Bumpy Ride Ahead - Mother Jones Blogs Iraq

Daily Mojo -- Two sentences separated by a mere four decades (Ron Hutcheson, Knight-Ridder, Some See Troubling Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam):

"'If we quit Vietnam,' President Lyndon Johnson warned, 'tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.'

"'We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today,' Bush said in his televised speech Sept. 7, 'so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.'"

In the media and in Congress, voices that were previously missing in action are finally being raised. Though no one would admit it, this is, of course, poll driven. It's proof that, for the first time, many in the mainstream are sensing what has been evident for a long time to some of us - that under all the macho posturing and "discipline" of this administration lies a weakness and vulnerability, now evidently beginning to be noticeable to all. Not long after the Afghan war, New Yorker Reporter Seymour Hersh commented that the first mainstream Democrat of stature to grab the antiwar banner would take the presidency. Imagine if one of them had paid the slightest attention. Howard Dean, who doesn't even fit the category, has made the point nonetheless.

And of course, some voices have been there all the time. Generally ignored until recently by the mainstream, Senator Robert Byrd, for whom the nakedness of the emperor has long seemed self-evident, continues to speak simple sense in his Senate speeches ("Remember that that $87 billion is just for 2004 alone. Does anyone really believe that it will be the last request for Iraq?"). He is now calling for a genuine debate on the path we've embarked upon and the "quagmire" we find ourselves in:


"I urge my colleagues to think long and hard about the growing quagmire in Iraq. I urge members of the President's own party to warn him about the quicksand he asks America to wade in. We need a long and thorough debate about the future of this country. We need a serious discussion about the kind of America we will leave to our children."

This week Teddy Kennedy denounced the war as a "fraud," concocted in Crawford, Texas, and Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and the strongest Democratic supporter of the invasion of Iraq, claimed the president "misled" him, and called for the firing of his full "defense leadership team"