Time for contrition on war

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Time for contrition on war				September 27, 2006

It was Plato’s addiction to logic and his aversion to philosophical hypocrisy that led to his attack on the effete orator Parmenides. Parmenides’ contention was that the telos of any persuasive presentation should be a victorious argument. In other words, say whatever you have to in order to win.

As we face another election and the verbal claptrap that passes for reasoned thought on the part of political contenders, it is clear that Parmenides’ position has won the day and that Plato’s insistence on logic as part of argumentative excellence is as passe as virtue and honesty in our governmental chambers.

In a recent column in the Washington Post, Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida and the present host of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” said, “If I were a GOP candidate this year, I would spend the next 50 days telling conservatives and liberals alike that, even though I voted for this war once and this president twice, time has proved that Bush and Rumsfeld were wrong to think that the nation could win Iraq on the cheap.”

Realizing that the great millstone around the necks of Republicans in this election is the war in Iraq and the obfuscating and misleading insistence on the part of the president, vice president and secretary of defense that things are on course in that blood-begrimed country, Republican candidates should perform a major act of contrition, disavow their votes for and support of the war and initiate divorce proceedings against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The best offense against the soporific Democrats is to co-opt the arguments they should have been drumming into the heads of the people since this mockery of a war in Iraq began.

As Scarborough suggested, people admire independence in their politicians. What better mode of independence is there than a hypocrisy that allows for the disavowal of the very leaders congressional Republicans have been mawkishly mewing over for six years?

Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-1^st) has also seen the light. In a speech before the Hampton Roads Chapter of the American Society of Military Comptrollers on Aug. 10, Davis called for the resignation of Rumsfeld. She claimed that he should have listened to the now-disgraced Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki when, before the war, he advised that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq. Furthermore, said Davis, she’s felt this way about Rumsfeld for two years. “He’s probably a nice guy, but I don’t think he’s a great secretary of defense.” This is the same Davis who, up until a few months ago, was claiming that we would still find WMD in Iraq.

Hello, Parmenides. Good-bye, Rummy.

But it is the war itself and the loss of life and limbs that now clutter Davis’ conscience.

While she still supports the war, she feels guilty about voting for it whenever she sees someone who has been severely wounded in combat. “I feel a little guilty there because I voted for the war. It makes you feel like, my vote caused this. But I still feel it was the right decision at the time.” As with most supporters of the war, Davis thought “the intelligence was correct.”

Davis sounds for all the world like Helen of Troy. Having deserted her husband, Menelaus, and followed that cutie Paris to Troy, Helen at one point in Homer’s narrative begins to feel guilty about the needless slaughter in a war she caused. Greek and Trojan blood is being spilled because of her vote to leave home, and how is she to justify that? Yet, after viewing all the gory scenes on the battlefield, she retreats to her quarters in the palace and castigates Paris for slinking off the field of combat. Fight the war I caused, but please don’t show me its bloody results.

Unlike Helen, who had all the intelligence she needed when she got her first whiff of Paris, Davis is still conflicted when she considers her fatal vote. “If I had known that the intelligence they gave us wasn’t correct, I don’t know how I would have voted.”

The thrust of that remark is rather staggering, if indeed Davis now surmises that, despite flawed intelligence, she still might have voted for the war. One wonders on what basis her vote for the massacre in Iraq would have been cast. Would it have been out of blind allegiance to her president or because of an inexcusable ignorance of the apparently unknown consequences of such a dire undertaking?

Whatever her reasoning at that point, Davis now wants to “bring our babies home” as soon as we can get the recalcitrant Iraqis to take over their own country. Babies indeed. If that is the only premise under which our babies can come home, they may well be suckling at the teats of terror until the Tigris runs dry.

With her alleged guilt over the war and her anti-Rumsfeld polemical panoply in full gear, Davis has, ala Parmenides, played her Iraqi trump card and decimated the hand of her opponent. Whether after the election she will obsequiously reclaim her fidelity to her former administrative consorts is anyone’s guess.