Iraq-War Vets: The Democrats' Newest Weapon

This is Karl Rove's worst nightmare: a large crowd has gathered in a restaurant in the small town of Montrose, Pa., on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February to listen to the Democratic candidate running in the 10th Congressional District, a rural conservative bastion considered "safe" for Republicans. The candidate, Chris Carney, is soft-spoken and well informed. The audience is enthusiastic and predominantly Democratic, but peppered with Republicans who seem every bit as angry about the Bush Administration as do the Democrats. One man, dressed in a jacket and tie, stands up and confesses he's a lifelong Republican who can't vote for Bush because of his "fiscal irresponsibility." Another Republican, a prohibitively large corrections officer named Gary Morgan, tells me he's disgusted by the way Bush has prosecuted the war in Iraq and by his party's "culture of corruption." He's impressed by Carney, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer who is also a college professor. "It's nice to be able to vote for somebody with honor and integrity, and a veteran."

The "honor and integrity" sentiment is echoed by many in the crowd, and it is a local reference. The incumbent Republican Congressman Don Sherwood, 65—whom the Democrats didn't even bother to oppose in the last two elections—is married and has three children, but he's best known for admitting last year, according to the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, to a "five-year affair with a 29-year-old Maryland woman, but denies repeatedly beating her." At one point, the woman locked herself in the Congressman's bathroom and called 911, claiming that he was trying to choke her. Sherwood said he was just giving her a back rub. The woman brought suit, and Sherwood settled out of court. A former teacher named Kathy Scott last week announced she would challenge Sherwood in the Republican primary because he "is not living his personal life in a way that's honest and moral."

Sherwood's when-did-you-stop-beating- your-mistress travails may have made this race competitive for Democrats, but Chris Carney's qualities as a candidate are what make it significant. He is one of more than 50 veterans running for Congress as Democrats this year, eight of whom are Iraq-combat veterans. Carney didn't see action in Iraq, but he was a senior intelligence analyst who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Indeed, he was one of a core group of military-intelligence officers who studied the Iraqi insurgency over the past three years and have been frustrated by the Bush Administration's failure to bring adequate force to meet the challenge. "We told them there was going to be an insurgency," Carney tells his audience in Montrose. "Did they prepare for it? No. We need to know why they didn't. Why wasn't Congress asking the tough questions about this war? Where was Mr. Sherwood?"

The first question from the audience is about Iraq: What would Carney do now? "I'd withdraw one American battalion for every Iraqi battalion ready to fight. President Bush says there are 50 Iraqi battalions ready." Of course, there really aren't 50 Iraqi battalions ready to operate independently; in fact, according to the U.S. military, there isn't even one. "Right, but the President claims there are 50," Carney said later. "We're not going to have an honest conversation about the war until the President is held accountable for the things he says."

Carney is no left-wing bomb thrower; he is a pragmatic moderate. Before the war began, he specialized in studying Saddam's ties to regional terrorist groups. "There were no links to 9/11," he told me. "But there were plenty of other contacts with terror groups. I always thought that was a better argument for the war than weapons of mass destruction." Carney's politics pretty accurately reflect the views of most Iraq combat veterans running as Democrats. They are not so much antiwar as anti-Bush, furious about the lack of preparation for the war, the insufficient troop levels, the lousy equipment. "I served in Kosovo and had an up-armored humvee," says Jon Soltz, the director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America political-action committee. "Then I served in Iraq and had a humvee that wasn't armored. I lost one soldier I sent on a convoy without armor. You don't forget something like that."

Almost every one of the Iraq veterans running for Congress as a Democrat is in a tough, high-profile fight against a Republican incumbent: they'll be the poster boys (and women: Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in Iraq, is running in Illinois) for the Democrats' long-shot efforts to retake the House in 2006. They may also represent the beginning of the Dems' long climb back to credibility on national-security issues. Chris Carney has one of the toughest races. "The district is so Republican that no one really thinks he can win, even with Sherwood's problems," says G. Terry Madonna, who runs Franklin and Marshall College's Keystone Poll. But Iraq-war veterans running as Democrats is something new under the political sun—and Karl Rove's nightmare is that candidates like Carney will win some unexpected races this year.