Observations on chickenhawks

It takes a personal experience to bring home just how truly disgusting politicians can be. I have a close friend, a father-of-three, who is about to leave for an eight-month spell with US forces in Iraq. Perhaps because of this, I keep recalling John Kerry's famous question when he returned from Vietnam - "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" - and find myself recoiling from the ugly war of words that the Iraq debate has become.

There is a sense here in Washington that the game is up, and that it is not a question of if troops will be withdrawn but when. Three military brigades by next spring? Sixty thousand before the midterm elections (the latest rumour)? Or the reduction next year of the present 160,000 to 140,000 troops (now mooted by Donald Rumsfeld)? It took about 1,500 US deaths in Iraq for public opinion to turn against the war - 20,000 died in Vietnam before the same stage was reached there, and 38,000 more perished before the decision was made to retreat. Now the battle is on for politicians to seize the moral high ground before making their pronouncements.

What is astonishing in the current Nixonian atmosphere of paranoia is the ability of these politicians and a pliant media to turn truth and reality on their heads. Critics of the war become traitors; those who question whether the Bush administration was truthful when it presented its reasons for invading Iraq are (in the recent words of Dick Cheney) "dishonest . . . reprehensible . . . corrupt . . . shameless".

Take the case of Representative Jack Murtha, a 73-year-old who has been a Democratic congressman for 31 years. He voluntarily joined the US marines in 1952 to fight in Korea and later in Vietnam, winning two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star; he supported Reagan's policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador and voted in favour of the 1991 Gulf war. He even wants a constitutional ban on burning the US flag. Shortly before Thanksgiving, though, he had finally had enough and denounced the war in Iraq as "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion", explaining that "the American public is way ahead of members of congress".

Murtha clearly knows a thing or two about war. But that did not stop a Republican onslaught to kill the messenger rather than the message. Murtha was immediately attacked by a 54-year-old Republican congresswoman called Jean Schmidt, who (apparently ignorant of Murtha's military past) told him, "cowards cut and run, marines never do".

Scott McLellan, Bush's remarkably thick 37-year-old spokesman from Texas, then denounced Murtha as representing "the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party" and said that "it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore". The Republican House speaker, Dennis Hastert - who would become president if Bush and Cheney were to fall under a bus - said Murtha had delivered "the highest insult" to the troops.

The Republican House leader, Roy Blunt, lectured Murtha that his views "only embolden our enemies" and that "Democrats undermine our troops in Iraq from the security of their Washington, DC offices". Representative J D Hayworth, yet another Republican, scolded that "the American people are made of sterner stuff", while his colleague John Carter said that Murtha prefers "the cowardly way out".

These exchanges brought out a fascinating phenomenon in the politics of the current Iraq war - that of the chickenhawk, defined in my dictionary as "a person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it". Schmidt beat her Democratic opponent in August this year by rabidly supporting the war, even though he had served in Iraq; Hastert, Blunt, Hayworth and Carter did no military service whatsoever. Those who have known war are increasingly against what is happening in Iraq; those who have not are ever more desperately for it.

It would be absurd to say that only military men in the Pentagon, say, should make decisions about when the nation can go to war. But the reason for the chickenhawk phenomenon of the 21st century, I suspect, is that the American chattering classes - including the politicians - are increasingly removed from the realities of war.

The draft in the US ended in 1973, and more than half the battlefield deaths in Vietnam were of draftees. In those days, blood and guts impinged on the lives of most Americans - not least through television, which is much more restricted in its reporting from Iraq in 2005. Today rhetoric and slogans count more than cool analysis, Hollywood portrayals of war much more than what is really happening. For my friend, meanwhile, the war in Iraq is about to become all too real.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website