Most Democrats who’ve gotten into trouble with their constituents
over their stance on Iraq—including Senator Maria Cantwell, in
early 2006, and Senator Hillary Clinton today—have only their
pro-war votes and their reluctance to take a strong position for
withdrawal to blame. Both Clinton and Cantwell, under pressure from
angry Democratic voters, wisely shinnied their way out of it: Cantwell
by supporting Michigan Senator Carl Levin’s withdrawal legislation in
the summer of ’06, and Clinton by voting “No” on the surge and “No” on
the surveillance legislation this year.
Progressive U.S. Representative Brian Baird (D-3, Vancouver) has the
exact opposite problem. After establishing a righteous antiwar voting
record (“No” on the original 2002 authorization vote; “No” on reauthorizing the
problematic Patriot Act; “No” on the surge; and “No” on surveillance), Baird came
out last week toeing the Bush line.
He’s now against withdrawal and wants to give Bush’s surge more
time. On a recent 14-day trip to Iraq, Baird saw that al Qaeda is being
“taken down” in the al Anbar Province, met with the compelling General
David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, talked with U.S.
soldiers who are seeing “real changes at long last,” and spoke to Sunni
sheiks who are fighting al Qaeda. Now, along with a handful of
Democratic reps like Tim Mahoney (D-FL), he’s convinced the war is
starting to go our way, and that the goal of stabilizing Iraq and
routing al Qaeda is attainable. He now wants to give the surge another
six months, to give breathing room to the political process in
Iraq.
Baird took this unpopular message to a packed Vancouver high-school
auditorium on Monday night, August 27, during one of his regular town
meetings. (He’s done 220 so far.)
Baird said that the war was authorized through our democratic
system, and that we now have “a moral responsibility… not to leave
[the Iraqi people] at the mercy of people who cut off people’s heads
and bomb schools because girls go there…. Al Qaeda was not a problem
in Iraq before the invasion. Iran was not a problem in Iraq before the
invasion. I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. But they are
a problem now. They’re a problem for Iraqis. The choice has become: Do
we stay a little bit longer”—to which audience members shouted
out a sharp round of “No!”—”because there is some chance that in
so doing we will help Iraq have a more safe society and become more
stable? If we withdraw now, I am confident it will be
catastrophic.”
The crowd inside Fort Vancouver High School—easily 500 people,
with others turned away for lack of space—was hostile and loud:
booing; shouting “Troops out now!”; and holding up signs saying things
like, “Be a Man for the People” and “Only a Corrupt Congress Is for
War-Making.” Activists stood outside telling people to call Baird’s
office in the morning and ask for his resignation.
“How dare he,” Zanne Joi, a middle-aged punk activist with a shaved
head, declared as she unloaded signs from her graffiti-tagged truck in
the school parking lot before the meeting. “What happened to him? In
2006 we gave [Congress] a mandate for peace. No excuses.”
It wasn’t only orthodox antiwar activists who groused. Retired
couple Doris and Paul Holmes (Doris is active with Southwest
Washington’s 18th District Democrats) left the meeting in disgust. “He
lied about the whole situation,” Doris said. “He’s toeing the Bush
party line. I can’t believe he’s a Democrat.”
Baird sat on the large wooden stage in front of red drapes and took
questions and abuse for four hours as his staff politely held the
microphone for the endless stream of people who lined up to blast their
boss.
Most of the comments were emotional, sputtering, rambling—and
off point.
The first speaker to take the microphone, for example, questioned
Baird’s reasoning about our moral obligation to the Iraqi people,
asking, “What about the moral obligation to our own people? The moral
obligation,” he said, turning the discussion into an anti-Bush circus
of orthodox sound bites, “is to impeach the president.” The applause
was raucous.
Some speakers did stick to the topic at hand. Jon Soltz, the
charismatic, 30-year-old Iraq war vet who runs the political action
committee VoteVets.org (which runs
antiwar TV ads, including ads that opposed Senator Joe Lieberman in
2006) had flown in from New York for an event for Democratic
congressional candidate Darcy Burner that morning in Bellevue and had
driven down to confront Baird. Soltz took the mic and calmly told Baird
he had been “fooled by a dog-and-pony show” after his brief visit to
Iraq. Soltz, who served a year in Iraq in 2003, said Baird’s drive-by
analysis was insulting. Soltz told the audience that “Baird was
providing cover for the president.” Soltz, who boasted to reporters
about his clean-cut appearance, has his act down. He started his speech
quietly, asking all the vets in the auditorium to stand. And he ended
by calling on the audience to “‘sound off’ for the congressman if you
agree with me.” The room erupted.
Joi, the activist I’d met in the parking lot, told Baird that the
people in the room had “gone door to door for you.” A woman sitting
right behind Joi shouted out, “And we’ll work against you now!”
This point had the most currency with the crowd. “He’s our
representative,” Kim Farr, a 50-year-old Baird voter told me as he left
the auditorium. “His job is to represent us. And he’s simply not
listening.”
Nor were the protesters listening to Baird. Sanctimonious talk of
impeachment (someone demanded to know if Baird would vote to impeach;
Baird said there’s been no impeachment trial); talk of an “illegal” and
“immoral” war; and trite shouts about “oil profits” were emotional,
dogmatic rejoinders to Baird, but not on point.
Baird’s point—which he himself sidetracks by stupidly arguing
that the surge is working—is this: We dismantled Iraq’s
government and have a moral responsibility to prevent the hobbled
country from being taken over by intolerant religious zealots who
behead people and oppress women.
Few in the crowd seemed interested in wrestling with that question.
The “Out Now” groupthink was an attempt to bully Baird out of asking a
legitimate question and starting a legitimate conversation. Given
Baird’s consistent voice of reason since the “war on terror” began (as
he pointed out, he voted against the war when 80 percent of the country
supported it), he has earned the credibility to challenge the
Democratic orthodoxy.
The Democrats’ “Out Now” mantra seems more like a political rallying
trick than a sincere policy discussion. But judging from the noisy
shout-down at Fort Vancouver High School, no one’s really interested in
a discussion. As Farr told me as he headed to his car: “Baird’s trying
to tell us what he thinks, and that’s okay. He’s showing his
independence. But I don’t want independence. I want representation.”
