Wordyard

Wesley Clark fires back at the Republican campaign to discredit Kerry’s war record, most recently highlighted by Dick Cheney’s speech at Westminster College (where Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech) attacking Kerry’s record in national security.

Meanwhile, Bush ads featuring a “disappearing act” with tanks and aircraft suggest that Kerry’s votes on some military spending bills mean that he wanted to leave the U.S. defenseless.

Clark writes: “After risking his life in Vietnam to save others, John Kerry earned the right to speak out against a war he believed was wrong. Make no mistake: it is that bravery these Republicans are now attacking. Although President Bush has not engaged personally in such accusations, he has done nothing to stop others from making them. I believe those who didn’t serve, or didn’t show up for service, should have the decency to respect those who did serve.”

Here’s the scene, then: A president who pulled family strings to get a berth in the Texas Air National Guard, and then couldn’t even show up for that cushy job, sends out a vice president who won multiple draft deferments and candidly admits he had “other priorities” more important than fighting under U.S. colors, to attack the “judgment” of a Democratic candidate who both fought for his country and had the guts to turn against the war when its folly became evident.

Observing all this, I see real judgment on one side — and outrageous chutzpah on the other.

As an overview of everything that has gone wrong with the Bush administration’s Iraq venture, Peter Galbraith’s New York Review of Books piece — “How to Get Out of Iraq” — makes for a captivating read: dispassionate and clear, informed by personal experience but not visibly settling quarrels, it’s a sobering and saddening account of all the lost opportunities and botched enterprises that are now coming home to roost for us in Iraq. All Americans, those who supported and those who opposed Bush’s “war of choice,” are now stuck with a losing hand. Throwing Bush out of office in November might help reboot some of the processes his administration has trashed, like our foundering international alliances; but it can’t turn the clock back in Iraq, where, as Galbraith outlines, we have set the stage for a disastrous civil war.

Meanwhile, bizarrely and appallingly, the president keeps gleefully throwing away what few cards we have left. Arabs don’t trust us? Hey, it’s the perfect time to tell Israel that those West Bank settlements are okay, after all, never mind what our diplomatic position has been all these decades!

Two comments on Rice’s testimony worth noting: Brad DeLong excerpts the passage in which our national security adviser declares that a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States” did “not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.” This is the memo that the Bush administration has steadfastly refused to declassify.

And Gary Wolf dives into the thicket of Rice’s multiple-passive-voiced, conditional-subjunctive avoidance mechanisms to try to untangle her evasions. What Rice said: “If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something… I would have been expected to be asked to do it.” What emerges from Wolf’s “Double Whammer Grammer Jammer”: “If I needed to do something, somebody would have asked.”

As Wolf says: “After this reformulation, no further clarifications are possible without altering the meaning. The passivity of the statement is no longer an artifact of awkward grammar, but an expression of Dr. Rice’s state of mind. She did not take action because she was not asked. This is exactly the passivity that Richard Clark complains of in his book.”