Treading Water

[I was of two minds whether to post this at all, since it's bound to piss people off on both side of the divide, but it's really more a piece about politics, than in itself political. You're welcome of course to take issue with me, but I'm not trying to tell you how to vote.]

The biggest mistake John Kerry made in his campaign for the presidency was not to slap down the Swift Boaters right away and call them out as liars. (Not that Kerry had any particular qualifications to be president, other than coveting the job since he was an underclassman at boarding school, but you could say the same about Mitt Romney.) The point is that the Swift Boat 'controversy' should never have gotten legs, but Kerry thought the story would dry up and blow away. He woefully underestimated the venom of his opponents, and the shelf life of a Big Lie.

We've been seeing a page out of a similar playbook, lately, and it's equal opportunity. Bush was roundly detested by the Left, and Obama is violently disliked by the Right. Not to rehash the rights and wrongs of going into Iraq, or the disputed failures or successes of affordable health care---I'm talking about three things that have recently dominated the news cycle: Benghazi, the VA scandal, and the prisoner exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

I might as well be clear about my sympathies. Maybe all the facts really aren't in yet, but I think Benghazi is a Republican fever dream. Of course, the real target's Hillary Clinton, and Obama's just collateral damage. The questions raised are what Ambassador Stevens was doing there in the first place, without adequate security; why CIA apparently didn't put State in the loop, that they had contractors in Benghazi; and whether the attack was mounted as a planned terror operation, not a popular demonstration that got out of hand. There's also the issue of whether air support could have been scrambled in time, but that's a non-starter. The fleet commanders in the Med say it would have taken a good two hours to get their planes in position over the target area, and without ground observers to call in fire, you wouldn't know who you were dropping ordnance on. You can research this on your own, and look at the after-action reports. The plain fact is that it was a security failure. It's not a cheap shot, either, to point out that Congress cut the State Department's budget for protective services. In other words, there's enough blame to go around, but I think that game has been pretty well exhausted, and the only purpose of a select committee is to keep the story alive, and to try and make HRC the goat.

On the other hand, the VA scandal is all too real, and a shameful lapse. It may go back to the Bush administration, but it came out on Obama's watch, so he owns it. It's unfair that Eric Shinseki had to fall on his sword, but that's how it goes. Jack Kennedy reportedly said to his CIA director Allen Dulles, after Bay of Pigs, that if this were Great Britain, and a parliamentary system, I'd have to resign. But it ain't, and your head has to roll. This is the hard fact of duty. We hang on princes' favors. Nor is Shinseki entirely blameless. The VA system is enormous. It serves eight million vets, at last count, and its budget numbers in the billions. Gen. Shinseki couldn't possibly be a hand's-on manager, but as they say in the military, you can delegate authority, but not responsibility. I have to say that my own experience with the VA health care system, here in New Mexico, at both the Santa Fe clinic and at the hospital in Albuquerque, has been first-class. I can't speak for other people, but I got timely treatment, I was respected, and there was remedial follow-up. The hospital food sucked, except for breakfast, and even then the coffee was terrible, but what do you expect?

Let's talk about Sgt, Bergdahl, though. This is the one that really gives me a cramp in my bowels. These are the facts as we know them. Bergdahl was captured by the Taliban in 2009. He was held captive for almost five years, and for much of that time, there was no proof of life. In the end, we made a deal. Him for them. Was it honorable, or honest? We got him back. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former Afghanistan commander, has said that that's the point. You don't leave a guy behind on the field. (I doubt, too, if Stan McChrystal is much of an Obama fan. The guy fired him.) What else do we know? There's been some selectively-released information, some of it from unnamed DoD sources, muddying the waters.

The most damaging charge is that Bergdahl deserted his post. Then, when his unit sent out patrols to find him, it got guys killed. The train of thought, here, leads from dereliction of duty, meaning it was his own damn fault he got picked off by the guerrillas, to the suggestion that he didn't deserve to be rescued. It wasn't worth the cost, and Bergdahl's got blood on his hands. This is pernicious. The trending storyline seems to be that if you discredit Bergdahl, then everything that followed is the fruit of a poisoned tree. We should have written him off, and anybody who advocated a recovery effort was being careless with men's lives. WTF? No responsible commanding officer or platoon sergeant in the field would sign their name to this. It would damage morale and unit cohesion, for openers, and probably end up getting you court-martialed. You don't abandon your people. It's the first rule of war.

Then there's this whole other narrative. John McCain and Nancy Pelosi – strange bedfellows, they – complain that the oversight committes weren't put in the loop. I'm sorry, but no. That's utter baloney. Trading the guys from Gitmo, and these same five guys, by the way, has been part of the conversation since late 2011. And why is McCain stepping on his dick? He's on record as supporting a trade for Bergdahl the last two-and-a-half years, and all of a sudden he claims he never did. It beggars the imagination, spreading snake oil on troubled waters.

Last but not least, the mantra that We Don't Negotiate With Terrorists. Hello? This is more hooey. Even the Israeli government, who despise Hezbollah, sat down with them to cut a deal for IDF prisoners captured in Lebanon, and released hundreds of suspected terrorists in custody to get their soldiers back. And who in fact were we negotiating with? Not the Taliban leadership, but a subset, the Haqqani network, a CIA client during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and now deeply enmeshed with Pakistan's spook shop, ISI, the very same who admitted no knowledge of Osama bin Laden's safe house in Islamabad. We've been in bed with these dirtbags for years---"I'm shocked, shocked"---and turned a blind eye to both criminal activity, like the drug traffic, and support for terrorism (India suspects ISI involvement in the Mumbai attack, for example).

What are we supposed to make of this? I guess there might be some smoking gun to the Benghazi story, although I don't believe it myself. And for sure the VA health system mess is way beyond damage control, or maybe even repair. It's a complete management failure. But fitting Bergdahl for the noose is something else again. There must be enough ways to poke a stick in Obama's eye, people who think he usurped the presidency, and he's dangerous for America, or just in over his head---not that people of a different political persuasion didn't think the same of George Bush---and I don't why I'm surprised these people have no shame, but it sticks in my craw. It's humiliating. We deserve better. Years ago, during the Red Scare of the 1950's, and the rise of Joe McCarthy, my dad remarked to a friend of his that McCarthy represented the worst product of democracy. This being liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, she said, "Isn't it terrific that it's embarrassing a Republican president?"

Makes you wonder, really, about whose ox is being gored. I think we start with the political process, and what we actually hope to accomplish by it. Politics is the art of the possible, not scorched earth. The perfect is the enemy of the good.