Well, One of These Arguments Is Embarrassing

The sad decline of Michael Kinsley continues with this bit of vacuous contrarianism, which has been understandably picked up by jingoist Republican bloggers like Glenn “more rubble, less trouble” Reynolds. According to Kinsley, the statements about Iraq in the Democratic platform are an “embarrassment”:

For national security in general, the Democrats’ plan is so according-to-type that you cringe with embarrassment: It’s mostly about new cash benefits for veterans. Regarding Iraq specifically, the Democrats’ plan has two parts. First, they want Iraqis to take on “primary responsibility for securing and governing their country.” Then they want “responsible redeployment” (great euphemism) of American forces.

Older readers may recognize this formula. It’s Vietnamization — the Nixon-Kissinger plan for extracting us from a previous mistake. But Vietnamization was not a plan for victory. It was a plan for what was called “peace with honor” and is now known as “defeat.”

It really is quite remarkable to use Nixon and Kissinger to attack Pelosi–is Kinsley actually claiming that Vietnam would have turned out better if we had kept more troops there longer? Is this supposed to be a serious argument? Kinsley doesn’t design to share with us what a non-embarrassing plan would look like, but merely implies that a pullout is likely to be followed by bad consequences in Iraq. Which is true enough. But since things are getting worse, simply staying–particularly since Bush has made it clear that his strategy will be to keep trying the same failed approach and magically hope that it will make things better instead of worse (and a pony!)–does absolutely nothing to prevent this “defeat.” If Kinsley is saying that we should try to change things by greatly increasing our commitment of troops, this would be irresponsible for three reasons: 1)it’s exceptionally unlikely to work at this late date, 2)the troops don’t exist, and 3)the people actually in charge of executing the war don’t want to do anything differently even if it were possible.

The real Nixon/Kissinger analogy here, of course, is that the Bush administration is going to do everything possible to blame other people rather than the people actually responsible for the Iraq fiasco. Kinsley demonstrates that any number of Sensible Centrists (TM) will be happy to do so, making the specious argument that if the Democrats don’t develop a plan (about which Kinsley, needless to say, has absolutely nothing useful to contribute) to salvage the unsalvageable then a bad outcome in Iraq is somehow their fault. Whatever its demerits, the Democratic platform is infinitely more honest and less embarrassing than Kinsley’s Nixonian critique. It’s the least bad option for a situation they didn’t create.

Or, of course, there’s the least charitable (but probably, alas, most accurate) reading: that Kinsley completely agrees with the Democratic Party, but thinks that the Democratic platform should say “if elected, we will immediately cut and run to ensure that the United States will lose the Iraq War.” I would prefer to think that he can’t possibly be arguing that parties have a responsibility to frame substantive policies in terms so politically unpalatable they could never be elected to enact these policies, but if he is, well…I think it’s self-refuting.

…Drum notes the same silliness elsewhere in the article.