The emergence of “Balking Hawks”

War is coming, push has officially come to shove, and the commentariat is falling into definite categories. It’s fascinating to watch from a distance.

As I’ve mentioned before, opponents and supporters of a U.S. invasion of Iraq do not fall along simple, predictable lines. While policy debates in DC usually break down into Dems vs. GOP, liberals vs. conservatives, or in the case of war, hawks vs. doves, we’re finding that dynamic just isn’t sufficiently descriptive — or elastic — for the varying perspectives out there.

Sure, there are plenty of actual hawks and doves out there. The left has both — Joe Lieberman is a definite hawk, Dennis Kucinich is a definite dove — and so does the right (although conservative doves, such as Pat Buchanan, are a little harder to find).

But when reviewing the landscape, I’m finding four distinct groups: hawks, doves, “Tough Doves,” and the newly labeled “Balking Hawks” (who might as well be called, “I was a Hawk, but Bush is screwing this up too much for me to go along with him”).

I’ve already talked a bit about Tough Doves. The term, coined by The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson, basically describes critics of Bush’s war plans who believe that, as Meyerson explained, “America faces graver and more immediate security threats than those posed by Saddam Hussein; that Bush’s preoccupation with Hussein has weakened the nation’s capacity to combat al-Qaeda, North Korea and other threats as well; and that the administration’s indifference to multilateralism, international law and any form of globalism not dictated by the United States has alienated just about every other nation on the planet and thus imperiled our safety.” It’s not that Tough Doves are opposed to ever using military force or believe Saddam Hussein is harmless. On the contrary, Tough Doves acknowledge that Iraq is a problem that warrants strict international scrutiny. It’s just that the group doesn’t believe an unprovoked attack on Iraq without U.N. approval or assistance from NATO allies — right now — is in anyone’s interest. Tough Doves include John Kerry (D-Mass.), Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Gen. Wesley Clark, to a certain extent Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), and in case you’re curious, Carpetbagger.

For a while, in the immediate aftermath of Colin Powell’s powerful presentation to the United Nations, there was a fifth group, labeled the “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club” by the New York Times’ Bill Keller, who found himself a member of the group on Feb. 8. These are folks who thought they were opposed to the war, and who generally disapprove of the Bush administration politically, but upon hearing of the evidence Powell laid out so persuasively, began to think an invasion was justified, and under the circumstances, warranted. In addition to the ever-reasonable Keller, the “club” also featured consistently liberal analysts such as the Washington Post’s Mary McGrory and Slate’s left-leaning Tim Noah.

As near as I can tell, the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club is falling apart and most of them have become Balking Hawks, a term created a few days ago by Slate’s Mickey Kaus. As you’d gather from the name, it’s a group who wanted regime change, believed Colin Powell, felt the benefits of an invasion outweighed the costs, but just hate the way Bush is executing his foreign policy. Journalists such as Time’s Joe Klein, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, and Slate’s Fred Kaplan have all recently explained that Bush is “botching” the entire crisis on a historic level, despite having expressed support for the war up until recently.

Writers such as Josh Marshall, one of my favorite journalists and editor of Talking Points Memo, explained in detail last week that after nearly a year of supporting an attack, he too has come to the conclusion that Bush’s approach to the war is just too costly to proceed. (I’d nominate him as chairman of the Balking Hawk caucus for his thoughtful, non-partisan analysis.) As Marshall said, “The pros and cons of handling Iraq have never been separable from how you do it, the costs you rack up in the doing of it, calculated against the gains you’ll get in having accomplished it. At this point, we truly have the worst case scenario on the international stage. And I think that those costs now outweigh the gains.”

A real coup for the Balking Hawks was picking up the New York Times’ award-winning Thomas Friedman. As Friedman explained just yesterday, after months of endorsing “regime change” in Iraq, he’s had it. Friedman labeled the attack a “war of choice,” and added that he believed “building a decent peace in Iraq will be so much more difficult than the Bush hawks think.” He ultimately concludes that Bush is planning a “divisive, unilateral war in Iraq,” which he said would undermine the goodwill we had built up after the attacks of 9/11 and would sacrifice “the key to managing this complex, dangerous world.”

As important as Friedman is, no one is more important to this debate than Ken Pollack, author of “The Threatening Storm,” easily the most influential book published on Iraq. Pollack, who worked as an analyst on Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council for the last 15 years, has convinced more Doves to become Hawks than all the officials in the Bush administration combined. And now he appears to be balking, too.

Pollack argues that, in light of how far Bush has already taken us down the road to war, “I think that we have no realistic choice but to go to war this year.” That being said, he joins with the Balking Hawks chorus by adding, “I think the Administration has handled the diplomacy and public diplomacy of coalition building very poorly, and I am deeply concerned about the impact this will have both on postwar reconstruction and on our ability to garner allies for the inevitable next crisis.” He has stated that the U.S. should wait to launch at attack on Iraq until “after al-Qa’eda had been greatly weakened,” which he said could take anywhere from “6 to 24 months.” Pollack really diverted from the Bush administration when he argued that invading Iraq should be America’s third highest priority in the Middle East, behind rebuilding Afghanistan and getting the Israeli/Palestinian conflict “under control.”

The fact that so many hawks are abandoning the president on the eve of war demonstrates just how badly Bush has handled the crisis. These are people who have supported the war, recognize Hussein as a threat, and publicly announced their endorsement of the White House’s planned attack. But bumbling diplomatic efforts, compounded by bouts of dishonesty, have fractured the resolve of these one-time hawks. They simply don’t want to be on Bush’s side anymore.

The administration is still lobbying for international support, they may even pick up enough votes to get a majority of the U.N. Security Council. Regardless of the outcome of the U.N. debate, this president, who was once a candidate promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” has split Americans predisposed to agree with him so much that there are now many who are pro-war without being pro-Bush.