Special to The Charlotte Observer, Nov. 23, 2006 (Thanksgiving Day) 

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," H.L. Mencken once wrote. I wonder if he meant to exclude the president and Congress from that slight. After what has gone on in Iraq for the last three years, it's hard to imagine that he'd consider them brighter than the rest of us.

We will see, in the days to come, a focus on all of the moronic moves they made in Iraq. The studies and reports will be variations on the themes of lack of troops, lack of post-war planning, and lack of understanding the uneasy history among Kurds, Sunni and Shi'a.

I am not holding my breath for the wise men and women writing the white papers and holding the hearings to go much deeper than to point out the errors of arrogance that paved the road to this particular Hell or to make recommendations more startling than drawing down our troops and engaging in diplomacy.

Face all the failures

It is right, of course, to acknowledge what went wrong and more right to work on finding the best solution we can. We have to find a way for our troops to leave without the Arabian house of cards we built fluttering rapidly to the floor with lethal consequences for thousands more innocent Iraqis. But there are lessons that have to be learned that go beyond the logistics of war and the vetting of intelligence. There are other failures we need to face, other demons that we need to name.

The Democratic Party failed in the only task that an opposition party has, which is to oppose; not for the sake of obstinacy, but for the sake of making the governing party prove its case. During the rush to war, the Democrats asked few hard questions. They rarely said "show me." Instead, they held the door open so the bulls could run around inside the china shop. They were afraid the Train of Trumped Up Patriotism would leave them at the station of Electoral Defeat, so they bought first-class tickets and jumped aboard.

Now that they've won the election, but before they dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back for becoming skeptical about the war, they need to go to a quiet place and ask themselves why it took three long, bloody years.

We citizens should be sleeping the sleep of the guilty, as well. We should be tossing in our beds and staring bleary eyed at the clock on the nightstand as 2 a.m. becomes 3 and then 4. Our sin? A simple failure to care. Our volunteer military, composed of men and women who risk their lives when duty calls, are strangers to most of us. Most of us do not have sons and daughters in service. As Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/ banged the war drums, we should have said, "Wait, we can't send our troops to die without an open and shut case." But we didn't. They were some other mothers' sons, some other fathers' daughters.

We were not powerless

We failed to demand convincing evidence that Iraq was a threat. We were too busy spending our tax cuts on buying new SUVs to care. The Mission Accomplished Boys played us for suckers while we took it on faith that there must be WMDs and that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots all along. We invested more concern over which moderately talented amateur pop singer got votes on "American Idol" than in the 2,800 American troops who died and the thousands more who were maimed, and the tens or hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqi women and children. They were other mothers' sons, other fathers' daughters.

We were not powerless to stop this. A couple of general strikes and a few well publicized marches would have done the trick. If as many people who attend the Super Bowl would have marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and blocked the halls until common sense prevailed, things would be far different now. Our failure to demand a sane foreign policy was a failure to care.

Seek actions, not words

Now, finally, we have woken from our carelessness. We have thrown some of the lower level rascals out. Next comes a torrent of words from all sides about what we should do. The cliché police need to be on their toes (I'm starting an office pool on which of the memory-challenged windbags will be the first to utter "peace with honor." With Bill Frist out of sight, my money's on Trent Lott.).

We cannot mistake words for actions. If we get lulled back into not caring again, because the president and the Democrats are talking a good game while doing nothing new, then we will be guilty twice over.

                                                        XXX

David H. Jones is a Charlotte, NC lawyer - djones@kennedycovington.com