Over fall break, I took a trip to visit my grandfather and his wife, June, in Detroit. June is a staunch Republican, and my grandfather has long since stopped challenging her. "It's amazing," my grandfather told me while June was in the kitchen getting him a fresh glass of water. "We can sit here and watch the same debate, but see two completely different things." He paused as she came back into the room and placed the glass next to him. He continued, whispering, after she left again. "I don't say anything though. She's completely crazy."
June isn't the kind of crazy conservative we've all come to know and love in the era of Karl Rove. She's that extinct, old-school kind of Republican: smaller government, lower taxes. She is not a fan of President Bush because she, like many other Republicans of her ilk, believes that Bush does not know what it means to be a true conservative. Small government means controlling government spending, and the president has created the largest deficits in history. It also means limiting the government's ability to intrude into people's private lives, and this president opposes a woman's right to choose and erased the Bill of Rights with his USA Patriot Act. Lower taxes means just that, not a series of irresponsible tax cuts for the rich.
What I suppose my grandfather meant when he called June crazy was that despite the fact that the president doesn't represent what it means to be Republican as she defines it, and despite the fact that, by her own admission, she does not approve of the way Bush is running the country, she will vote for him just the same. She's totally dogmatic about this, which isn't surprising. She is a Republican after all.
There is no issue where this divide is clearer than on the issue of Iraq. At this point, the facts are out there. Every single reason the administration gave before the war has been discredited. Besides the fact that Saddam had no WMD and hasn't since 1991, the economic sanctions put in place had successfully prevented him from acquiring them. He also had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no immediate or even distant threat to the United States, so long as we kept on doing what we were doing. This week, both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have acknowledged all of these things. They're true, and that's that.
Saddam was a tyrant, yes, but if we're invading nations these days based on what's morally compelling, I feel like Sudan could have used the help. The genocide that's been going on there for almost 18 months has killed at least 70,000 people. I can't think of anything more morally compelling than that. There are quite a few other nations in the world with tyrannical regimes also, so why Iraq? And if it was just because the president's heart was bleeding for the Iraqi people, why didn't he just say that in the first place? Why bother with all that WMD-connection-to-9/11-mumbo jumbo? None of this adds up.
This is why the nation is split into the president-was-lying-and/or-uninformed-and-this-is-unacceptable camp and the president-was-out-of-it-or-something-but-he's-a-good-guy-and-we're-voting-for-him-anyway camp. When you really think about this, this is sort of a bad position for the president; he's incompetent at best and an evil imperialist at worst, which is sort of a sucky range of options, in my opinion.
For me and many others, being an American has become sort of like living in a sort of Orwellian mind-warp. For this reason, pointing out all the mistruths, errors and manipulations that forced us into Iraq is no longer useful. Whether Bush was lying or whether he was misinformed no longer matters. We need to move forward by making sure we never have to ask these questions about our president ever again.
In this new Upside-Down Bizarro America, facts are twisted and turned. The president and his campaign team create their own reality. As the media covers only the horse race of the presidential election, they do not report in depth the actual situation in Iraq. We do not hear about how our soldiers are ill-equipped, many of them asking their families to purchase them body armor on the Internet and send it to Iraq before it's too late. We don't hear about how much of Iraq is no longer under U.S. control and how many troops it will take to secure it again once Bush is done waiting out the election. Because of this, Iraq's own free elections will have to wait.
John Kerry is telling the truth about Iraq. He has a real plan for real success, which can be found at http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/national_security/iraq.html. If Iraq was legitimately the most important issue in this election, Kerry would win in a landslide, as Bush has no plan for Iraq, no exit strategy and no plan to win the peace. However, Bush's icy relationship with the truth has allowed him to court about half the electorate away from the plan for peace to the plot for power politics. If Bush wins in November, it will mean that the real issues regarding Iraq were non-issues in terms of the presidential campaign, and voters went with the guy who sounded more upbeat. America must do better than that.
Greg Wasserstrom is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs and School of International Service, and the president of the AU College Democrats.
