Last week the nation acknowledged an important historical milestone. On March 19, 2003, the United States, under the leadership of then-President George W. Bush, formally launched its second invasion of Iraq in 23 years. But whereas Operation Desert Storm was widely interpreted as a justified venture in defense of democratic liberty, a warranted response to Saddam Hussein’s offensive against the sovereign nation of Kuwait, Iraq 2.0 will be forever remembered as war of choice. For the price of a deficit bloating trillion dollars and counting, the USA purchased the perception of its intelligence apparatus as inept at best, diabolical at worst. W.’s “Cowboy Diplomacy” proved an arrogant, ally alienating failure and the pristinely admirable career of Secretary of State Colin Powell (ironically, a celebrated hero during Iraq 1.0) was forever tarnished. Meanwhile on this 10th anniversary, the now Saddam-free Iraqis struggle with self-government consistently punctuated by sectarian violence.

Happy anniversary indeed. Finally we have an issue upon which most liberals and Tea Party crackpots can agree: the 21st Century Iraq war was a dismal fiscal and foreign policy failure that helped public support of post-9/11 national security measures that did nothing to address root concerns (the growing influence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda), jump the shark.

As time marches on, conversations surrounding the merits and demerits of the Iraq War will continue to impact future military efforts and the legacy of the Dubya regime. At the same time, political pundits utilized the occasion of the war’s 10th anniversary to speculate on the conflict’s domino effect upon various elements of our political culture. One of the boldest and most infuriating theses on the topic was presented by conservative New York Times Op-Ed columnist, Ross Douthat.

In a piece entitled “The Obama Era, Brought to You by the Iraq War” Douthat makes a broad argument that the ascent of President Obama to the White House would not have been possible without the misguided war hawkery of the Bush team, and the voting majority’s ultimate rejection of Cowboy Diplomacy. That postulation is fair enough.

I’ll go along with Douthat on this: “But Obama didn’t just benefit from the zeal that entered the Democratic Party through the antiwar movement; he also benefited from the domestic policy vacuum left by Bush’s Iraq-ruined second term. The Bush White House’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ was the last major Republican attempt to claim the political center — to balance traditional conservative goals on taxes and entitlement reform with more bipartisan appeals on education, health care, immigration and poverty.” Ok, sure.

The problem begins when Douthat essentially attempts to credit W. and the failed Iraqi initiative for just about everything that the current President has struggled to accomplish. Referring once again to Bush’s lame duck second term, the columnist writes, “This collapse, and the Republican Party’s failure to recover from it, enabled the Democrats to not only seize the center but push it leftward, and advance far bolder proposals than either Al Gore or John Kerry had dared to offer. The Iraq war didn’t just make Obama possible — it made Obamacare possible as well.”

Say what? Is there any limit to this party’s arrogance and the spokespeople who support it? Although the right almost unilaterally loathes Obamacare and has vowed to do all it can to neuter its clauses, if not repeal it entirely, that does not stop certain talking heads from taking an immature and sour grapes schoolyard approach to the debate. Does anyone on either side of the political aisle to find the pouty argument “Our incompetence made you,” compelling?

Douthat goes on to award ownership for the left’s rapid and recent gains in the nation’s culture wars (women’s issues, LGBT marriage equality, gun rights) to the failings of the Iraq conflict. I’m serious. Yes Ross, that’s correct. It’s not your party’s washed up, corporate-serving, faux religious, regressive platform or the rapidly changing socioethnic demographics of the country that have driven folks away from the GOP. It’s the failure to locate WMD in the desert a decade ago.

Thankfully just before I reached for the blood pressure medication, Douthat’s argument cannibalizes itself. He writes, “True, there’s no necessary connection between the Bush administration’s Iraq floundering and, say, the right’s setbacks in the gay-marriage debate. But cultural change is a complicated thing, built on narratives and symbols and intuitive leaps.”

Douthat’s entire column epitomizes the failings of the intuitive leap. Linking the current Republican leadership’s inability to connect with today’s voters, to egregiously terrible foreign policy decisions that took place 10 years ago, accomplishes only two things. In the first place, it provides cover against internal reflection upon popular distaste for the GOP’s whitewashed, greedy agenda. And perhaps most aggravatingly, it deprives the twice-elected POTUS from the hard-won credit he deserves for standing against the tide of deficit scolds, religious extremists and well-fed lobbyists to achieve landmark reforms.

For delusional shame.

I want to clarify upfront that I am in favor of equality for all, almost regardless of how we get there. It wasn’t so long ago (I’m thinking of the 2004 George W. Bush vs. John Kerry Presidential election) that my young liberal heart feared that discrimination against the LGBTQ community would be written into our nation’s venerable Constitution.

The Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) was conceived by Republican leaders in the runup to the 2004 election as a social wedge issue. A disingenuous diversion from the real conversation many Americans wanted to have – how to resolve the Iraq quagmire, the expensive war of choice – the opportunity to use the marginalization of gay citizens as a method of uniting the right wing base ultimately proved irresistible to the era’s “compassionate” conservatives.

The story wasn’t much different by the time we came around to President Obama’s successful 2012 reelection bid. Just under two years after the historical repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward the enlistment of gay and lesbian soldiers, the Republican party continued to offer a platform offensive to any and all supporters of equal rights for every American. An August 29, 2012 Associated Press report directly quoted the GOP’s official stance: “The platform affirms the rights of states and the federal government not to recognize same-sex marriage. It backs a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

Well it’s a new year and the Republican Party would now like you to believe that its’ stance on this key issue is “evolving,” – yes, the very same sort of transition for which the party once mocked the POTUS. Christian Science Monitor published an article last week purporting to take a closer look at the discourse surrounding LGBTQ issues at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The sub-header of this piece framed the debate as an internal struggle between emerging conservative candidates who might actually like to win an election someday and the stubborn old guard committed to critically slow suicide. Brad Knickerbocker writes, “Some Republicans worry that the GOP may be alienating the next generation of young conservatives if the party continues to oppose gay marriage.”

A number of polls have confirmed that a majority of American voters now support same-sex marriage. In a normal Darwinian political climate, one might assume Republicans are coming around due to the twin influences of cultural normalization and a need for electoral survival. But that sort of logical thinking is checked when one remembers the party’s embarrassing, ongoing backslide surrounding woman’s issues. A woman’s Constitutional right to control her own body was affirmed in 1973, yet rhetoric from Republican candidates throughout the 2012 election cycle often hearkened back to 1950s water cooler talk, bemoaning hard-earned female advances in family planning autonomy.

So what is really behind the Republican party’s incremental about face on the subject of same-sex marriage? I would offer that the evolution is based on the one important resource we can always count on the GOP to covet: money. Simply put, once you remove corporate contributions and the corrosive influence of various industry lobbyists, the party of obstructionism is running out of individual donors to tap. They have successfully alienated the majority of young, female, African-American, Latino and Asian voters. Our own Jason Easley wrote a February 19 post for this site entitled, House Democrats Crush Republicans With Their Best Fundraising Month Ever. The writing is on the wall for the GOP. With an urgent need to convey the perception of populist appeal, the easiest cherry to pick is a slow warmth toward marriage parity.

As stated in the opening paragraph, whatever moves lawmakers toward the legislative codification of equality is welcome, but I stop short of lauding the Republican party for its pivot as a sign of general dogmatic progress. After all, it must be remembered that key figures like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Ohio Senator Rob Portman only threw their tenuous support behind marriage equality when it became a choice between the hard line and repudiating their own children. This is the party of unlimited greed, not human equity.