Wampum

Proving Too Much

Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Allawi came to the US recently. According to the L.A. Times, he spent his time here "echoing President Bush's key arguments about Iraq."

Allawi "offered almost exactly the same assessment of Iraq as Bush: conditions are better than they appear, elections for a national assembly are on track and the struggle in his country is a critical front in the global war against terrorism."

As an aside, Mr. Allawi contention that "conditions are better than they appear" reminds me (as it does George Will) of Bill Nye's assement of Wagner's music: "It is better than it sounds."

Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign reacted to Mr. Allawi's statements saying:

"The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips," said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser.

Glenn Reynolds was equally quick to react to Mr. Lockhart's statement, calling it "absolutely unacceptable coming from a Presidential campaign in wartime." Reynolds went on to call for Mr. Kerry to fire Lockhart noting that if he doesn't, "you're going to hear a lot of people questioning Kerry's partiotism. And they'll be right to."

Although it is not exactly clear, Reynolds' logic seems to be that our fortunes in Iraq, at least until the elections now scheduled for January, are tied to the Allawi government. Allawi needs to bring stability and security to Iraq in oder for the elections to produce a goverment widely perceived as both legitimate and legitimately Iraqi. If Allawi is perceived to be a puppet of the Americans, then Allawi's ability to bring stability and security to Iraq is harmed.

That, in turn, harms the goal of producing a legitimate Iraqi government. To the extent that Lockhart's statement undercuts Allawi's ability to produce the election of a legitimate Iraqi government, it harms American interests.

Harming American interests is unpartiotic. If Kerry does not fire Lockhart, then he is not a patriot. I think that is Reynolds' logic but I might be mistaken.

Hmm..., that argument seems to prove too much.

For instance, George Will recently wrote the following:

After "This Week" arranged with Allawi's office for Sunday's interview, the U.S. State Department called ABC to say that the office of U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte in Baghdad had decided that the interview would not happen until this coming Sunday, after Allawi's U.S. visit. This attempt by the U.S. embassy to exercise sovereignty over the prime minister raised interesting questions about just what was actually transferred on June 28 when sovereignty was supposedly given to the Iraqi government. The White House recognized the inconvenience of such questions. The interview occurred.

Joe Lockhart holds no government position. All he did was say that Allawi looked like a puppet of the administration. If he deserves to be fired for that offense and if John Kerry's partiotism should be questoned if he does not fire Lockhart, what can we conclude about John Negroponte and George Bush?

Negroponte did not say that Allawi was a puppet, he demonstrated it. First, the highest ranking American official in Iraq presumes to control the interview schedule of the Interim Iraqi Prime Minister. Surely that presumption feeds the perception that Allawi is controlled by the US. Can you imagine the US Ambassador to Russia telling ABC News that they can not run an interview with Putin?

Then, when ABC gets into a snit, they complain, not to Allawi or to the Iraqi government, but to the Bush administration. The Bush administration then reverses ITS policy about Allawi's interview schedule. Once again, the administration's doesn't SAY that Allawi is a puppet, they just treat him like he is Charlie McCarthy and they are Edgar Bergen.

If the point is to lead Iraqi's to believe that Allawi is not a puppet of the US administration, then the damage done by an American official treating Allawi like a puppet is far greater than the statements of a person with no official position.

So far, George Bush, who appointed Negroponte, has not seen fit to fire him for the "absolutely unacceptable" act of treating Allawi like a puppet. By Reynolds' logic, George Bush's patriotism should now be questioned.

Or perhaps we should just conclude that Reynolds's logic is just a wee bit strained as he searches for some way, any way, to smear people with whom he disagrees as being unpatriotic.

Update: If you buy into Reynolds' logic, Corrente has another reason to question Mr. Bush's patriotism. And some more here.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at September 25, 2004 11:43 AM | TrackBack