Keep Talkin’ Happy Talk

September 23, 2004

In a recent Newsweek column, Anna Quindlen says the war can still be won.

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No, not the war on terrorism — the war on poverty. All we need is the will to win.

Forty years ago, in his first state of the Union speech, President Lyndon Johnson announced, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” Johnson was an optimist when it came to war. He never made or sought a formal declaration of war in Vietnam. He unilaterally declared war on poverty himself.

Both wars turned out to be unwinnable, but Johnson remained the optimist. Curiously, liberals soon saw the futility of his war in Asia, but not his war on poverty. Miss Quindlen still espies the light at the end of the tunnel.

Johnson never specified how we’d know when poverty — an abstraction, like terrorism — would be defeated. After all, American poverty was, and is, a relative thing. The “underclass,” at its most restive, didn’t steal necessities like food; it stole luxury items like color televisions. No matter how rich the country gets, there will always be relative poverty. When the majority of us are billionaires, there will still be millionaires straggling behind. Liberals will still be lamenting the inequity of it all.

The Iraq war, which George W. Bush equates with the war on terrorism, also appears to be unwinnable, though Bush and his Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, remain optimistic. Pay no attention to those car bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, “pockets of resistance,” “thugs and terrorists”: “Freedom is on the march.” But freedom in Iraq has to go heavily armored, watching its step.

Bush has to talk happy talk. If he admits he has achieved anything less than success, he may as well say “President Kerry.” And the other top members of his administration seem to be letting the boss do all the happy talking, just as most of the Catholic hierarchy let the Pope preach the hard teachings without much help from them. They may still talk tough (“The war is justified, and we can’t give up”) but they no longer talk happy (“It’s a cakewalk!”).

[Breaker quote: Still fighting, after all these years]

[Breaker quote: Still fighting, after all these years]

Robert Novak reports that even within the administration there is a near-consensus that U.S. troops must come home next year. Troop morale is low. Even Bush himself no longer predicts an epidemic of democracy sweeping the Middle East, inspired by the Iraqi model. The elections scheduled for January are in doubt.

Lincoln won reelection in 1864 after Sherman burned Atlanta, giving the North hope of victory in a long (by American standards) war. Bush has already burned Baghdad and toppled the old regime. It not only hasn’t seemed to help, it has only compounded confusion as to who the enemy is and what the war is about.

We thought we knew what it was going to be about: Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction and the “smoking gun” that might take the form of a “mushroom cloud.” Saddam is in custody, the weapons never turned up, and Condi Rice has clammed up about mushroom clouds. In fact the whole administration avoids mentioning the very things it warned us about so obsessively for more than a year.

One of the ironies of the war is that Saddam’s mythical weapons were a distraction from Osama bin Laden. Now Bush needs distractions from Saddam’s mythical weapons. Bin Laden, still at large, is all but forgotten.

Bush has left himself only one exit strategy: to set up a viable, or at least seemingly viable, democracy in Iraq. But when your policies are futile and inconsistent, keeping up appearances can become awkward. The Nixon-Kissinger exit strategy for South Vietnam was “Vietnamization”: handing the war over to the South Vietnamese themselves. But they couldn’t handle it, and the North Vietnamese won.

Maybe freedom really is on the march in Iraq, if freedom means Iraqis driving invaders out. But to Bush, those Iraqis are “rebels,” “insurgents,” “terrorists,” who simply hate democracy and freedom. He is a captive of his own slogans, which have no analytical meaning and appeal only to reflexive patriotism.

Can Bush keep up the illusion of imminent victory until the election? As someone has said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time; and those are pretty good odds.”

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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