DMN to Rumsfeld: Do As We Say

… not as we do.

The lead editorial in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News was a scathing admonition to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld which accused him of playing politics with the war in Iraq.

Trying to put wind into the flagging sails of their Iraq policy, President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld played good cop-bad cop in speeches to the American Legion convention this week. Yesterday Mr. Bush said of war critics, “Many of these folks are sincere and they’re patriotic, but they could not be more wrong.” But two days before, Mr. Rumsfeld portrayed journalists as fifth columnists and compared the administration’s opponents to appeasers of Adolf Hitler.

Given how badly the war is going and how even some leading conservatives are publicly questioning our mission in Iraq, the president has no choice but to go on the rhetorical offensive. But the defense secretary’s crude speech was, to put it with extreme delicacy, not helpful to the cause.

Invoking Hitler is designed not to invite understanding but to obscure it for the sake of manipulation. If it really is 1938 all over again, then there’s only one thing we can do: Go to war with all we’ve got. The Hitler analogy is not necessarily wrong, but it is so freighted with historical memory that it compels the war conclusion. It puts those who invoke it in the Churchill position, and portrays those who disagree as jelly-spined Chamberlains.

Mr. Rumsfeld also deployed a phalanx of straw men and allegations in an effort to discredit critics. Aside from the Cindy Sheehan crowd, who in this country is advocating that we should appease terrorists? What serious person is arguing that “America, not the enemy … is the source of the world’s troubles”?

The secretary also accused the news media of being more interested in dividing America than in uniting it, accusing journalists of having a “Blame America First” attitude. Singling out the messenger is an old and often successful strategy, but the dismal facts on the ground are really responsible for a majority of Americans losing faith in the Iraq war.

Mr. Bush is certainly correct that success in Iraq is vital to U.S. national security. Given the seriousness of the stakes, it is deeply dismaying to see the defense secretary playing partisan politics with a cause so critical.

America really does need unity of purpose to do right by Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld’s simple-minded rhetoric surely will stoke the shrinking pro-war base, but it will do nothing to help win this war.

Never mind that the DMN editorial staff appears to be working from the Associated Press’ version of Rumsfeld’s speech.

Never mind that the editorial does not bother to support its claim about how “badly the war in Iraq is going,” assuming that the reader must agree because the DMN’s coverage would give no reason to believe otherwise. After all, the paper did not tell its readers about progress in Iraq involving local assumption of responsibility for the Iraqi NCO academy, the large extent to which Iraqi forces now lead the security situations, or the recent and dramatic reduction in civilian deaths.

No, never mind all of that. Let’s just take a look at the editorial’s headline:

Keep Politics Out of Iraq

What a great idea. It’s too bad that hypocrites at the DMN cannot keep up this standard. In fact, in the print edition, they couldn’t keep it up for one freakin’ inch as not even that far away from the headline was the following political cartoon by Tom Toles of the Washington Post.

That is most assuredly a political attack on Rumsfeld based on the perception of Iraq that the media has created. And it most assuredly less than an inch from the headline telling Rumsfeld to leave politics out of Iraq.

Less than an inch — that’s about how far the Dallas Morning News editorial board can be trusted to avoid hypocrisy.