The Imperial City

The Deniers’ Club

Concerning the war, the president and a significant portion of the country seem to be in denial together, co-dependent, committed to the power of positive thinking, each encouraging the other to believe that, by God, we will prevail. Between 30 and 34 percent of Americans think that Iraq is “going well,” that we’re “making progress” or “winning”—and even more, maybe half, think that we’ll probably or definitely succeed in the end. Yet as the famous left-wing terrorist-appeaser Newt Gingrich said recently, “Unless the Bush administration admits that the war in Iraq is a failure, it will never develop a strategy to leave the country successfully.”

When Über-Republicans like Gingrich, Meese, and James Baker are calling a spade a spade, that’s hopeful. Denial and wishful thinking are on the run. But that doesn’t mean last week’s show of earnest, bipartisan good faith will last.

The evolution of hopelessness is following the Kübler-Ross model: We’re bargaining for time, being depressed, moving toward acceptance, while Bush is still in the denial stage.

Early in the New Year, the 2008 election cycle will crank up, the new Congress will convene, and the 3,000th American will die in Iraq. The particulars of our Iraq policy are now mainly a matter of harm reduction and triage, but the big accountability question—Who Lost Iraq?—will loom ever larger as we wind down our involvement, and the consensus answer will shape our politics for decades. Whichever party the public blames will be hobbled.

The greatest long-term gift the new Democratic Congress could give the GOP would be to cut off funding for the war. The Democrats have been screwed for a third of a century not for having gotten us into Vietnam but for deciding that it was a huge mistake and doing a 180 while the war raged. But because today’s out-of-Iraq-now wing of the party is small, and the 2008 presidential front-runner has been more pro-war than anti-, the Democrats are in an excellent position to avoid blame and national-security disrepute. And while the mess in Iraq will surely still be a mess in early 2009, a new Democratic president should be able to preside over our part in the finale, as Nixon did with the Vietnam endgame, without getting branded as surrenderer-in-chief.

Still, Bush will sincerely blame his domestic opponents for the failure, insisting that the debacle is not his fault. You and I can’t imagine that he’s not doing it cynically, but then you or I wouldn’t have said to foreign leaders in 2003 that “God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.” How can he now imagine that he misunderstood God, or that God was mistaken? “I’m satisfied of how he’s done all his jobs,” Bush said of Rumsfeld just before he fired him—and the scary prospect is that he may have been telling the truth, that in Bush’s mind it was just those damn Democrats who forced him to commit that craven political act. People in denial may be a little crazy, but they’re not necessarily lying.

London’s Guardian recently quoted a former senior administration official, who conceded that Bush “is in a state of denial about Iraq,” but that “nobody else is any more.” Indeed, underlings and ex-underlings are madly, cynically trying to shift blame. The leaked Rumsfeld memo (“It is time for a major adjustment”), written just before he left, was meant to show he hadn’t really drunk the Kool-Aid. Tony Snow last week blamed the media for demoralizing our troops by means of “press reports that have a constant failure narrative.” The national-security adviser said that Bush won’t use “the Baker-Hamilton commission [as] cover for an American withdrawal … As the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea.” And the New York Post is calling Jim Baker a “surrender monkey.”

On the eve of the invasion, finally persuaded by writers such as George Packer, David Remnick, Ken Pollack, and Bob Kerrey, I found myself more in favor of the war than opposed. That it would be prosecuted with such relentless incompetence was unimaginable. I still taunt myself with counterfactual speculation about how it might have all gone better. If they’d planned for an occupation and followed Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki’s recommendation to send “several hundred thousand troops” instead of just 150,000, or if Paul Bremer, our “viceroy” in Baghdad, hadn’t disbanded the Iraqi army two months after the invasion. A couple of weeks ago, Kerrey happened to tell me that the viceroyship had been broached to him by “someone connected to the White House” and that he’d said “maybe,” but no job was offered in the end.

I guess those fantasies amount to my own idle, occasional form of denial. For most Americans, I think, the evolution of hopelessness concerning Iraq is following the Kübler-Ross model: We’re now bargaining for time, being depressed, moving toward acceptance, while Bush, it seems, is still in the denial and anger stages.