Left I on the News

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

That's what John Kerry said two days ago, and now the Republicans are howling for his head, and the Democrats are beside themselves defending Kerry.

The main line of defense, coming from Kerry and picked up by his defenders, is that this was a mangled joke, and that what he really meant to say was "If you don't, you get us stuck in Iraq," and even if he didn't leave out the word "us," he was really referring to the U.S. being "stuck" in Iraq, not the students he was speaking to.

I have a variety of disconnected thoughts on this subject, some of which I've written in comments elsewhere, others not:

• Let's assume this was a "botched joke," and that the dumb person Kerry was referring to was George Bush. But how dumb is John Kerry not to realize that this "joke" (not exactly a side-splitter, by the way) would be easily subject to the "misinterpretation" that the Republicans are now giving it (i.e., as an insult to the intelligence of the troops)?
• Kerry was speaking a Pasadena City College (PCC), a perfectly fine schol no doubt, but not exactly one of the ramparts of higher education. Did Kerry give any thought to the fact that a straight-A student at PCC probably has a better chance of ending up in Iraq than a C student at Yale (like he and Bush)? And that getting "stuck in Iraq" has a lot more to do with your economic status than with "how hard you study"?
• Is anyone going to mention the elephant in the room (and I don't mean the Republicans), that the U.S. military has been lowering the educational and intelligence requirements for entry, several times as I recall? How about some statistics about the number of Ph.D's or Yale graduates serving in Iraq right now, vs. the number of community college graduates?

But after all those points, we come to the heart of the matter. Let's assume Kerry really meant to say, in his bumbling way, that it's only because George Bush (and all the key people in his Administration?) didn't "study hard and do their homework and make an effort to be smart" that the U.S. is "stuck in Iraq." What is wrong with that statement? Let me count the ways:

• First, the U.S. is no more "stuck" in Iraq than it was stuck in Vietnam. Just leave. Jump on the helicopters and get out.
• Second, if we take the prevailing view of the politicians and the pundits and the media that the U.S. is stuck in Iraq, it hasn't the slightest thing to do with George Bush not having "studied hard and done his homework." If the U.S. is stuck in Iraq, it's because the U.S. ruling class is bound and determined to exert control over the Middle East, no matter what the cost. On a different level, the U.S. is stuck in Iraq because the U.S. didn't send enough troops to "do the job," but not because they're "dumb," but because the antiwar movement and antiwar sentiment in general, domestic and foreign, meant that they had to go to war "on the cheap" because the public wouldn't have tolerated a larger committment. Many people think the antiwar movement isn't successful because it didn't stop the war before it started, and hasn't stopped it yet. True enough. But there is no question, in my mind anyway, that the antiwar movement did, and still does, place tremendous constraints on how the U.S. is able to conduct that war, which in turn has opened up space for the resistance forces to be successful.

A lot of this comes back to John Kerry's famous quote. Here's something I wrote in August of last year, when there were a thousand fewer American dead and many tens of thousands fewer dead Iraqis as well:

How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake? But the thing is - the invasion of Iraq wasn't a "mistake". The invasion of Iraq was a deliberate, conscious decision by the Bush administration, designed to advance a variety of goals - long-term control of oil, projection of U.S. power, maintaining the Republican Party (and George Bush) in control in the U.S., providing a source of profits to Halliburton and other large U.S. companies, sending a message to countries around the world that trying to maintain a foreign policy independent of the U.S. is unacceptable, defending Israel, George Bush revenging the alleged attempt on his "daddy" by "Saddam", etc., etc.

The reasons are many, and one can certainly debate which reasons are the most important. But, whatever the reason or reasons that were behind the invasion, one thing is certain - it wasn't a "mistake". Which makes the tens of thousands of deaths listed in the first paragraph of this post all the more tragic, and likewise makes every death which will occur in the years to come before the U.S. is forced out of Iraq equally tragic, if not more so. Because their deaths, those ones which will occur in the years to come, are entirely foreseeable. And also entirely preventable.

Thinking about this, I have to ask a question to which I don't know the answer: when John Kerry said what he did in 1971, what did he mean then by "a mistake"? Did he think then that the U.S. had no right to invade Vietnam, and was conducting an illegal and immoral war? Or did he simply think, as he does now about Iraq, that it was "fought poorly," a "mistake" in the sense that it had been botched to the point where there was no way to "win," and therefore the only sensible thing to do is to get out before more people are killed?

And, just to round out this post, let me add another insight into that Kerry quote (and possibly into his current state of mind) by repeating something I wrote in November, 2004:

On more than one occasion, I have praised John Kerry's famous 1971 quote: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Today for some reason I found myself thinking about that quote, and I'm ashamed to admit that for the first time I realized what is wrong with that quote. Which is that it's a completely American-centered quote, very much akin to talking only about the 1221 American dead in Iraq without mentioning the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have also died. How about "How do you ask an Iraqi to be the last innocent civilian to die for a mistake?" Of course, the problem with that quote is that the U.S. doesn't bother to ask the Iraqis anything; unlike the American soldiers, they didn't volunteer to be on the receiving end of a bullet or bomb.

But now, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths after I first asked these questions, John Kerry still thinks the U.S. is "stuck" in Iraq, and still isn't willing to pose that famous question, even in an American-centered way. And he still doesn't understand why the U.S. is there in the first place. At least, he pretends not to understand (my guess is he understands very well).

Update: According to this chart, while 97% of U.S. military recruits in the last three years graduated from high school, only 5-6% have "greater than high school credentials." So presumably anyone who makes it through PCC, no matter what their grades, is already 20 times less likely to be "stuck in Iraq" than someone who doesn't.