The unbridgeable divide between the left and right’s approach to Iraq and the WoT is, among other things, a disagreement over the value of moral and material strength, with the left placing a premium on the former and the right on the latter. The right (broadly speaking) can’t fathom why the left is driven into fits of rage over every Abu Ghraib, every Gitmo, every secret rendition, every breach of civil liberties, every shifting rationale for war, every soldier and civilian killed in that war, every Bush platitude in support of it, every attempt to squelch dissent. They see the left’s protestations as appeasement of a ruthless enemy. For the left (broadly speaking), America’s moral strength is of paramount importance; without it, all the brute force in the world won’t keep us safe, defeat our enemies, and preserve our role as the world’s moral leader.

War hawks squeal about America-haters and traitors, heaping scorn on the so-called “blame America first” crowd, but they fail to comprehend that the left reserves the deepest disdain for those who squander our moral authority. The scars of a terrorist attack heal and we are sadder but stronger for having lived through it. When our moral leadership is compromised by people draped in the American flag, America is weakened. The loss of our moral compass leaves us rudderless, open to attacks on our character and our basic decency. And nothing makes our enemies prouder. They can’t kill us all, but if they permanently stain our dignity, they’ve done irreparable harm to America.

The antiwar critique of Iraq is that it is an immoral war and every resulting death is a wrongful one. Opponents of the war view the invasion and occupation as a dangerous and shameful violation of international law. Iraq saps our moral strength and the sooner we leave the better. Opposing the invasion on the grounds that the administration lied its way into it, they see every subsequent death, American or foreign, as an ethical travesty and a stain on America’s good name.

Peter Daou | Salon (read more. . .)

Meanwhile, a more overt pro-war position is explicit from the Washington Post, which seems bent on replicating its blood-soaked history of editorial support for the Vietnam War.

In August 1966 the Post’s owner, Katharine Graham, discussed the war with a writer in line to take charge of the newspaper’s editorial page. “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but that we couldn’t be precipitate; we had to move away gradually from where we had been,” Graham was to write in her autobiography. Many more deaths resulted from such unwillingness to “be precipitate.”

In August 2005, while noting the latest setbacks for the U.S. agenda in Iraq, the Post’s editorial on the last Saturday of the month did not waver — and was certainly not precipitate: “There is no cause for despair, or for abandoning the basic U.S. strategy in Iraq, which is to support the election of a permanent national government and train security forces capable of defending it with continuing help from American troops. But it is dispiriting, and damaging to the chances for success, that President Bush still refuses to speak honestly to the country about the challenges the United States now faces, or how he intends to address them.”

This is an inventive proclivity of the Washington Post and many other corporate media outlets that are eager to advise the president on how to build a better war trap.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

The Iraqi politicians who emerged victorious from the January elections started suffering the same ‘reality disconnect’ that their backers, the American, have been suffering from for the past two years. It is the huge gap between the realities in the streets in Baghdad, not to mention anywhere else in country, and the Byzantium of the green zone where they have settled.

A few weeks ago, a Kurdish parliamentarian told me, as we stood in the middle of the Iraqi parliament in the green zone, that ‘we [politicians] don’t know what’s happening in the streets outside and the people outside don’t care about what are we doing here because of the violence they are suffering from’.

Pointing at the parliamentarians around him, he said: ‘They will all be fighting for the last seat on the American helicopter fleeing the green zone when the American leave. For us, the Kurds, we will just go up in the mountains.’

And this disconnect has found its way through the constitutional debate. Does it matter if Islam is ‘the main’ source of legislation or only ‘a’ source, when Shia militia in the south of Iraq are enforcing hijab on women, banning alcohol and transforming the south into ‘Iran lite’? The role of Islam in the legislation seems irrelevant if those parts of the Sunni west that are under the control of the insurgents have become Taliban land.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Guardian (read more. . .)

In the new pitch there are no mushroom clouds. Instead we get McCarthyesque rhetoric accusing critics of being soft on the war on terrorism, which the Iraq adventure has itself undermined. Before anyone dare say Vietnam, the president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld drag in the historian David McCullough and liken 2005 in Iraq to 1776 in America - and, by implication, the original George W. to ours. Before you know it, Ahmad Chalabi will be rehabilitated as Ben Franklin.

The marketing campaign will crescendo in two weeks, on the anniversary of 9/11, when a Defense Department “Freedom Walk” will trek from the site of the Pentagon attack through Arlington National Cemetery to a country music concert on the Mall. There the false linkage of Iraq to 9/11 will be hammered in once more, this time with a beat: Clint Black will sing “I Raq and Roll,” a ditty whose lyrics focus on Saddam, not the Islamic radicals who actually attacked America. Lest any propaganda opportunity be missed, Arlington’s gravestones are being branded with the Pentagon’s slogans for military campaigns, like Operation Iraqi Freedom, The Associated Press reported last week - a historic first. If only the administration had thought of doing the same on the fallen’s coffins, it might have allowed photographs.

Even though their own poll numbers are in a race to the bottom with the president’s, don’t expect the Democrats to make a peep. Republicans, their minds increasingly focused on November 2006, may well blink first. In yet another echo of Vietnam, it’s millions of voters beyond the capital who will force the timetable for our inexorable exit from Iraq.

Frank Rich | NYTimes (read more. . .)

The US opposes independent nationalism from Iraq to Venezuela. It prefers to weaken independent states to diminish their military potential in either the Middle East or Latin America, and to break down what are described as “protectionist” barriers to the “free trade” model of Halliburton or Wal-Mart.

In seeking to impose both Pentagon dominance and a neo-liberal economic model on the world, the US is prepared to accept alliances with religious forces that insist on strict censorship and punishment of freedom of association and belief. For Bush and the neo-conservatives, it seems, freedom for American investors can’t wait, but women - their rights “are not critical to the evolution of democracy.”

Far from achieving stability and security, these policies will foment more violent hatred of the US. Far from planting democracy, US policy is squelching what little democracy there is, threatening to dismember Iraq, causing a civil war that will be the pretext for US troops to remain, and re-arranging the Middle East to include a de facto Shiite alliance from Teheran to Basra. That’s why Bush can find no “noble purpose”. It is about a war for dominance, not democracy.

Tom Hayden | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

If this war had worked, the momentum to keep building an aggressive militant super-power would have only accelerated. As it is, simply to return to pre-Iraq levels of defense spending is more or less unthinkable. By holding on to this outmoded model of international aggression, a militant U.S. betrays the ideal of peace in every way.

Iraq was in reality a test of war, and it passed. More war is in the offing, and by passively allowing this conflict to happen, the good people helped pave the way for our next invasion or intervention. Passivity, not blood-thirstiness, is going to lead us into a hugely militarized future. America’s addiction to war has just received another fix. The Bush administration and its cohorts don’t care if this war is won or lost. Either outcome will reinforce the ethos of war and cut off any alternative.

Kerry and the Democratic National Committee knew that his only strategic option was to vote for the Iraqi war originally, because no anti-war candidate has a chance in a general election. That act of self-contradiction didn’t win Kerry the Presidency, however, even against one of the weakest opponents imaginable. I think we should realize that liberals and moderates are in a lose-lose situation. Stop passively assenting to the U.S. as a war power and stand up for your belief in peace.

Deepak Chopra | HuffingtonPost (read more. . .)

The failure of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government to ratify a constitution worthy of the name provides the Bush administration with a unique opportunity to shift gears in Iraq and the Middle East. It allows for the achievement of stability inside Iraq, and as a result, a meaningful reduction in the ability of anti-American terrorists to recruit and train followers to wage Jihad in Iraq and abroad.

Rather than continuing to reinforce failure by supporting a fatally flawed process, the Bush administration should allow the current government in power in Baghdad to collapse, walk away from the policy of direct meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq, and seek a more nuanced approach to achieving stability inside Iraq through a strategic shift in overall American policy in the Middle East as a whole.

The key reasoning behind the impetus for a radical departure from the current policy is the reality that the Bush administration has gotten it fundamentally wrong regarding Iraq from the very beginning, and as such lacks a foundation upon which to build any lasting achievements in that troubled nation. In its rush to achieve regime change in Iraq, the Bush administration disregarded years of expert opinion, which held that before one seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power, one had better have a good idea about who or what will rule in his place.

Instead, policy formulators acted on ideologically-driven revisionism that held that an invading American military would be greeted by “song and flowers,” and that Western-style democracy could flourish in Iraq, despite centuries of historical grievances among those who populate that country. This ideologically-motivated theory deviated so far from reality that the damage incurred by the Bush administration in trying to force an outcome is irreparable.

Scott Ritter | AlterNet (read more. . .)