Nation Topics - Washington | The Nation

The article presents an editorial discussing how the recent political turmoil facing the Republican party has influenced the atmosphere in Washington. The author suggests that the GOP majority is begin to resemble the Democratic party of old, when they held power and where always fighting amongst themselves. According to the author, the most damaging criticisms of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush are related to the war in Iraq. It is suggested the political landscape in Washington has never been more open to progressive solutions.

The article focuses on U.S. Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, and how he is becoming an aggressive and progressive member of the Senate Democratic leadership. Durbin's filleting of judicial nominees, such as Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, has been an obscure pleasure enjoyed mainly by Washington liberal activists who monitor the progress of judicial nominations. Those who have followed Durbin's twenty-two-year career as a member of the House and Senate argue with confidence that his election as Senate Democratic whip, the second-highest-ranking position in the caucus, was one of the few bright spots in the dark days following the 2004 election debacle. The November 2 defeat of minority leader Tom Daschle opened the way for a long-needed reshuffling of the Democratic Party's leadership in the upper chamber. Though Durbin has one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, he sees himself as very much in the mainstream of his party. But he recognizes something that too many party leaders in both houses have had a hard time wrapping their heads around since the 1994 election handed power to the Republicans: The mainstream of his party is not currently the mainstream of Congress. Democrats must therefore stop thinking of themselves as the natural party of government and start operating as an opposition force--picking the right fights, remaining united in their dissents and establishing a record on the most critical issues of the day that is distinct from that of the White House and the House and Senate majorities. While Durbin is very much a member of the inner circle of Senate progressives, he is no fan of lonely protest votes. He is determined to hold the Democratic caucus together in order to get the forty votes necessary to stall nominees and policies.

The article presents news briefs related to current events. The Abu Ghraib scandal has faded from Washington's radar screen--to the President George W. Bush Administration's presumed relief. Seven low-level soldiers have been prosecuted in military court, but the people in charge, starting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have avoided legal scrutiny. In an attempt to remedy this breakdown of justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials, accusing them of war crimes connected with Abu Ghraib. Henry Waxman of California said in a report that government documents kept secret included those about the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, communications between the Department of Defense and Vice President Dick Cheney's office regarding Halliburton contracts in Iraq, and memorandums revealing what the White House knew about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The United Church of Christ has produced a television advertisement featuring muscle-bound bouncers determining who may or may not attend church. Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations," CBS announced, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the CBS and UPN networks."

This article discusses U.S. involvement in Iraq. The price we are paying for George W. Bush's unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq keeps rising: The number of Americans killed in the war has now passed the 1,000 mark. And the price will keep rising until Washington accepts the fact that this is a war we cannot win--and that by trying to win it, we are only further radicalizing the Iraqi people and giving life to Islamic extremists by handing them the cause of Iraqi nationalism. Indeed, since the "handover of sovereignty" at the end of June the resistance has grown in intensity and sophistication--August was the bloodiest month of the occupation, with 2,700 attacks on US troops and 1,100 soldiers wounded--and has come from more sectors of Iraqi society, both Sunni and Shiite. Reconstruction in many parts of the country has ground to a halt, and the last fifty or so international aid agencies operating in Iraq are said to be likely to leave, following the abduction of two Italian aid workers. At the same time, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has told the Security Council that the violence in Iraq could make it more difficult to go ahead with the planned elections. Faced with this situation, the Allawi government and American military commanders have had no choice but to effectively cede more and more areas to various resistance groups, including the cities of Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra. We urge political and other leaders to join us in calling for Washington to begin to withdraw US forces and to renounce any interest in maintaining military bases or in exercising control over Iraq's economy and oil resources, instead leaving the future of Iraq to the Iraqi people.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents, along with their powerful fellow travelers, Christian Zionists, have forged a bipartisan consensus in United States politics that Middle East policy must privilege the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. In practice, this solid consensus means putting Israeli security before peace; supporting even such extreme Israeli measures as the separation wall and assassinations; and delegitimizing the Palestinian leadership. But surveys have consistently found that 50 to 60 percent of American Jews favor ending the occupation and dismantling settlements in return for peace. 2002 was a banner year: At a pro-Israel rally in Washington that April, busloads of demonstrators from Jewish social-service agencies and Hillels (the network of Jewish campus organizations) booed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for speaking about Palestinian suffering, and the Anti-Defamation League and other groups published manuals on how to discredit "anti-Israel propaganda" on campuses. But tens of thousands of American Jews have had a very different response to the failed talks and the new Palestinian uprising. Most of the new organizations are explicitly Jewish, but American Jewish activists have also been central players in the founding of multiethnic organizations like the International Solidarity Movement, which sends international observers, about a fifth of whom are American Jews, into the occupied territories, and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which advocates divestment from Israel bonds. In April 2004, Brit Tzedek organized 10,000 U.S. Jews to sign another open letter, this one calling on Israel and the United States to fund the relocation of Jewish settlers from the occupied territories to Israel.

Perhaps the most important question--for present policy-makers as well as historians--posed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States is what role he played in ending the cold war. And perhaps the most illuminating recent article on this question is one written by Wesley Clark for "Washington Monthly" just before Reagan died in June 2004. A mistaken belief that the Soviet Union was brought down chiefly by U.S. military pressure, Clark believes, has led the group of neoconservatives now in charge of U.S. policy to think military action can now bring democracy to the Middle East. Clark acknowledges that the Reagan military buildup played a role in the Soviet turnaround under Mikhail Gorbachev. Soviet military backwardness was perhaps the most sharply painful aspect of the Soviet Union's growing technical lag behind the United States, and the Reagan military buildup intensified it. But far more important than the buildup, Clark argues, was the long policy of containment that preceded it. Gorbachev called for a "new thinking," which put the interests of peace and survival above imperial or ideological interest. He had a commitment to installing openness and respect for human rights in Soviet policy. In a word, the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred more for political than for military reasons.

In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, a national debate is emerging about withdrawing US forces from Iraq; even some of the war's firmest backers suggest it is now a lost cause. As the "[Washington] Post" reported on May 9, a growing number of US commanders share this pessimism, not because opponents like the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr cannot be crushed militarily but because each American assault serves only to deepen Iraqis' resentment of the occupation. And then there are non-Iraqis like the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is reportedly behind the grisly videotaped beheading of Nicholas Berg, the first of many promised acts of revenge for Abu Ghraib. "Dead Man Walking" is how one Pentagon consultant described the mood among US generals about the situation in Iraq. Every day, more horrific photographs and videos come to light--a naked detainee led on a dog leash, another naked man screaming in terror as attack dogs menace him--lending bitter irony to the claim that America's ultimate mission in Iraq is to export our values. With polls showing that half of Americans now think the Iraq war is a mistake, and with the Muslim and Arab world seething over Abu Ghraib, we hope [John] Kerry summons the courage to call for a similarly bold change in course.

The author comments on the April 25 pro-choice demonstration in Washington, D.C. By the most conservative estimates, the March for Women's Lives in Washington on April 25 was the biggest pro-choice demo ever--and it may have been the biggest march of any kind in US history. If justice existed in the mass-media universe, the newsweeklies would now pose the question, "Is Post-Feminism Dead?" Of course, it doesn't, and they won't. But the political reverberations of this groundbreaking event could be significant. The stealth antichoice strategy pursued by the Bush Administration has been premised on the expectation that a gradual whittling away of women's reproductive rights will have little political consequence. The pro-choice movement's response, embodied in the broad-ranging theme of the March for Women's Lives, is to unmask the anti-woman agenda connecting the assault on sex-ed and contraception to the global gag rule to Attorney General Ashcroft's outrageous subpoena of women's private medical records to defend the "Partial-Birth" Abortion Ban. After congratulating the throngs for turning out, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who received a reception fit for a rock star, noted, "If all we do is march today, that will not change the direction this country is headed under the leadership of this Administration." She had a point. So, yes, there is much unglamorous work to be done (including pressuring centrist Dems like Clinton and Kerry to stand up on the full range of issues affecting women's lives). But the importance of the march itself--for networking, coordinating, strategizing as well as morale boosting--should not be discounted.

The author comments on the reactions of U.S. journalists to a joke made by George W. Bush about the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When George W. Bush appeared before the annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner and joked about his failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was a challenging--and illuminating--moment for the Washington media. As Bush flashed photographs of himself looking about the Oval Office and quipped, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," the betuxed and begowned audience generally laughed. Perhaps it was not surprising that Bush was so insensitive. By turning his prewar misinformation--or disinformation--into material for yuks, he was downgrading a controversy. Suspicious minds can wonder if that was the strategic intent of the bit. But did the media have to go along? An extensive though unscientific review of the subsequent coverage suggests that many, if not most, in the Washington press corps saw Bush's shtick as no big deal. Much of the media approached the story as just another tussle between Democrats and Republicans. Not all Washington journalists and commentators went with the just-a-joke or it's-all-politics lines. Overall, there was more excuse and explanation than outrage and examination.

The Bush Administration's hawks and their neoconservative allies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and "The Weekly Standard" are engaged in a high-risk and high-stakes effort to restore their fading power in Washington by pressing for a confrontation with Iran. Not only are they undeterred by the chaos in Iraq, but they are pressing ahead to advance their regional strategy, one that calls for regime change in Iran, then Syria and Saudi Arabia. Leading the charge against Iran is AEI's Michael Ledeen, perhaps best known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra. In 2002 they helped organize the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the Iraq war-planning unit whose intelligence staffers are now under investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for allegedly manipulating evidence about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism. There is widespread disagreement about both Iran's intentions in Iraq and the extent of its capability to cause mischief there. But there is a consensus that Iran can exercise significant power. The "realists" inside the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer in Iraq, are well aware that Iran could deal a fatal blow to the already faltering US efforts.