1 Boring Old Man

Now that Bush has talked about our kids, can we ask about his?

George W. Bush During his press conference Thursday, the president got personal when talking about the threat from al-Qaida terrorists. "They are a threat to your children, David," he said to NBC’s David Gregory. It’s an understandable instinct. To persuade, we try to appeal to common experience. Policy debates can get abstract. Mention someone’s children, though, and they get concrete fast. The president found this such a useful tool that he used it a second time in the same press conference. "I would hope our world hasn’t become so cynical that they don’t take the threats of al-Qaida seriously, because they’re real, and it’s a danger to the American people," he said in response to a question about the war from Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times. "It’s a danger to your children, Jim."

For Bush, this line of argument is not a two-way street. Over the years, reporters have been censured and scowled at for asking about the president’s or vice president’s children in the context of a policy debate. The tone was set in the early months of 2001. After the president publicly urged parents to talk to their children about drugs and drinking, Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth asked then-press secretary Ari Fleischer if Bush had taken his own advice with his daughters, one of whom had just been cited for underage drinking. Roth got no answer. He was later told ominously that his question had "been noted in the building," as if he should expect to wake to the sight of a horse head.

Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney welcomed into the world his sixth grandchild, Samuel David Cheney. The lad’s parents are the Cheneys’ daughter, Mary, and her partner, Heather Poe. When Wolf Blitzer asked Cheney months ago about a stalwart Republican political ally who’d claimed that two lesbian parents were not healthy for a child, the vice president did not answer, rebuking Blitzer with, "I think, frankly, you’re out of line with that question." (Another horse head, or maybe Gitmo.)

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It’s easy to understand the president’s impulse during his press conference. Making the private reference to the reporters’ children helped make his case in the most human terms possible. But he’s got to get, then, why other people make the same move. Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq, asked the president if he’d talked about the war with his daughters and why they weren’t serving. It’s hard to imagine that the president and Mrs. Sheehan would ever have anything in common, but it seems that now, they do.

I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging "the terrorists," opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

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As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the "the-surge-is-already-working" school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

 

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. "The long war is an unwinnable one," I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. "The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do."

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To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.