[Peace-discuss] Democrats betray voters

[C. G. Estabrook]

     Top Democrats to Voters:
     "Enough Already, Now Shut Up!
     We've Got a War to Run!"
     By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Let's go first to that moment of good cheer on the morning after. 
Horrible senators like Allen and Burns lost narrow races. The 
Republicans got a pasting. A man who called Alan Greenspan "a political 
hack" and George Bush "a liar" will be Senate majority leader. A woman 
elected to Congress with the help of thousands of San Franciscan 
homosexuals, some of them married by Mayor Gavin Newsom, would be 
Speaker. Who wouldn't want Harry Reid instead of Bill Frist, or Nancy 
Pelosi instead of fatty Hastert?

It's also the role of elections in properly run western democracies to 
remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for 
the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd 
lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done. Nowhere was 
there an item on the Democrats' "must do" list saying "Reverse plunge 
towards fascism. Rescind Patriot Act. Dump the Military Commissions Act. 
Restore habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights." Pelosi made haste to say: 
impeachment is off the table.

"Bold new vision" these days means Pelosi pledging a drive to notch up 
the minimum wage. I don't know about the vineyard, hotel and restaurant 
that Pelosi co-owns, but the effective minimum wage here in Humboldt 
country, northern California, is about $10 an hour, which is what you 
have to promise a young person to mow the yard. The pay-out rises 
rapidly to $13 an hour if you want to buy the tyke's loyalty for return 
visits. Maybe on some slave plantation in southern Florida attainment of 
the federal minimum wage is part of the American Dream , but elsewhere 
we have to talk about a Living Wage, which is something altogether 
different.

But who cares! No one believes the Democrats are ever going to mess with 
the system, and that's not why the voters put them back in charge of 
Congress. They want America out of Iraq. Pronto, just like Rep Jack 
Murtha said it should, this time last year. To her credit and the 
chagrin of the Washington Post as well as Fox News Pelosi backed Jack 
Murtha against pro-war Steny Hoyer to be House Majority Leader and said 
that Jane Harmon shouldn't chair the House Intelligence Committee.

A couple of days later the House Democratic caucus sent Hoyher cantering 
home 149-86, with Hoyer cheered on by the Washington Post, which ran 
nasty stories about Murtha; also by the New York Times which ran two 
dreadful stories by Michael Gordon saying this was not the time for the 
US to leave Iraq.

So at most you can reckon there are 86 antiwar votes on the Democratic 
side of the aisle in the new House of Representatives. Over on the 
senate side, Harry Reid, who'd been calling for "redeployment" of US 
troops out of Iraq "within the next few months" told his fellow 
Democrats that the issue of what to do in Iraq shouldn't be raised till 
James Baker and his Iraq Study Group issue their report.

Optimists somehow imagine the Baker Report will explode excitingly under 
the war's partisans and blow them sky-high. It'll do nothing of the 
sort. There'll be paragraphs of soggy language about the promise of 
democratic governance and the rule of law in Iraq, raised fingers of 
warning about the perils of failure, acres of statesmanspeak about the 
need for multilateral involvement. Probably, Baker and Co think the US 
should quit Iraq, but can't think of a way of accomplishing this without 
jump-starting charges across the next two years that America is cutting 
and runnng and is this any way to run an Empire? McCain's saying that 
already.

There is a ferocious battle in the offing and the swift rebuff to Pelosi 
and Murtha is not an encouraging straw in the wind. On the one side is 
the majority of Americans sickened of the war in Iraq, who spoke clearly 
on November 7. Their prime institutional ally is the uniformed military 
which was against the war from the start, and which gave Jack Murtha the 
briefings that emboldened him to take his stand last year. Their most 
plausible presidential candidate, Russell Feingold, has just said he 
won't run for the nomination.

On the other side is the massed legions of cold war liberalism, of whom 
the notorious neo-cons ­ now denouncing Bush and Rumsfeld -- are but one 
battalion. Remember the origins of the neocons, as shock troops of the 
Israel lobby. Back in the mid-70s Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol , 
Albert Wohlstetter and the others saw the US facing impending defeat in 
Vietnam, and feared that the McGovernite peaceniks would rot the resolve 
of the Democratic Party to stand behind Israel. So they fanned out into 
the Committee on the Present Danger, the editorial page of the Wall 
Street Journal and stoked up the furnaces of the new cold war and 
greased the wheels of the Reagan campaign.

The apex neocons are a pretty discredited lot these days but there are 
legions like them spread across the nation's think tanks and policy 
institutes, all imbued with exactly the same fears that reverberated 
across the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Commentary, and the New 
Republic a generation ago: that America's "resolve" will soften; that 
there will be accommodation with Iran; that Israel will be abandoned. 
And in fact such fears are now more vivid. Thirty years ago the weight 
of the Israel lobby wasn't being excoriated by mainstream professors 
from Harvard and Chicago. Thirty years ago respectable professors like 
Tony Judt weren't publicly pillorying the Anti Defamation League. Thirty 
years the name of Israel, blowing apart children in Beit Hanoun and Gaza 
didn't stink in as many nostrils as it does today.

So the stakes are very high, and the party of permanent war ­ 
represented at its purest distillation in the form of senators like Joe 
Biden and congressmen like Rahm Emanuel are regrouping for a 
counter-attack, their numbers refreshed by a phalanx of incoming blue 
dogs, ranged against the 60-80 "out now" Democrats. You think pro-war 
Tom Lantos (D)-- one of the most rabid Zionists in Congress -- will be 
an improvement on antiwar Jim Leach (R) as chair of the House 
International Relations Committee? The Democratic foreign policy 
establishment cannot and will not tolerate the notion of Cut and Run in 
Iraq. Expect the Israel lobby to say, post November 7, "We're back, 
stronger than ever!" Expect reassertions of the essential nobility of 
the attack that ousted Saddam Hussein, a deprecation of the destruction 
of Iraq as a society, a minimization of the outrages committed by US forces.

Expect a fierce campaign ­ spearheaded by the Democrats and the 
surviving neocons, to wage a "better" war, evocations of the bloodbath 
that would accompany "over-hasty" us withdrawal (weird: your 2003 attack 
triggers the killing of maybe half a million and you claim 
anti-bloodbath credentials?)

Expect a presidential campaign waged among warmongers, from Clinton 
through to McCain by way of Giuliani. The voters spoke up, but that's 
the last chance they'll get, at least at the ballot box, for another two 
years. Top Democrats to voters: Okay. Enough already. Now shut up! In a 
few weeks we could be looking at Lieberman, Obama and Clinton holding a 
joint press conference and saying that no military option should be left 
off the table when it comes to Iran. They have said it often enough 
already. Ranged against them will be the peaceniks like James Baker and 
Brent Scowcroft and maybe Robert Gates, though that man is as slippery 
as an eel. Hagel-Edwards in 2008! (Liz Edwards of course.)

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, End Times: the 
Death of the Fourth Estate, will be published in February by 
CounterPunch Book / AK Press.

Footnote: An earlier version of this column ran in the print edition of 
The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.