Coming home: How the US feels

Bill and I got home Friday evening, after flying for what felt like a very long day from Amsterdam via Frankfurt to Virginia. Coming back home here to Charlottesville after three months away has enabled me to (1) Get a strong sense of just how rapidly and how far the opinions of the US political elite seem to have traveled in an anti-war direction in the period since we left, and (2) Start to try to bring together, reflect on, and figure out what to do with the many really amazing experiences I had on the trip.
In the former regard I have certainly noticed the degree to which, for example, the front pages of the WaPo seem to be completely dominated by news stories that are either highly critical of the Bush administration’s current and recent handling of the war in Iraq, or highly critical of earlier phases of the invasion/occupation project there, or highly embarrassing for the Bush administration on other grounds as well.
In that last category would fall stories about the ongoing revelations being made by “the Washington Madam”, a procurer of high-class call-girls whose notebooks and “business records” are currently being extensively data-mined by ABC News. (One early casualty: a guy called Randal “Randy” Tobias who was head of all US overseas-aid programs at the State Department– and therefore, we can note, in charge of running the policies that deny condoms to millions of HIV-vulnerable women around the world. He also supervised a policy that requires aid recipients to sign off on statements that they oppose prostitution in all its forms… He resigned over the revelation. As for Harlan Ullman– yes, Mr. “Shock and Awe” himself– he merely shrugged when reports surfaced that his name, too, was on the list… But in all, this looks like a great week of bubble-pricking news that’s about to come up…)
Also bad news for the Bushites: development in the ongoing Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz affairs; or pieces of investigative reporting like this one in today’s WaPo, which tells us that while after Hurricane Katrina foreign countries offered the US assistance totaling $854 million– but only $40 million of that has ever been used for victims or reconstruction…
The Bush administration seems, in many respects, to be falling apart at the seams. And the main reason for that is undoubtedly the continued leaching out of US blood, money, reputation, and self-respect that has been occurring because of the war in Iraq.
The fact that even at the WaPo– which in the whole four years that followed 9/11/2001 was just about as hawkishly pro-war and as mawkishly pro-Bush as it was possible to be– the editors have finally decided to return to something like the standards of independent, truth-seeking journalism seems to me a bellwether of the opinions in the country’s elite.
Thankfully, the anti-war vote of last November was not just a flash in the pan. The citizenry has held fast and true to a position of growing hatred for this war. Congress has been pushed by its base. Barack Obama, with his strong record of having opposed this war all along, has emerged as a completely plausible competitor to all those other Democratic presidential candidates who voted for the war-enabling resolution back in October 2002,
Heck, even a serving military officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, has come out in public with a devastating critique of the way the military leaders behaved in the lead-up to and the conduct of this war:

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America’s generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.

(Equally as notable as Yingling’s willingness to express his harsh criticisms in public was the identity of the medium that carried his piece. It was in the Armed Forces Journal, a very mainstream journal on professional military affairs.)
Anyway, Congress has now passed the legislation requiring the president to start withdrawing the troops from Iraq by a date certain. Bush has threatened to veto this legislation. The Friends Committee on National Legislation says, “We believe that the president is not in touch with reality.” I’ll say!
FCNL is also asking all US citizens to write urgently to Bush to urge him to reconsider his promised veto. Their website says:

Give him a dose of reality today. He should know that the people of this country insist on a change in U.S. policy in Iraq and will mobilize popular opposition to this awful, failed war, until the last U.S. troops have left Iraq.
Next Tuesday, May 1, is the fourth anniversary of the president’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The weekly death toll in Iraq – for both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers – is growing. Not one more dollar, not one more drop of blood should be spent on this war. The U.S. should not send more soldiers off to Iraq to die.

Right. And nor, of course, should it send them off there to kill.