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I spent five pre-9/11 years in a rent stabilized hole in Manhattan learning my trade. When I went back there on the Thanksgiving after the attacks and saw the twisted metal, still burning fire, and falling ash of Ground Zero, it was mentally and physically nauseating to envision the scope of death and suffering that had occurred so suddenly in the city I once called home.
Like most Americans, I supported the mission in Afghanistan. Though with a heavy heart; I have someone in my immediate family in the military.
So when Bush started to talk about Iraq in 2002, I decided I really needed to start paying attention to the news. While I hitherto led a chiefly apolitical life, I wasn't so dimwitted not to know that Bush was on the wrong side of the issues. But at the time, I thought he was a clown; I didn't realize he was also pernicious. And so I was looking for guidance on this Iraq business. I even videotaped Colin Powell and his little white vials (I had a TeeVee back then) so I could watch and re-watch.
In timing that should have, but didn't, arouse my suspicion, the Cheney Administration framed the Iraq war authorization neatly within the parameters of a mid-term election. The nominees for US Congress for my new home in the 2nd district of New Hampshire were Republican incumbent Charlie Bass and Democratic nominee Katrina Swett.
NH Outlook aired a profile of both candidates on October 16, 2002. Incidentally, that was the same date as the Iraq AUMF resolution.
Here's Charlie Bass, about four minutes in:
"We are not going to tolerate states that sponsor terrorism. And there is a nexus between Iraq and September 11th and the fact that it has been supporting the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction."
And here's the segment on the same issue with Katrina Swett, around eleven minutes in:
At defense contractor BAE Systems, Swett made clear that homeland security is her top issue, and that President Bush is on the right path. "And I think he's right that we need to bring about a change in Iraq. They do pose a threat to us, and the development of weapons of mass destruction by a brutal and unpredictable leader like Saddam Hussein is completely unacceptable."
There are numerous other statements from both Bass and Swett in support of the Iraq invasion, but those two quotes will suffice.
Being only a newly politically tuned in person, and not yet familiar with the blogosphere or other types of alternative media, there was precious little daylight between Republicans and Democrats on Iraq in my mind. And in my own district, there was none whatsoever.
Sometime in March, before it began, I decided to support the Iraq war. I didn't believe the claims about links to 9/11, but I did buy the WMD argument. It was, iirc, a New Yorker article that put me over the top.
When it became clear, quite soon in early summer of 2003, that there were no WMD in Iraq, I felt like I had literally been kicked in the stomach. I mark it as one of the worst decisions of my life, and I am only glad I was not in any kind of policy position of influence or power when I made it. I had failed to be sufficiently intellectually skeptical about the single most important debate the citizens of a nation can have: whether or not to go to war, and knowing you are committing people to their deaths depending on the answer.
In my personal shame, and also my revulsion over what the Cheney Administration had done, my interest in politics accelerated. I searched out those who had been right all along, and who had been voices in the wilderness on Iraq during the war fever that had gripped the country. Strangely, the clearest voice on the biggest issue of my time was coming from right over the Connecticut river.
By the summer and fall of 2003, I had become a full-fledged "Deaniac," and had committed to truly bizarre things I had never come near before, like bumper stickers, yard signs, volunteering now and then, and reading a "blog" on the Dean for America website.
Katrina Swett had moved on as well, to become national co-chair for Joe Lieberman's presidential bid. The Lieberman campaign, more than any other Democratic rival, tried to bring Dean down by painting him as outside the mainstream on, inter alia, his opposition to Iraq. Here's a sample from Joe, though you can find lots of others online, as well as supporting statements from Swett about Lieberman on the same issues in news archives:
"(Howard Dean) seems to believe if you are just against everything, that's enough -- against removing Saddam Hussein, against tax cuts, against knocking down walls of protection around the world so we can sell more products that are made in America by Americans."
While I could not have been further on Iraq from Swett and Lieberman during that time, I don't begrudge primary differences.
However, in 2006, when the Democratic voters of Connecticut, on the basis of Iraq, among other things, voted in favor of Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman to be their nominee, Katrina Swett, unlike fellow Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, and anti-Iraq Illinois senator Barack Obama, stuck by him:
Swett believes Lieberman lost because of three perceived Democratic "sins": the sin of supporting the Iraq war and being tough on defense, the sin of being bipartisan and the sin of displaying religious faith. Swett said those traits might make Lieberman undesirable to many Democrats but they could be key for Democrats in winning future national elections.
"Round two in Connecticut is going to be a battle between two Democrats: Joe Lieberman, a centrist Democrat, and Ned Lamont, a pretty-far-left-of-center Democrat," said Swett. "I'm convinced that Joe Lieberman is the better leader . . . and I'm also convinced that he's the better positioned politically for the future of the party that I love."
As a result, Swett said, she thinks many prominent Democrats in Washington - despite their post-primary support for Lamont - would "quietly and secretly" breathe a sigh of relief if Lieberman bounced back.
In 2007 the US Senate race in New Hampshire to replace John E. Sununu introduced me to two strongly anti-Iraq war candidates, Steve Marchand, and Jay Buckey, the latter of whom even had an email preserved showing his opposition at the time of the October 2002 AUMF.
Against this backdrop, and five years after the Iraq AUMF, Katrina Swett added her candidacy to the race (all three would eventually bow out after Jeanne Shaheen decided on a run). For the first time I can find since the Iraq invasion, Swett was now against the war. In the New York Times she is quoted as calling it "ill conceived," though there is no explanation on how she got from her early support for invasion to that depiction. And to bloomingpol, who queried her on her support for Lieberman, she gave a statement that was then posted on this site. In it: "I certainly do not agree with him on a lot of issues - especially Iraq."
President Barack Obama, whose opposition to Iraq was as early and steadfast as Howard Dean's, will next month be on track to withdraw our troop presence there to its lowest level since the invasion, as he promised he would.
It is difficult to estimate the number of people whose lives ended prematurely in Iraq due to the invasion and resulting power vacuum, but estimates have it in the hundreds of thousands, with many more wounded, and many more than that displaced. For a war that had no connection to 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction, and never had to happen.
As we pass the important milestone of significant troop withdrawal in Iraq, at the same time we are witnessing a marked increase in violence and fatalities in Afghanistan. While I continue to cling to the (possibly naive) desire to capture or kill the man who killed so many innocents on 9/11, even I am beginning to re-evaluate my position, so many years on in a country that has repelled foreign occupiers for millenia and with Osama bin Laden nowhere in sight.
Furthermore, opinions on why we are there and whether we should be are rapidly shifting among Americans. For example, here in New Hampshire, Carol Shea-Porter is on record as being critical of the current situation. And one of her Republican opponents, Bob Bestani, wants out of Afghanistan.
In the second district, congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster, whom I support, has also expressed disagreement over the current approach:
While I am pleased that the President has decided to set a timetable for drawing down our troops in Afghanistan, I do not agree with the decision to first send 30,000 additional troops. It is not clear that sending more combat troops is the best way to meet the real threat, as Al Qaeda disperses to Pakistan and other countries. This is particularly important as our military has been strained by six years of fighting in Iraq and eight years of fighting in Afghanistan.
I believe we need better cooperation and accountability from the Afghani government and we must demand a commitment from them to root out corruption. Instead of more troops, we should be sending more trainers to help the Afghan military provide better security for its citizens. Rather than a broad counterinsurgency, we need a narrowly focused mission, with clear, measurable goals for success. Our involvement can't be a blank check, and I appreciate the President's attempts to focus our mission.
and:
"I am convinced that we need to focus on better coordinating our intelligence capabilities against Al-Qaeda rather than building up our troop presence. We need to develop a more nimble approach and not get bogged down in large, long-term military endeavors."
Republican Charlie Bass, running again for his old seat, is also opposed to the current strategy in Afghanistan:
"In Afghanistan, there isn't the kind of governmental infrastructure that there is in Iraq, and the result is that the military can't succeed. And so, I believe that in Afghanistan, we need to implant our best intelligence assets possible. We need to make sure that we know where terrorist cells are. We need to take military action where necessary to protect US interests in this country, but I don't believe that we can support a government that essentially doesn't exist. The Russians learned this twenty-five years ago in Afghanistan. We should take the same lesson that they learned.
Katrina Swett does not have a section on Afghanistan on the issues page on her website (as of the datestamp of this post). But the Plymouth Record Enterprise caught this from a recent forum:
Swett said that she had supported a temporary troop surge policy as a way of stabilizing and strengthening Afghanistan and giving the Karzai government a chance to succeed. She emphasized the geopolitical importance of the conflict due to its proximity to a nuclear armed Pakistan. "It would be unthinkable for the Pakistan nuclear arsenal to fall into the hands of terrorists," said Swett.
I find it an interesting that both Kuster and Bass (and Shea-Porter and Bestani, for that matter) are to the left of Swett (and the President, for that matter) on Afghanistan.
As I said up top, I'm firmly on the side of hammering swords into ploughshares. But gone are the days when I happily leave the decisions about war for others to figure out. When I saw this photo, my heart broke. Those brave men in uniform serving our country look not much different than the children in my classroom.
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