Howard Dean Was Right

HOWARD DEAN

By DONALD KAUL
Dr. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, is something of a joke in sophisticated political circles -- wild --eyed radical, well out of the American "mainstream."

His signature moment, you'll remember, came when he ran poorly in the Iowa presidential caucuses of 2004 after having been the early favorite. "Eeeyah!" he said, or something like it, as he tried to rally his disheartened troops, looking a little demented as he did it.

Do something like that once in a presidential campaign and the press never lets it go. From then on, he was the crazy one. I am indebted to the online virtual magazine "Crooks and Liars" for reminding me who he really was and what he stood for in that campaign.

In a speech Dean made at Drake University in Des Moines the year before, as the campaign began to heat up and we were getting ready to invade Iraq, he had this to say:

"I believe it is my patriotic duty to urge a different path to protecting America's security: To focus on al Qaeda, which is an imminent threat, and to use our resources to improve and strengthen the security and safety of our home front and our people while working with the nations of the world to contain Saddam Hussein ...

"Had I been a member of the Senate, I would have voted against the resolution that authorized the President to use unilateral force against Iraq ...

"That the President was given open-ended authority to go to war in Iraq resulted from a failure of too many in my party in Washington who were worried about political positioning for the presidential election.

"The stakes are so high, this is not a time for holding back or sheepishly going along with the herd."

How does that compare with John Kerry's "I actually did vote for (funding the war) before I voted against it"?

Yet Kerry got the nomination, while Dean got to wear the fool's cap.

Dean was not speaking from some peacenik sensibility that would have put him against the war no matter the circumstances. He thought this particular war was a bad idea at this time.

"If we go to war, I certainly hope the administration's assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean. I certainly hope our armed forced will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Baghdad.

"It is possible, however, that events could go differently ...

"Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.

"Anti-American feeling will surely be inflamed among the misguided who choose to see an assault on Iraq as an attack on Islam, or as a means of controlling Iraqi oil."

That, ladies and gentleman, is an absolutely spot-on assessment of the way things were and how they would go, which was a lot more than the combined forces of the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOD and JCS were able to give us.

Howard Dean was one of two candidates, the other being Dennis Kucinich, who figured out what was going on. Both were treated as clowns.

The American press -- "media" they call it these days -- has become an embarrassment to the First Amendment. It habitually inflates the trivial and trivializes the significant.

Thus when Dick Cheney failed to report his shooting incident promptly, the press responded with loud outrage. I thought they were going to storm the lectern in the White House briefing room.

But when Cheney met in secret session with energy experts to craft a national energy policy, then refused to divulge the names of the people in the room with him, there was hardly more than a peep from our watchdog press.

Dean was also the guy, you'll remember, who said that the capture of Saddam Hussein -- much heralded as a turning point in the war --wouldn't matter much. The press's response was to ridicule him.

How's the Saddam thing working out, by the way?

(Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email him: donald.kaul2@verizon.net. His column is distributed to The Journal by Minuteman Media.)