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A year in, the Iraq War was not going well.
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The U.S.-led invasion, begun on March 20, 2003 had been forecast as a “cakewalk” by one foreign policy advisor in the George W. Bush administration. The effort quickly soured. Violence against coalition forces and among various sectarian groups led to the Iraqi insurgency, strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqi groups, and a new faction of al Qaeda in Iraq.
The Democratic left was in full “I told you so” mode. Democrats in Congress, their supporters marching in American streets, and others had warned about dangers of preemptive military action against Iraq. And they had raised serious legal questions about the launching of the war against Iraq, and the Bush Doctrine in general.
In the post Sept. 11, 2001 atmosphere these voices were largely shouted down. But when the Iraq occupation — or liberation depending on one’s viewpoint — didn’t go as planned, one voice in particular captured the left’s anger and rage at the Bush administration over Iraq.
Writing from his Berkeley, Calif., home, a blogger named Markos Moulitsas applied his own U.S. army experiences from a dozen years earlier to the Iraq debacle. On April 1, 2004, the DailyKos founder and editor posted this in the comments section of a blog post about contractor Blackwater USA employees, who were killed and mutilated in Fallujah:
Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries [sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.
The next commenter gave Kos an angry attaboy:
Four dead mercenaries. I should care?
The repercussions were swift and severe. Moulitsas’s growing site lost some advertisers and came in for torrents of criticism for his making light of the deaths of fellow Americans in the Iraq War effort. Conservative pundit Bernard Goldberg included Moulitsas in his book “The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America,” ahead of David Duke and the folks who gave us Paris Hilton.
Many partisans used his outburst to argue that the left really does hate America.
A decade on, Moulitsas’s “screw them” post stands out as a stark period piece. It’s an important reminder about just how much has changed on foreign policy, depending on whether one’s party is in the White House.
While no Democratic member of Congress was as intemperate as Moulitsas about casualties in Iraq, he represented a strong well of opposition, even hatred, of then-President George W. Bush and his Middle East policies.
Ironically, many of those same voices are now just as strident in support of American action in the Middle East, now that Democratic President Barack Obama holds the White House. As the Syrian civil war deepened in summer 2013, some of the very same Democratic lawmakers were oh-so-willing to defer to military judgments and instincts of their own party’s commander-in-chief.
Consider Rep. Nancy Pelosi, now in an encore performance as House minority leader. Opposition to Bush’s Iraq push played no small part in Pelosi’s rise to become the first female House speaker, after Democrats captured the majority in November 2006.
From the start Pelosi was a vociferous critic of Bush on Iraq. Not just on the wisdom of his policy, but the president’s very powers to guide foreign affairs unilaterally. “The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of preemptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition,” Pelosi said in the Democratic response to Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address.
She viewed things quite differently a decade later when Obama, a fellow Democrat, was mulling military action in Syria to stop the thuggish Assad regime from putting down a long-running rebellion.
In September 2013 Pelosi told reporters she supported intervention in Syria. As Mediaite columnist Noah Rothman noted, Pelosi “defined America’s national interest in this case as the enforcement of the globally recognized prohibition on the battlefield use of chemical weapons. This, the first violation of this norm in the post-Cold War-era, demands a response that only the United States can deliver. Pelosi essentially told the press that the anti-war argument is a child’s argument.”
Of course, congressional Democrats are hardly the only ones who have flip-flopped on assertive foreign policy in the Middle East. Hill Republicans are arguably even bigger hypocrites on the contentious issues of presidential power.
The Syrian crisis in fall 2013 pointed to a near-complete reversal of many Republicans’ foreign policy stances from the George W. Bush years. Look no further than Pelosi’s ideological bookend, Rep. Darrell Issa.
In October 2002, when the Iraq war resolution came for a vote on the House floor, the California Republican, then a freshman congressman, was perfectly willing to trust the Bush administration on Iraq.
The headline on an Issa news release from the time says it all: “Now Is The Time To Support The President.” He speechified that it was time to “break our silence” and to “remove Saddam and give the people of Iraq the opportunity to live in peace and security.”
Yet 11 years later, Issa was a born-again dove. By then chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa was far more skeptical about military action in Syria.
After President Obama delayed military strikes on Syria in order to outline his strategy for Congress, Issa said that while “tens of thousands have been killed by the Assad regime in this brutal conflict,” only “relatively few” had been done in by chemical weapons.
“A military response that places an arbitrary focus on such weapons,” Issa warned, “will do little to protect civilians and sends a deeply misguided signal that totalitarian regimes should only use conventional weapons to carry out mass murder.”
That’s hardly the presidential green light Issa called for when Bush was commander-in-chief. The results of that go-ahead infuriated Markos Moulitsas in his infamous blog post ten years ago. These days, it’s Kos’s party, let by its Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, that wants to stomp on the gas pedal.
