Here's The Issue

After my “Choosing Liberalism” post last week, Tankwoman picked up the ball and ran it several more yards down the field with her own post: "Choose Courage and Morality." While I urged liberals to distill their vision to a manageable number of issues, Tanker was all about just one: Bush’s war. I could not agree with her more heartily.

Political pundits often castigate “single-issue voters.” People who think they can see the bigger picture of the complicated array of issues facing twenty-first century American citizens, seem to believe it is the ultimate laziness, or stupidity, or dereliction of duty, to pick one issue, and vote your conscience on the basis of that issue alone. I used to have little patience with the tunnel-vision types myself. Until the last election. When I became one.

This is what I wrote on the subject in October 2004, in the waning days of the last presidential election campaign:

“Domestic policy, fiscal policy, stance on Medicare, tax and spend, spend and spend…in the long run, there is little difference between the parties on these issues. I’m of the opinion that the economy does NOT live or die by which party occupies the White House. Spin these issues all you want. They REALLY make no difference.

What DOES make a difference is this: George W. Bush led our country halfway across the world to invade a small, relatively helpless (in the face of a vastly superior United States military) nation, for reasons most of the rest of the world found so flimsy that they not only wouldn’t participate in a "coalition" to invade Iraq, but condemned the United States for invading. Thousands of people have died, and a country has been reduced to anarchy, if not civil war, because our president wanted to invade it... We know that Mr. Bush was seeking reasons to attack Iraq almost from the moment he took office, well before the 9/11 attacks. He WANTED to make a war. And he did... Why is it permissible for US to do what the rest of the world may not? Because we currently have the biggest gun and the brass balls to aim it at anyone we choose?

The Bush administration is solely responsible for the travesty in Iraq. Not one iota of blame for this can be laid at the feet of the previous administration, the other party, the Baathists, Osama bin Laden, the Red Menace, or the devil. Any other issue debated during this campaign has simply been an attempt to sidestep this ONE. George W. Bush is the author of unspeakable horror in Iraq. If ever there was a legitimate reason to become a single-issue voter, this is it.

The Iraq War WAS the issue then. It IS the issue now. Except it’s sixteen months, 1310 American souls, and untold thousands of Iraqi lives more the issue now than then.

We have made a hideous mess of Iraq. And there are as many theories about what we should do about it as there are butts in seats in the House and Senate chambers. But, in my book, the first thing we have to do is own up. Someone has to stand up, in front of his/her fellow Americans and the nations of the world, and roundly condemn this war for the gross miscarriage of justice and global relations that it was and continues to be. That person—that courageous, moral person—will be the one who deserves our commitment, our allegiance, and our votes in 2008.

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