If only the decisions on Iraq were good

By LINDA P. CAMPBELL
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
In this era of broken marble ceilings in the halls of power, it ought to be OK to speak frankly about inherent differences between mothers and childless women without being labeled rude or sexist.
But hyperventilating bloviators jumped all over Sen. Barbara Boxer last week for alluding to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's single status -- as though Boxer were accusing Rice of botching the Iraq war because she's a spinster.
That wasn't the point at all.
During the Jan. 11 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Boxer clearly was talking about sacrifices -- and the lack thereof by most of us -- made to pursue the Bush administration's infernal fiasco.
"The issue is who pays the price, who pays the price?" Boxer asked Rice, according to a Federal News Service transcript on Nexis. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young.
"You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact."
Maybe the California Democrat was posturing. But it's a leap of misconstruction for White House spokesman Tony Snow to call it "a great leap backward for feminism."
Hypersensitive
A follow-up story in The New York Times made Rice sound as though she'd suddenly gone all fragile and hypersensitive: "I thought it was OK to be single," she was quoted as saying. "I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children."
Of course you can. The problem, though, is that neither the single-female Rice nor the married-with-children men in the administration who've been driving the Iraq war have been making good decisions on behalf of the brave and dedicated troops who've shouldered the burden or the American people at large.
Who can honestly deny that the price of our civilian leaders' bullheaded ineptitude has been paid disproportionately by the military families who've sacrificed physically, emotionally and financially?
Instead of asking us to share the burden by (for instance) conserving energy or forgoing tax cuts, members of the administration insisted that we trust them to know what they were doing. Distrust and disillusionment, anyone?
Even many of their fellow Republicans have lost confidence.
"We owe the military and their families ... a policy worthy of their sacrifices, and I don't believe, Dr. Rice, we have that policy today," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska told Rice at last week's hearing.
"To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives, to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong. It's, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It's tactically, strategically, militarily wrong," Hagel said.
The Vietnam veteran called Bush's plan for a surge of U.S. forces "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out."
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio sounded just as skeptical. "I think you're going to have to do a much better job, and so is the president, explaining this to us," he told Rice. "I've gone along with the president on this, and I bought into his dream. And at this stage of the game, I don't think it's going to happen."
Obfuscation
What ought to infuriate the chatterers -- and the rest of us -- is the way that Rice evaded, obfuscated and acted mystified when Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., pressed her on whether we're more secure for having invaded Iraq:
Feingold: "What about Afghanistan, are we better off in Afghanistan than we were before the invasion of Iraq?"
Rice: "I think there's no doubt that we are better off in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has made a lot of progress since 2006 -- since 2001 when we invaded Afghanistan."
Feingold: "That's not what I asked. I asked if we're better off since ... since the intervention in Iraq."
Rice: "Senator, not everything is related to what we have done in Iraq. What we've done ..."
Feingold: "It's a simple question. ... Did it help or did it hurt our situation in Afghanistan?"
Rice: "Senator, I think that we have been managing what is going on in Afghanistan as we've been managing what goes on in Iraq. I don't actually see the connection you're trying to draw. I don't understand."
How conveniently dense.
Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.