Matt Gunterman March 9th, 2007

We’ve learned a lot this week (as did the nation from DailyKos and ThinkProgress) about the warring (and megalomaniacal) ways of Mitch McConnell.

Just a week ago today, President George W. Bush dropped into Louisville to help, as he said in his $500-per-word speech, his “buddy” and “friend” Mitch McConnell to the tune of $2.1 million for his various war chests. “I’m glad to have Mitch McConnell by my side,” said the President who later added, “Mitch understands what I know.”

Now, you’ve probably never done this before with something uttered by Bush, but take a few seconds to really dwell and reflect on his last five words there: Mitch understands what I know.

Most of us, I think, if we were trying to communicate a similar thought, would have phrased ourselves thusly: ’someone understands what I understand.’ With that sort of construction, you set you and the other person up as equals and like-minded observers of an external, shared experience.

Bush’s words, however, reveal him as “The Knower” (and, of course, it follows that he should therefore be The Decider) and Mitch as merely An Understander. In Bush’s mind/world/reality (let’s just call it the Bushverse), he and the truth are a unified thing, and Mitch, and indeed all the president’s sympathizers, have consequently prostrated themselves before the oracle that is George W. Bush, so that they may come to understand what are these eternal truths and absolutes that Bush intrinsically knows.

By the sound of Bush’s words of praise last week, Mitch has undoubtedly achieved a canonized and enviable level of bliss in the Bushverse and is fast approaching nirvana.

Bush is, to state the very obvious, a delusional man, especially on the matter of this war in Iraq, and last Friday he attempted to explain Republican involvement in Iraq by this rationalization, “We believe there is universality when it comes to freedom. We believe all want to be free.”

For Bush and his followers, then, this earnest belief in others’ want was justification enough to wage a war of choice at the cost of half a trillion dollars and tens and tens of thousands of human lives.

Bush’s most obvious delusion here is that this belief made for a reality. Now, I underscore Bush’s delusion to juxtapose it against Mitch McConnell’s calculated duplicity.

A short eight years ago, Mitch McConnell appears to have shared a faith in such noble universalities similar to Bush’s. We know this because, when the United States and its Nato allies intervened militarily to stop genocide in the Balkans under the leadership of President Clinton in 1999, McConnell tried at every turn to undermine Clinton’s strategy in the region. Of course, in the end (and it was a very short end, unlike the quagmire in Iraq) that strategy proved immensely successful and saved tens of thousands of innocents’ lives.

Why did McConnell oppose President Clinton so relentlessly when he’s been so patient with the Bush administration’s incompetence? Well, according to Mitch,

…we ought to give the Kosovars a chance to defend themselves. I mean you have refugees when people are afraid and can’t defend themselves; that’s when they run; that’s when they go across the borders into Macedonia or other places. These people will stay, if they think they have a chance to defend their homes and defend their families.

In other words, Mitch believed then that it was a universal truth that people would fight for their freedom if they were just given the guns to do it, and Mitch literally tried to do just that: give them guns, even if he had to go above the Commander-in-Chief to get it done. Mitch proposed the “Kosova Self-Defense Act of 1999,” which would according to McConnell’s own testimony, “equip 10,000 men or 10 battalions with small arms, antitank weapons, for up to 18 months.”

That was Mitch under a successful Democratic president. Under a failing Republican president, his attitudes about experiential universalities have shifted a bit. In fact, Mitch doesn’t appear to be on the same page as Bush on the nature of the conflict in Iraq.

Whereas Bush is so confident that defeat is nowhere in the realm of possibility that he’s not even preparing a Plan B, McConnell readily admits that failure is likely. He says it’s because the Iraqis simply aren’t up to the task of exploiting the grand opportunity that the Americans have handed them. There will come a point, he argued this week, “at which we will be able to determine whether they have the will and the capability to govern themselves there in the capital city.”

It would have been nice if Bush and McConnell had attempted to determine whether this “capability” existed before the costly invasion, but the nature of the Bush-Mitch relationship is so that Mitch doesn’t question (he’s An Understander, not The Knower, remember), and to ‘attempt to determine’ would be an admission that perhaps this belief isn’t so believable after all. One of the many things Mitch is trying to achieve with this blame-the-Iraqis language is to say, in effect, ‘it’s the Iraqis who suffer because of it,’ but I’m sure the families of the thousands of wounded and dead American soldiers would interject that they’ve suffered plenty, too.

Really, though, Mitch’s near decade-long shift from believer to skeptic is one of convenience. You see, seeing what the President refuses to allow himself to see, Mitch knows that Iraq is a lost cause, and Mitch is getting ready to play the race card in next year’s election. The Iraqis and their lack of “capability” to make the engines of democracy work will be the 2008 equivalent of the 2004 gay-bashing campaign. And Mitch is just hoping that these sorts of casual hate-mongering tactics will still fire up his base enough to get him first past the post on November 4 of next year.

In truth, the quagmire in Iraq isn’t a failing of the Iraqis. There was a short window of opportunity to make Iraq work, but that window is now closed. The party lacking “capability” here isn’t the Iraqis, it’s the Bush/Mitch axis. They were too incompetent and arrogant to properly and wisely plan for success in the occupation.

The fault is all theirs and no-one else’s.

• George W. Bush , Iraq War , Mitch McConnell
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