After carpeting their green rooms with neocon artists for weeks, the network Sunday shows have finally had someone on who’s saying what everyone else has been thinking. On ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos yesterday, Katrina vanden Heuvel told Bill Kristol to his face that if he wants the United States to intervene in Iraq so much, “you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi Army.”
Rarely, if at all, has someone put it so directly to Kristol on one of the Sunday talk shows, where the Weekly Standard editor has made quite a successful career for himself. But The Nation’s vanden Heuvel punctured the Sunday-show gentleman’s agreement that we’re all in this TV pundit business together—so, while you don’t have to be polite to one another exactly, if you want to speak truth to a bully’s blather, it’s best to do so indirectly and on tiptoes.
Instead, sitting just a foot from him, vanden Heuvel told Kristol what we’ve all been thinking, especially of leading chickenhawks like him: that he’s one of “architects of catastrophe” who deserves “accountability,” and that what America—and by implication him and the neocons—has done to Iraq is “a crime.”
The panel, including Matthew Dowd and Donna Brazile, was talking about presidential powers when Katrina bent the discussion:
For example, the president should go to Congress if he’s going to take military action in Iraq…. There’s no military solution to Iraq, and I have to say, sitting next to Bill Kristol, man—I mean, the architects of catastrophe that have cost this country trillions of dollars, thousands of lives—there should be accountability.
If there are no regrets for the failed assumptions that have grievously wounded this nation—I don’t know what happened to our politics and media accountability, but we need it, Bill, because this country should not go back to war. We don’t need armchair warriors, and if you feel so strongly, you should, with all due respect, enlist in the Iraqi Army.
Kristol, his smirk fading, shot back, “That’s a very cute line.” (Would he have said that to a man?)
“But it’s real,” vanden Heuvel said. “Millions of Iraqis have been displaced…. What we have done to that country is a crime.”
“What we have done to that country?” Kristol said. “President Bush made mistakes, he was punished for those mistakes electorally as he should have been in 2006, and perhaps in 2008. He also had the courage to order the surge in 2007, which made up for those mistakes, and left things peaceful.”
It’s not clear if Kristol was trying to pin all the “mistakes” on Bush and thereby pretend that vanden Heuvel wasn’t talking about him at all.
After more back and forth, Matthew Dowd, who worked for George Bush and has a son who served two tours in Iraq, in effect seconded Katrina and obliquely slammed Kristol, “We all know, everybody—most everybody knows—that this has been a colossal waste of money…and the blood of men and women of our country,” he said.
“We don’t fix the first mistake by continuing to make a second mistake." Anyone who’s an enlisted person, he continued, “will tell you that the only way this can be solved is you have commit troops there for 100 years. …I, for one, don’t think we should send another man or another woman, over there in a mistake that was made in the first place.”
Watch it here:
