Posted on 05/13/2006 2:45:29 PM PDT by RWR8189
IT'S TOUGH TO BE a moderate Democrat. Hatred of George Bush has changed the loyal opposition into the bitter opposition, less interested in policy than in punishing their bête noire. It's particularly tough for Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq, the defining George Bush moment, and who oppose withdrawal. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the very model of a modern "defense Democrat"--not to mention the party's 2000 vice presidential nominee--now faces overwhelming votes of "no confidence" from Connecticut Democratic town councils.
The conundrum is acute for the rising generation of moderate Democrats who may run for president, if the performances last week by former Virginia governor Mark Warner and Sen. Evan Bayh at an event sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute are any indication. Speaking in support of PPI's new collection of essays, With All Our Might--a valiant attempt to define "a progressive strategy for defeating jihadism and defending liberty"--both Warner and Bayh clung safely to the anti-Bush orthodoxy. Neither rose to the occasion as laid out by PPI president Will Marshall: "It's really time to stop reacting to the administration and start defining what we're for on national security, to look beyond the fumbles in Iraq."
Warner approached the challenges as though he were still governor. "We're at our strongest when our institutions of government are run with competence and coordination. Our national security departments must work together to win this war, not simply compete against each other," he said. All true enough--it's hard to defend the Bush administration or the Rumsfeld Pentagon for competence and coordination--but Warner appeared unwilling to accept that winning the war demands, first and foremost, the use of military force. "We can't put the whole burden of fighting Islamic terrorism on our armed services," he said, a moment before parroting the very line of the Rumsfeld Pentagon: "As many of our generals themselves have said, Islamic terrorism cannot be defeated by military power alone."
Bayh sounded like nothing so much as a senator. His remarks were laced with cutting-edge rhetoric: "This is . . . our first post-nation-state war. . . . The second thing that characterizes this new phenomenon is . . . the asymmetry of the conflict." Bayh had given serious thought to these concepts, but, like Warner, he did not convey a sense of urgency about winning. "Number one," he said, "we can't define America's security only by the strength of our arms. It must also be defined by the strength of our economy, the strength of our finances, our energy independence."
At bottom, both men seem to see competence--in a kind of "good government" sense--as the true measure of a wartime president. Bayh put it most revealingly: "There's no greater test of a commander in chief than how [he] manages a war." It's not picking nits to emphasize the verb "to manage." It's the core idea for moderate Democrats, but a very different idea than "to lead," which is what matters in war.
If there's a big gap between these centrist politicians and the Nancy Pelosi wing in Congress or the MoveOn.org wing at large, there's also a gap between the moderate politicians and those wonks-in-waiting who would likely build the policy factory in a future Democratic administration. PPI's book With All Our Might actually represents an impressive lineup of younger defense and security intellectuals, many of whom worked in the Clinton administration. And they're more hawkish, in general, than Warner or Bayh.
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, whose prewar The Threatening Storm made a forceful case for invading Iraq, still sounds like a closet neocon. His essay on "A Grand Strategy for the Middle East" argues that "whether you supported the war or not, it is all about Iraq now." Withdrawal is not an option: "We cannot simply walk away from Iraq without repercussions. In that sense, Iraq is decidedly not Vietnam." While offering a comprehensive critique of Bush administration failures in Iraq, he emphasizes the military and strategic shortcomings; Pollack sees clearly that the first order of business is to establish security, which means fighting.
PPI's own Jan Mazurek is even tougher on Middle East strategy than Pollack. Where Pollack imagines, in keeping with the elite conventional wisdom of both parties, that China can easily be made a partner for progress in the region, Mazurek sees that the People's Republic, by its own choices, is creating the conditions for an even greater challenge. "Beijing is striking up cordial relationships with a motley array of tyrants and rogue states with which the United States is at odds," he writes. "In fact, competition between China and the United States for oil and influence in oil-rich countries could become the 21st-century equivalent of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the cold war."
And there are two very fine essays on military matters. James Blaker and Steven Nider call for an expanded Army and commit the ultimate Democratic apostasy: "The military budget--which currently consumes a much smaller percentage of U.S. GDP than it did during the cold war, on average--will probably need to grow in the short term." Perhaps most surprising is Melissa Tryon's remarkably sensitive examination of current military culture, an essay that should be required reading for all post-Vietnam politicians. She understands that people in uniform "see the defense of our country as a calling, and one of the greatest forms of service." They also have a deep commitment to victory that "leads to anger at what is widely seen as 'defeatism' among those who declare that the Iraq war is 'unwinnable.' . . . What service members want most is to see America succeed in Iraq."
It's ironic that the current president, a Republican, is a visionary liberal, while those who seem to be his natural lieutenants are Democrats without the prospect of a commander in chief who shares their commitment. The ever-optimistic Will Marshall thinks the Democratic leadership, the "presidential party," will come around. Maybe. But the Warners and the Bayhs--to say nothing of the rest of the likely candidates--sure aren't there yet.
Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI and editor of Armed Forces Journal.
It just proves that liberals are especially weak on defense, and are proud of it, along with the group of hardline libertarians.
In fact, what's the difference between the Left and hardline libertarians? I tend to view this group (as represented by certain but not all individuals within groups like the Cato Institute) as self-loathing Left except they pay respect to the free market economically. But it would be quite a lot like the current establishment/bipartisan foreign policy of New Zealand.
Almost all Democrats become hawks after we get attacked. Their problem is that they vote against defense research when it is needed the most (for one, while Islamist countries are getting into nuclear technologies). And their reaction after being attacked is to draft a huge army and equip it with their obsolete weapons.
Wilson (d) WWI , FDR (d) WWII , Truman (d) Korea, LBJ (d) Vietnam...
I find it interesting that the closet liberals over at AEI are now looking for "liberal hawks" for support.. Look how this Neocon closes his article:
It's ironic that the current president, a Republican, is a visionary liberal, while those who seem to be his natural lieutenants are Democrats
Bush the " visionary liberal" - and his natural lieutennants , the dems, how do you like that?
The three million innocent human beings murdered when we walked away from Vietnam might quibble with that statement. Except they can't. They're dead.
The last real Democrat hawk was Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. There are no Democrats like him around any more, not even Leiberman. As an Orthodox Jew, Leiberman is hawkish when it comes to Middle East security issues and the war on radical Islamist terrorism, but he is not hawkish when it comes to Red China's arms build-up or North Korea.
There used to be a lot of Southern Democrats who were truly pro-national security conservatives, like F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana who chaired the House Armed Services Committee for many years, but today he would be a Republican.
Reference bump
"Most of our foreign entanglements have been arranged by liberals:
Wilson (d) WWI , FDR (d) WWII , Truman (d) Korea, LBJ (d) Vietnam..."
I agree on Wilson and LBJ, but Truman was *no* lefty on foreign policy. Aside from twice nuking Japan, he was probably the most aggressively anti-communist President we've had other than Reagan. He was also a staunch supporter for the creation of the Israeli state.
Scoop was the best. I still can't believe he lost the nomination to The Peanut Farmer in 1976.
To the Pusillanimous Left, this never happened.
Many lefties I know actually acted like real Americans for a few days after 911.
Didn't last very long.
The three million innocent human beings murdered when we walked away from Vietnam might quibble with that statement. Except they can't. They're dead.
It's simply incomprehensible to me that there are actually people who don't understand what would happen if we were to pull out of Iraq right now. The inhumanity of it is breathtaking.
They don't think about the murdered millions. They couldn't sleep if they did. They can't think about them because their own past decisions and positions and efforts materially abetted the murderers, and interfered with those trying to stop them. If they admitted this to themselves, when they looked in the mirror every morning they would be physically sick. So they block it out with a bigger dose of HappyThought, they earnestly CARE a little more deeply (much more deeply than the cynics they know must surround them), and it passes.
The second lot know what happens. They just really don't care. Other people, especially if far enough away or different enough, just aren't of moral concern. Some of these are scared as all get-out and just want to appease baddies in the hope they will go away. Murder somebody else, but not my son, above all not me.
Some are worse still, know what happens, but long for power and influence so strongly, they will do anything and I mean anything, to secure them. If that means exploiting a demagogic opening and blaming some current office holder for things that aren't their fault, no problem. If it means encouraging HappyThought, that is easy to manufacture, whatever the market wants.
Some of this type tell themselves they will do more good once they have power, whatever they do to get there. And others just really, really don't care. They'd physically kill for office if it didn't get them arrested, but it is personal advancement sought cynically, they are after. And some are radical enough they positively want capitalist pigs like us to get their come-uppence. To them the only thing wrong with killing fields is who is getting killed.
Numerically, the legions of HappyThought are overwhelmingly dominant. The other types are overrepresented in the actual pols, and in opinion leaders manipulating it all.
And yes, it is breaktaking. I call it moral squalor. We've been wallowing in it, as a country, since the 1970s. Some of the parts of the world we find ourselves fighting in, have lived in that atmosphere for literally centuries, and it is why outright murderous bastards run those parts of the world.
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