After the president’s veto of the war-funding bill yesterday, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle took turns most of the morning delivering speeches on how right they are.
Some were excellent. Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) told his colleagues, “Yesterday the President vetoed only the second bill that has ever come to his desk. He called it ‘a prescription for chaos and confusion.’ I ask, how is that different from what we have now?” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), meanwhile, took on one of the White House’s favorite talking points: “In this administration, Generals who disagree with the President earn a new title: ‘Retired.'”
Others were far more incomprehensible.
Today on the House floor, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) compared the war in Iraq to a Major League Baseball feud, asking fellow members of Congress to “Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs.”
“The Cardinals are up by five finishing the top of the ninth. Is this a cause for celebration? Is this a cause for victory? No. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Cubbies score five runs in the bottom of the ninth to throw the games into extra innings. There the score remains until 1:00 AM five innings later. However at the top of the 15th, the Cardinals fail to field a batter. The entire team has left the stadium…. Who wins? We know it’s the team that stays on the field.”
Now, this is unusually dumb for several reasons. As TP noted, “The war in Iraq isn’t a baseball game. No one gets killed in a Cardinals v. Cubs game. U.S. troops need to withdraw from Iraq not because the other “team” is beginning to catch up, but because our presence there is helping to fuel the violence and forcing our troops to referee an intractable civil war.”
Quite right. Maybe I can put this in a way Rep. Shimkus will understand: Imagine your beloved Cardinals are playing the Cubs and they’re literally killing each other. A handful of Brewers are on the field, wreaking havoc, but none of the players are wearing uniforms. You’re with the Yankees. You could have helped stop the fight when it broke out, but you blew it. Ever since, you’ve been chatting with the managers, trying to stop the fight, but to no avail. The Yankees can stay on the field as long as they want, but they can’t win. If they leave the fight, they haven’t “surrendered”; they’ve come to their senses.
Shimkus’ bizarre allegory is helpful, however, in highlighting part of the problem with how conservatives view this war. They see winners and losers. They see us and an enemy. It’s some kind of bilateral conflict.
In fact, it shapes their rhetoric, too. If we withdraw, it’ll be a “defeat.” If we redeploy, it’s akin to “surrender.” It’s what makes Shimkus’ baseball illustrative — he sees this as us vs. them.
All of this is wrong. Let’s say we withdraw from Iraq over the next year. Who has “defeated” us? Sunnis? Shia? Neither. This isn’t a failed war; it’s a failed occupation. To whom have we “surrendered”? The right would have us believe it’s al Qaeda, but we know better; the network is a small part of the Iraqi civil war.
No wonder war supporters’ rhetoric is so incoherent. Even as the war enters its fifth year, they don’t understand the nature of the conflict.