No More Music by the Suckers
According to John Podhoretz of the NYPost (via Salon's Right Hook column, which summarizes recent Right-leaning columnists), I'm a loser. I've been granted that distinction because I just couldn't unequivocally come out and jump around with unfettered joy about the success of the Iraqi elections last weekend:

Yesterday was a day for Democrats and opponents of George W. Bush to swallow their bile and retract their claws and join just for a moment in celebration of an amazing and thrilling human drama in a land that has seen more than its share of thrilling human drama over the past 5,000 years. But you just couldn't do it, could you?

Losers.

Yo man, what does me mean by suckas? Well, this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of a lot of gloating going on by Right commentators (just check out Ann Coulter's latest column if you're in for a bit more stick-it-to-the-Dems fun). But a little further down from Podhurtz's rip, Right Hook summarizes a column from the Wall Street Journal from a rightest perspective that's a bit more on the realism tip. Yo.

Johns Hopkins University's Eliot A. Cohen, who has served the gamut of neoconservative organizations, from the Defense Policy Board to the Project for the New American Century, wrote in Monday's Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi vote was "a victory, no doubt about it."

But far more striking was his lengthy, sober assessment of just how much has gone wrong under Bush.

"If the war has had its great successes, it has also had more than its share of bungles, evident in the chaos and suffering in Iraq, heavy loss of American life, and a battered reputation for the United States abroad. Bloody mistakes occur in all wars, as some point out -- an easy wisdom that flows most easily from those who have no loved ones in harm's way. Even such philosophers, however, should honor the 8,000 families of dead and wounded American soldiers by facing the unpleasant truths, because even if blunders characterize all wars, blunders they remain."

Cohen outlined the broader consequences of Bush's accumulated policy debacle.

"Because we choose to cut taxes in wartime, we have a ballooning deficit; because we have a ballooning deficit we cannot expand the active-duty military on a permanent basis; because we cannot expand the active-duty military we call up hundreds of thousands of reservists to fight an optional war half a world away, sending part-time soldiers -- some ready for this mission, others not -- off for a year of combating guerrillas in a limited war, a concept at odds with all previous notions of what citizen-soldiers do."

That, Cohen added, while Bush stuck with and heaped praise on failed civilian leaders:

"Ambassador Paul Bremer, an intelligent and self-sacrificing man, accepted the call to go to Iraq, with neither the time nor the authority to build a staff and a plan. Still, the Coalition Provisional Authority he ran was a disaster, a micromanaged American enterprise too often out of touch with Iraqi realities. The U.S. government that had not provided the structure needed to administer postwar Iraq would not admit his deficiencies and replace him. Instead, he, like George Tenet and Gen. Tommy Franks -- equally able and patriotic men, who also failed in key aspects of the Iraq war -- received the Presidential Medal of Freedom."

Cohen concluded with some advice surely directed at the entrenched Bush White House.

"The United States may still achieve a tolerable outcome in Iraq," he wrote, "albeit at the cost of far too much American and Iraqi blood, far too much treasure, far too much political capital. We remain big, rich and determined; above all, we have tapped a yearning for freedom in Iraq. But as we celebrate this historic poll, honoring the courage of the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote, and the bravery and skill of our soldiers and public servants who helped them do so, we should, in all humility, look at our failures as well as our successes, call them by that name, and learn from them."

Look, I'm not one for schadenfreude and I'm very glad that the violence wasn't as crippling as many expected it to be. This is a big, positive step. But it shouldn't be wrapped up in the American flag (or displayed on a purple-stained finger of a U.S. congressman). Eric Alterman's MSNBC blog/column from 31 January publishes a column/riposte from Charles Pierce, which very eloquently places this all in perspective (no matter what knuckleheads like Coulter or Shammity or Podhurtz might say):

You do not own their courage.

The people who stood in line Sunday did not stand in line to make Americans feel good about themselves.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify lies about Saddam and al-Qaeda, so you don't own their courage, Stephen Hayes. They did not stand in line to justify lies about weapons of mass destruction, or to justify the artful dodginess of Ahmad Chalabi, so you don't own their courage, Judith Miller. They did not stand in line to provide pretty pictures for vapid suits to fawn over, so you don't own their courage, Howard Fineman, and neither do you, Chris Matthews.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line in order to justify the dereliction of a kept press. They did not stand in line to make right the wrongs born out of laziness, cowardice, and the easy acceptance of casual lying.  They did not stand in line for anyone's grand designs. They did not stand in line to play pawns in anyone's great game, so you don't own their courage, you guys in the PNAC gallery.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to provide American dilettantes with easy rhetorical weapons, so you don't own their courage, Glenn Reynolds, with your cornpone McCarran act out of the bowels of a great university that deserves a helluva lot better than your sorry hide.  They did not stand in line to be the instruments of tawdry vilification and triumphal hooting from bloghound commandos.  They did not stand in line to become useful cudgels for cheap American political thuggery, so you don't own their courage, Freeper Nation.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify a thousand mistakes that have led to more than a thousand American bodies.  They did not stand in line for the purpose of being a national hypnotic for a nation not even their own.  They did not stand in line for being the last casus belli standing. They did not stand in line on behalf of people's book deals, TV spots, honorarium checks, or tinpot celebrity. They did not stand in line to be anyone's talking points.

You do not own their courage.

We all should remember that.

(PS - if'n you're wondering, the headline is a reference to samples within a Public Enemy song from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back; I say let the music play and we'll be cold lampin' in full effect... whatever that means)