because "we" would lose face before the world. Naturally these types of claims have to be dressed up in all sorts of preposterous nonsense about "dominoes" and how "they" will follow us here if "we" (again, "we" - have these people no sense of decency?) do not fight them over there.

"If you start running from the communists," Lyndon Johnson warned in 1964, "they may just chase you right into your own kitchen." At that point, fewer than 1,000 Americans had died in Vietnam. By the time Richard Nixon had secured "peace with honor," that number was more than 50 times higher.

The things that kept getting American troops killed in Vietnam for years after all but the most hopelessly stupid ideologues recognized the futility of that war are the same things that ensure our troops in Iraq will continue to be killed and maimed for no good reason.

Those things are hysterical fear and political cowardice.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

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