Security Was Secondary To Politics In Iraq

by Steve

In the remaining days of the midterm elections, and to drive up the approval numbers of vulnerable GOP incumbents, the White House will keep the focus on the war on terror, and not on how bad they screwed up Iraq and abandoned Afghanistan.

Democrats need a compelling narrative to blow a hole in this media-fed storyline, and to steer voters’ focus away from Bush’s “vote Democrat and die” meme and towards something that pins the failing war on terror in Iraq squarely on Bush’s political decisions, because such a linkage goes directly at his misjudgment and lack of character.

This story will provide that narrative. A Page One in Sunday’s Washington Post outlines how the White House turned the Iraqi occupation into a large GOP patronage program, where the only qualification to serve wasn’t your expertise and training, but rather your sworn fealty to George W. Bush and his reelection.

Read this and weep. But every time the Democrats hear Bush challenge their patriotism for opposing him in Iraq, they can hang Iraq directly around his neck, and therefore tell voters that the threats we face have grown because Bush played politics with terrorism and our national security. There are a slew of messaging opportunities from this story, and it can blow a hole in the “stay with me on this or die” narrative that Bush is putting out there, simply by telling voters that he has turned Iraq into a Republican party playground rather than get the right people to secure the country.

If he did this with the biggest foreign policy mistake of the last several decades, why should voters let him continue to have a free hand in fighting the war on terror?