In a post today Andrew Sullivan writes …
What we desperately need right now is less recrimination – can we all agree that the current crew is simply unhinged? – and more imagination with respect to exploiting the opportunities opened up by the moral and strategic catastrophe of the Iraq occupation.
I don’t think Sullivan necessarily disagrees with what I’m about to write. But it puts me in the mind of what Sen. Lieberman (I) said Tuesday night during the Republicans’ Iraq filibuster when he decried the partisanship and acrimony of the Iraq debate, with an undisguised emphasis on his Democratic colleagues. I agree to the extent that the dangers we face because of the Iraq catastrophe are so great and the long term consequences so vast that we can’t afford score settling and jockeying for advantage. This isn’t rhetoric. Completely setting aside the lives we’ve lost and the money we’ve squandered I don’t think this country has really taken stock of the damage we’ve done to ourselves or the prices we’re going to pay for this folly for decades to come. As it is with a family so to with a country, when catastrophe strikes everyone has to pull together to help find a way out, a way back.
But that’s not where we are. A faction in this country, and it doesn’t merit a loftier label given its quickly diminishing size and its focus on loyalty to a single man, is still focused on perpetuating the catastrophe — continuing it, expanding it and perhaps most importantly denying its very existence. One might say that denial and refusal to come clean on how we got into this mess is actually the least important element. But that’s not the case since it is these that make the continuation of the policy possible.
We can agree that the current crew is unhinged. But they still control the US military and all of US foreign policy until 60 senators agree to bring them to heel.
