Conservatives and the Iraq War

Journalist Andrew Sullivan assesses the growing dissatisfaction with the GOP among conservative voters.

Andrew Sullivan: I think the American people deserve to have a real discussion before these elections about what we're doing [in Iraq], rather than after them.

[President Bush] is gonna let Jim Baker fix it after the elections. Meanwhile, he's even changed the "stay the course" thing now. I wish we'd had some honesty the last three years, and one of the reasons that I'm, as a conservative, sick of this administration is the dishonesty, and the way they haven't leveled with us, and the way we're sending young men and women out there to risk their lives, and not supporting them, and not having a strategy and a plan. And he's now taking responsibility, now? He should have taken responsibility a long time ago.

Tavis: Two follow-ups, Andrew. Number one, too little, too late?

Sullivan: Yes.

Tavis: Number two, what's behind the strategy, days out from an election, to come out and say this in a news conference? What's behind that strategy, you think?

Sullivan: He's trying to - they can see catastrophe coming. And they have gotta do something to rescue it. And I think what everybody, you and I know, everybody's talking about, everybody out there knows this, we're losing. And he didn't seem to even understand that we were losing. He kept saying that everything was going great, and anybody with half a brain and two eyes could see it's not going great.

So finally, I think they realized that unless they change and show that they have some contact with reality, people are gonna respond in these elections. So I think of this, I have to say, as a desperate pre-elections tactic. Not as a legitimate statement.

Tavis: I think the people - I wanna try this out on you, you're much closer to this than I am. The president, Mr. Rove, Secretary Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney; these people aren't idiots. They're not stupid. They have to know, to your point, the same thing the rest of us know, that we are losing. To stay the course on something that you are losing suggests to me that it must be about more than just winning this today.

There must be some other massive, over-arching agenda. Some geopolitical agenda. There's something behind here that says that we cannot throw in the towel. We have to stay the course. It's not just about winning, 'cause we're getting our behinds kicked in the polls every day. So what's that bigger thing that they're really after?

Sullivan: The terrifying thing, Tavis, is there isn't a bigger thing. The only terrifying thing is it's either bad or terrible. If we were to withdraw at this point, the consequences would be catastrophic. We have a country where the Sunnis and the Shiites are fighting each other; where the Shiites are now fighting Shiites; and where, if this becomes a really big civil war, you're gonna have ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis, and you're gonna bring Iran in, Saudi Arabia in, Jordan.

You're gonna have a huge regional war. And you're gonna have 140,000 American troops sitting there in the middle of it. We're facing catastrophe. I don't think people realize yet how bad it really is. And for him to have kept saying we're winning, and he even said that today. "We're still winning." We're not.

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