Bush at the Tipping Point
A hawkish Democrat calls for an Iraq withdrawal, setting off a bitter fight in Washington over how, and when, the troops should come home.

By Howard Fineman
Newsweek

Nov. 28, 2005 issue - As friends describe it, Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania had been searching his soul for months, seeking guidance on what to do in Congress about Iraq. "I think he was going through what we Catholics call a 'long night of the soul'," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. In 1974, Democrat Murtha had become the first Vietnam veteran elected to the House. A decorated Marine from the mountainous "Deer Hunter" country east of Pittsburgh, he had always been a down-the-line hawk and a favorite of the Pentagon generals. Now, at 73, he was the dean of the House on defense spending: a gruff, taciturn pasha receiving supplicants from his perch in the "Pennsylvania corner" of the floor—last row, aisle seat, surrounded by equally beefy cronies. "I like to do things behind the scenes," Murtha explained to NEWSWEEK.

But, by last week, Murtha had decided to come out of his corner in spectacular fashion. The result was a turning point—and a low point—in the war at home over the war in Iraq. Reassembling its campaign-style war-room apparatus, the White House went on the offensive against Democrats, who in turn were emboldened by polls that showed a cratering of the Bush presidency. After months of debate over the question of how the country got into Iraq—who knew what and when about the absence of WMD—the political center of gravity suddenly shifted to another question: how we get out.

Murtha was the one-man tipping point. Initially a strong supporter of the conflict, he had voted for it and the money to pay for it. But on his last trip to Iraq, he had become convinced not only that the war was unwinnable, but that the continued American military presence was making matters far worse. "We're the target, we're part of the problem," he told NEWSWEEK. Back in Washington, he resumed his weekly pilgrimage to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, visiting severely wounded casualties in rehab and agonizing over what he saw there. "I think those visits affected him deeply," said DeLauro. In a long chat with an Irish colleague, he talked about his congressional hero and mentor, another blue-collar Irishman, Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill. No liberal on defense, in 1967 O'Neill had stunned President Lyndon B. Johnson by telling him that the Vietnam War had become a lost cause. Now, Murtha mused, it was his turn to confront a president with harsh truths.

Which was precisely what the Democratic leadership wanted Murtha to do. A close ally, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, was anxious to open a second axis of attack on Iraq—and was aware of his growing antagonism toward the war. The two met and agreed that he would make his case in private to the party conference. After that, on his own, he would introduce a resolution calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date." Pelosi and the other liberals would keep their distance, while their own Marine charged up the Hill. Framed by long rows of American flags at a press conference, he denounced the Iraq war as a "flawed policy wrapped in an illusion."

Murtha had known he would set off an explosion. He did. His arrival on the House floor was greeted with cheers from fellow Democrats, by dagger glances from Republicans. A near riot ensued. An Ohio backbencher named Jean Schmidt, eager to demonstrate coldbloodedness, was given time by GOP leaders to relate a phone call from a Marine whom she said wanted "to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Furious Democrats charged down the aisles, fists in the air, shouting that Schmidt's words had to be stricken from the record. "You guys are pathetic!" yelled Rep. Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, while Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee charged into the GOP side to confront them. The melee was so intense that it brought the soothing presence of Rep. Tom DeLay from his secure undisclosed location, and Schmidt eventually apologized. By a vote of 403-3, the House ultimately rejected a bowdlerized version of Murtha's resolution, which the GOP had crafted (without Murtha's permission) to sound as cravenly antiwar as possible. Seeing the obvious trap, virtually every Democrat, including Murtha, voted against it.

The drama on the floor was a shabby—at times, farcical—finale to a season that nevertheless had produced something serious: a transformation of the politics of the war in Washington. Some of the change had little to do with the war per se. From the bungling of Katrina disaster relief to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, the White House had faced a run of bad news that would buckle support for any of the president's policies. But as they watched the continued deadly attacks by Sunni insurgents—and the continued erosion of Bush's numbers as a war leader and honest man—Democrats were encouraged to up the ante in Congress. "The fact is, Bush's war policy has failed," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a former Clinton spin doctor who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It's failed! Who better to say so than Jack Murtha?"

On the ground, the shrewder analysts say, it's not entirely clear that U.S. policy has "failed." The TV news, not to mention Al-Jazeera, doesn't regularly summarize the stunning changes in Iraq, many of them morally and politically worthy. Saddam Hussein is gone and awaiting trial. Schools, hospitals and other institutions are operating in most parts of the country. Voters have adopted a constitution. And even many Sunnis are gathering in political parties that are maneuvering in advance of the Dec. 15 national elections. After the elections, the plan is that Coalition forces will use the growing number of capable Iraqi units to "clear, hold and build" a peaceful Iraq.

But fresh allegations that the government was secretly torturing Sunnis won't help encourage that sect to take part in the December balloting. And few members of Congress return from visits to Iraq buoyant about the likelihood of ending the insurgency any time soon without a massive infusion of additional American troops that, according to Murtha, would require the reinstitution of the draft. "I saw how discouraged these commanders were," the congressman told NEWSWEEK. "They say what the White House wants them to say, but they don't have enough troops to secure the border."

As Congress fled the capital for Thanksgiving, and Bush made his way back from a trip to Asia, White House aides were studying the political videotapes to see where they had lost control of events. Among those at fault, they decided, was GOP Sen. Bill Frist, outmaneuvered early this month by the Democrats' Harry Reid, who used a parliamentary trick to force the Senate into a secret session and demand answers on WMD issues. But White House aides concede that they, too, were at fault for having assumed that Bush was personally unassailable and that events—and explanations of them—would take care of themselves. A war-room defense was "something we did well during the campaign," said Nicolle Wallace, Bush's communications director. "Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn't be necessary after the election."

It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove. To answer the charges that Bush "deliberately misled" the country on WMD, the White House is arguing that most Democrats—and most U.N. officials and European intelligence agencies—thought Saddam had WMD, too. Bush aides argue that Democrats saw the same intel and came to the same conclusions Bush did (an assertion Democrats hotly dispute). "We recognized that we can't communicate our message effectively until we deal with this," said a top White House aide.

But it's unclear how calling Democrats hypocrites will help revive Bush's personal reputation. Rather than undermine Bush's foes, the strategy seems unlikely to do more than remind voters of the undeniable fact that the WMD simply weren't there. And to make their case at all, White House strategists have been forced to use a tactic they studiously avoided in the campaign: deploying Bush himself as the attack dog. "Having the president engaged in the argument is not the first choice," says Sen. John Cornyn, a Texan who is close to Bush and Rove. But the president pressed ahead. "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war," he told a military audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." Then he resorted once again to the argument all presidents unload in wartime: that criticism undermines morale and emboldens our enemies. "These baseless attacks," he declared, "send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy determined to destroy our way of life." But even using that weapon can be risky at a time when polls show most Americans doubt that the war in Iraq has made us safer.

War-room spinners also hope to highlight whatever good news there is to be found in Iraq, and which, they say, doesn't make its way into the American media. They recently dispatched one of their best operatives, Steve Schmidt (no relation to the Ohio congresswoman), to Baghdad to look for ways generate positive press. His answer: build better relations with the reporters. But they may be preoccupied these days by the need to dodge terrorist attacks on their hotels.

The president himself remains upbeat, saying that he will "settle for nothing less than victory." Democrats such as Sen. John Kerry, meanwhile, have begun offering measured withdrawal plans, and Republicans, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel, are expressing their deep doubts about the policy. The Pentagon has developed elaborate options for phased withdrawals of U.S. forces. Murtha plans to press for a full-scale debate. "Tip O'Neill would be proud of you," a friend wrote to him. At the end of the week Murtha was back in the Pennsylvania corner, only now everyone in Washington knew exactly where he was.

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With Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey and John Barry

They don't know Jack

Sunday, November 20, 2005
By Dennis Roddy

Moments after Walter Cronkite, fresh home from Saigon, declared that the war in Vietnam could not be won and the troops should come home, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a political giant unaccustomed to retreat, knew he was finished.

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," Johnson said.

From that moment in 1968, the Vietnam War consisted of a long, fatal denouement, every death a profound indictment not of a bad decision in 1964, but corrupt indecision between Tet 1968 and the day Richard Nixon welcomed home the POWs.

The loss of Vietnam rankled John Murtha deeply. I know this because I knew him 30 years ago, when I was a college sophomore and worked in the 1974 campaign that sent him to Congress. In a wretched little cubbyhole office on lower Bedford Street in Johnstown, I went through the Murtha family photo album looking for things to use in a brochure. One thing that stood out was a photograph of a photograph next to a framed document. It was Marine Reserve Maj. John Murtha's orders to Vietnam, next to his service photo.

He argued his way into Vietnam -- wanted to go, and once wrote an article for a service magazine about how the war could be won through motivation and leadership. The photo was fuzzy, faded and graphically useless even as it spoke with clarity about the man the Conemaugh Valley was about to send to Washington.

In Congress, Rep. Murtha has been a hawk among doves, a man filled with political acumen and suspicious of anything smelling of the post-Watergate reforms others in his congressional class embraced. When U.S. troops went to Lebanon, Mr. Murtha went to see them. When we invaded Grenada, he cheered them on. When America dabbled in El Salvador, he supported aid to defeat a communist insurgency.

Mr. Murtha was, in short, Johnstown: a place where working people expect others to work, are slow to embrace the new, and will happily join up for a war so long as the cause is good and they are sent there to win. Cambria County, in which Johnstown is the lone city, cast aside the leftover traditions of the New Deal last year and voted for George W. Bush. They voted for Mr. Bush because they believed him when he said the Iraq war was necessary, and because they accepted his sincerity about banning abortion, saving their guns and restoring old values that fit them like their fathers' steel-toed work boots. In short, they voted for George W. Bush because they believed he was like John P. Murtha.

Last week, with Walter Cronkite off the airwaves, and a once-aggressive press more than two decades at bay, George W. Bush lost Jack Murtha.

He lost Middle America.

Every death in Iraq from this moment on will be a mark of shame, first upon the president who took us there under an erroneous pretense, then upon a Congress that allows any more men and women to die while they cast about for a new pretense for staying.

But where Lyndon Johnson was a political giant, unwilling to lash out in revenge, President Bush is not. What remains ahead for Mr. Murtha is so obvious as to be harmless to him even as it is toxic to governance. Vice President Dick Cheney fired one of the first shots, questioning the congressman's judgment and, by implication, his honor.

"I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Mr. Murtha responded.

Expect Mr. Murtha's patriotism to fall into question. His morality in office will be questioned. Possibly his enemies will assign him Tom DeLay's finances and Bill Clinton's libido.

Soon the Swift Boaters will be afloat, suggesting that Mr. Murtha's Vietnam service was a charade (he won a Bronze Star), and that his Purple Hearts were undeserved. The Purple Heart gambit has been played before, first in 1982, then just last year. The answer to this nonsense will be the one that gave Mr. Murtha such cache as both a candidate and a member of Congress: big wound or small, he got it in Vietnam. He was there. They were not.

The second brick destined to crash through the Murtha family parlor window is Abscam. Mr. Murtha was one of eight members of Congress lured to a Washington townhouse by a team of FBI agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik. They handed out briefcases filled with $50,000 in return for helping the sheik gain residency in the United States.

Mr. Murtha is on videotape telling the agents, "Not interested," but inviting the sheik to invest a few million in his struggling hometown, where unemployment reached 25 percent.

Mr. Murtha's probity might have been in doubt at that moment. Certainly he played the political coquette, suggesting they might do business later.

But where his companions were stuffing their pockets, he was trying to figure out how to get a fake prince to open a factory in Johnstown. Among agents of the government operating a fantasy, Mr. Murtha was attempting to get something real accomplished. That is what he is like.

Now, having learned through Abscam that good intentions cannot be achieved by appealing to false premises, Mr. Murtha is applying the same fresh truth to the Iraq war.

No man has more credibility on issues military and certainly none represents a district more attuned to the values Mr. Bush professes to love.

If Jack Murtha's district stands behind him on this, the Bush administration has lost that part of the body politic wherein the heart is kept.

The Irresponsibility Of It All

by Bart Whiteman
posted November 18, 2005

Let’s all get on the same page. Okay? The bash word of the week is “irresponsible.” Use it at your leisure for seven days and then move on. It is being used now by the Bush administration gang the way Mark Antony used “honorable” to describe Julius Caesar’s assassins at the great leader’s funeral. Antony’s usage was ironic. The Bush gang’s usage is less sophisticated.

Antony was able simultaneously to seduce his opposition with apparent flattery and rile the Roman crowd who didn’t miss the intended irony one bit. Bush has left his seduction club at home in his other golf bag. That leaves riling, and he will rile away ‘til the cows come home.

Antony was a protégé of a more powerful man who subsequently rose to power on his own, but thanks completely to that man. So is Bush.

Antony eventually had an affair with his mentor’s former mistress (Cleopatra). Bush…well, times have changed.

Antony’s speech led to war. Bush doesn’t need to lead to war. He’s already got one.

Antony’s choice repeated adjective of the moment was aimed at a group of senators. So is Bush’s.

Antony’s speech was in defense of single strongman rule – dictatorship. He had offered to crown Caesar emperor. Antony’s subsequent war established a triumvirate (himself and two others) to rule the still growing Roman Empire. The idea was it would take three people to fill the shoes of one Julius Caesar, or so Antony thought. This triangle proved to be unstable. Another part of the triumvirate (Octavian) seized power alone and changed his name to Augustus Caesar (meaning “Big Caesar”) to celebrate his triumph. It would be like Bush changing his name to “Magna Bush” or “Terminator Bush” as a way of delineating himself from his father.

The murderous senators thought they were defending democracy. (Sound familiar?) Instead, they opened the door for the biggest despot the world had seen to that point. It took 1776 years for some other folks to take a stab at establishing democracy again half a world away.

For all this trouble two thousand years ago, we got the names of two of our months – July and August, the two hottest. Hot dog.

All of this is to say “plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose.” This was something a few Blue Bloods were heard mumbling as they made their way up to the guillotine platform during another attempt at establishing democracy. Lo and behold, their blood wasn’t blue. Who knew?

The French democratic experiment created Napoleon, who gave Augustus Caesar a run for the title of “Biggest Baddest Monster Cheese of All Time.” Napoleon didn’t wait around for an Antony to offer him a crown. He crowned himself emperor. This is what is called “progress.”

Napoleon wanted to teach the Russians a lesson in the joys of governmental evolution, and about 200,000 of his own soldiers froze to death as a price for that seminar.

In the bygone 20th century, there were three other attempts at supplanting monarchies with group rule or “government by the people.” One gave us Stalin, another gave us Hitler, and the third gave us Mao.

All of this reminds me of another quote: “The best laid plans o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley/An’ lea’e us nought but grief and pain, For promis’d joy!” This wasn’t written by John Steinbeck. It was written by Robert Burns, a Scotsman who understood what it was like to have the tar and stuffing beaten out of you for a thousand years by the British. The little island blood feud was finally settled (sort of) to form the United Kingdom when the British monarch (Elizabeth I) didn’t produce an heir. Elizabeth was succeeded by her nephew James, the reigning King of Scotland, whose mother (Mary) Elizabeth had beheaded. This was how they settled wars in the old days.

We are currently searching for another method…I think.

Let’s go back to the word “irresponsible” itself. To call someone “irresponsible” doesn’t really have a Patrick Henry-esque ring to it. You get the feeling that the noun “cad” should follow it. Now we are really off in left wimp field. It sounds like a euphemism used at a slightly racy Victorian tea party. “I have to use the irresponsible, Dolores, to powder my nose. I’ll be back in five minutes. Don’t you dare start desert without me.”

No, Bush would do better if he said things like: “They’re a bunch of truth-squashing, scum-eating vermin.” He needs words he can sink his canines into.

Besides, Bush calling the Democrats “irresponsible” in this fracas is like the pot calling the kettle “over-rated cookware.” It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just Bush saying it but there is an obvious lexiconic conspiracy afoot here since that word is leaking out of every hole in the crate of state. “Okay, guys, here’s the deal. We call them ‘irresponsible.’ Capiche? Memorize it. It’s this week’s code word. If I hear you use one adjective, I want to hear that one.”

Say it a million times. Drill it into the public mind. Then even the responsible ones look “irresponsible.”