The Blue Voice

Sunday, February 26, 2006

TBV Feature: Democratic prospects for 2008: War, terrorism and ... Republican doves?

I want to get started on my contributions to our group effort to think about the Democrats and 2008.

Both for 2008 and even more for the long run, the Democrats need to grasp the depths of this country's military and foreign-policy problems.

This often gets framed as improving the party's standing among the public on national security. But, ohmygod, outside of the realms of FOXWorld and OxyContin radio, the Dems' national security standing among the public is just not so much lower than that of the Republicans.

Rasmussen in a report of 02/25/06 looks at the public reaction to the Bush dynasty's give-the-ports-to-our-UAE-cronies deal. And gee whiz, look what they found:

From a political perspective, President Bush's national security credentials have clearly been tarnished due to the outcry over this issue. For the first time ever, Americans have a slight preference for Democrats in Congress over the President on national security issues. Forty-three percent (43%) say they trust the Democrats more on this issue today while 41% prefer the President.

Now I'm not one to go salivating over the findings of this or that poll. Margin of error and all that in this case. But this is one illustration. Just because Rush Limbaugh fans may get their jollies fantasizing about Dubya in his flight suit doesn't mean that the general public sees things like they do. But you probably can't convince anyone on an OxyContin high of that.

Now, the Dems do need to come out strong on national security. The Dems have been beating the drums on port security for a while, and the controversy over the UAE deal gives them the chance to pound it some more. Even if there can be something worked out to let the deal go through, the crony nature of the deal shows how unserious this administration has been about national security in vital ways.

Summarizing the findings of Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, David Cole writes:

National security policy ... should reject the model of a military "war on terror," and instead adopt an intelligence-based approach that (1) seeks to identify, capture, and disrupt terrorists; (2) safeguards the most dangerous weapons to keep them out of terrorists' hands; (3) identifies and protects the most vulnerable targets in the US; and (4) reduces the creation of new terrorists by addressing the grievances that drive people to extreme violence in the first place.

The Bush administration's stubborn adherence to the traditional conception of war has caused it to disregard more important and effective defensive actions. The administration, Benjamin and Simon write, has failed to safeguard nuclear weapons materials in the former Soviet Union; failed to identify and protect the most vulnerable targets within the United States, such as water supplies; failed to work effectively with private businesses that are responsible for other vulnerable targets, such as chemical plants; and failed to increase in any significant measure the monitoring of container cargo at shipping ports, of which only one in twenty is inspected. According to the authors, the FBI is still so reluctant to adapt its methods to the realities of terrorism that it has used its intelligence "analysts" to take out the garbage and answer phones, the result being a very large turnover of employees who should be piecing together scraps of intelligence in order to find terrorists and disrupt their plans. (Are We Safer? New York Review of Books 02/08/06 [03/09/06 issue])

But the Democrats also need to start addressing the fact that our foreign policy depends too much on war and military threats and that our military budget is far too big.

Even saying that sends the DLC types into asthma-like fits of gasping and choking. The DLC prescription for Dems to show that they're "tough" on national security has been to advocate military threats, wars and high military budgets.

But reality has its claims, too. For the US to be spending more than half the military budgets of the entire world is crazy. Andrew Bacevich has suggested setting a target of matching the military budgets of the next 10-largest national military budgets - and that would be a huge reduction!

The Iraq War

One way in which that can translate into practical politics for 2006 and 2008 would be to straightforwardly oppose the Iraq War. Now, I grew up in Mississippi hearing the Confederate-romantic version of the Civil War. So I appreciate the dramatic charm of a Lost Cause.

But people who need the satisfaction of a Lost Cause can buy a copy of the Gone With the Wind DVD. Continuing a war when the game is clearly up isn't noble, it's self-destructive. Since a solid majority of the American public has turned against the Iraq War even while the Dems as the opposition party hemmed and hawed and looked for ways to "triangulate" a way around opposing a war that clearly was not in America's interest, it's perplexing what the Dems think they're going to get by more waffling.

Besides, our war aims as incorporated in the October 2002 Congressional war resolution have been accomplished. Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. And the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attack has been ended. Actually, those goals were achieved even before the invasion. Because there weren't any WMDs there, and the Iraqi regime had no operational ties to Al Qaeda and no involvement in the 9/11 attack. Mission accomplished. Let's bring the troops home.

It's a sign of the Democrats' strange disorientation on national security issues that they haven't been willing to make Bush's violation of the war resolution front-and-center of their criticism. Especially since the Republicans have been beating the John Kerrys and Hillary Clintons who voted for it over the head with it to de-legitimized their criticisms of the conduct of the war. That resolution specified that war against Iraq was authorized only if *both* those two conditions pertained: that no other option would get rid of Iraq's (nonexistent) WMDs and that the administration demonstrate a connection between Iraq, Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attack.

Neither condition existed. Bush's invasion violated the war resolution. That the Democrats haven't raised holy hell over that is just amazing to me.

The military budget

But, the DLCers argue, if the Dems start demanding military budget cuts, that will make them look "weak on defense". And, no doubt, the DLC poster boys like Joe Lieberman will be glad to assist the Republicans in making that argument. But it's not as though they haven't already been making that argument as loud as they could, to as many people as they could get to listen, for as long as anyone can remember. (With apologies to Sinclair Lewis and )

And out in the real world, voters can make distinctions between military expenses that make sense and ones that don't. And there are fairly obvious ways in which too much military spending can obviously make us less secure.

For instance, everyone but the hardest-core of the Bush Kool-Aid drinkers recognize that the Iraq War has made the United States and its citizens less secure than we were in February 2003, the month before the invasion. It has promoted the international jihadist movement, acts of terrorism are up worldwide in a major way, the invasion and occupation have alienated large majorities of Muslims around the world, the war and particular actions like torture have alienated almost all of democratic allies.

So, in a very real sense, all those billions and billions of dollars that we're pouring into the sinkhole of money and lives known as the Iraq War are actually damaging US national security. We would literally have been better off - more secure, safer - if none of those dollars spent on the Iraq War had been spent.

There are also blatant boondoggles like the Star War ("missile defense") program that are wastes of money. Star Wars is little more than feeding tube pumping taxpayer dollars into the veins of military contractors. Even its value in terms of creating jobs is less than almost any other kind of federal spending in which that money could be invested. Hopefully we'll at least get some spin-off scientific benefits from all the research that went into it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that specific programs have specific constituencies in the military and private business that can pour time, money and lobbying effort into pushing for those programs. While there is currently no equivalent lobbying groups specifically focusing on those programs. So, when it comes to saving money by eliminated redundant weapons systems, its very difficult for non-specialists to make an informed judgment about which one should go forward and which should be discontinued.

The Democrats can start to provide that kind of leadership by singling out particular systems that could be safely eliminated. Congress is, after all, supposed to exercise that kind of oversight. So should the President.

Sure, if you look at it through the eyes of chronic OxyContin usage, or prolonged viewing of Republican State TV (FOX News), it may seem that cutting a boondoggle system that has little or no valid military function is being "soft of defense".

But the Democrats are never going to win the OxyContin vote. Our leaders may be spewing out propaganda like dull-witted Party functionaries, and we're about to build our own version of the Berlin Wall along the Mexican border in Arizona.

Still, we have morphed into the German Democratic Republic (former Communist East Germany) yet. So the Dems have the chance to go after reality-based voters on these issues.

Republican doves?

Another weakness in the DLC approach is that it implicitly assumes that antiwar voters have nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. But the handwriting is on the wall on this one. Mr. "Shut Up!" himself, Bill O'Reilly, just came out against the Iraq War:

[H]ere is the essential problem in Iraq. There are so many nuts in the country - so many crazies - that we can't control them. And I don't - we're never gonna be able to control them. So the only solution to this is to hand over everything to the Iraqis as fast as humanly possible. Because we just can't control these crazy people. This is all over the place. And that was the big mistake about America: They didn't - it was the crazy-people underestimation. We did not know how to deal with them - still don't. But they're just all over the place. (Media Matters for America 02/22/06)

A lot of the liberal comment I saw on this focused on the blatant hypocrisy of it, though our postmodern Republicans reinvent reality so often that "hypocrisy" has almost become a meaningless concept with them. The Media Matters report says:

As Media Matters for America has documented, during a November 30, 2005, appearance on NBC's Today, O'Reilly called those advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq "pinheads" and compared them to Hitler appeasers.

Longtime conservative polemicist William Buckley is now also saying directly that the Iraq War is a bust :

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that "The bombing has completely demolished" what was being attempted - to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols. (It Didn't Work National Review Online 02/24/06)

What we're seeing here is the further development of a Republican/conservative alibi for the Iraq War. For those who have been following the military's public discussions of the war, it's been obvious for a while now that the scramble to assign blame for failure is being pursued with great energy behind the scenes, and more and more often in public.

But now we're seeing more mass-market versions emerging. Buckley's version is aimed more at the highbrow segment of the Republican faithful, the ones who like to imagine they aren't part of a party dominated by superstitious flat-earthers. His argument says with dignified restraint that the natives in Iraq just aren't up to the higher calling of civilized behavior that the Bush administration expected of them. Nice try, but the savages aren't ready.

O'Reilly's version is the same argument but aimed more at middle-brow FOXists. They're just a bunch of crazy Arabs, his version says. They don't deserve our help any more. We did everything right but those Iraqi savages screwed it up. Same argument, different market segment.

The lowbrow version can easily be derived from those two. Except it will talk about dirty A-rabs and ungrateful "hajis" and so forth. What the lowbrow version will likely settle on pretty quickly - because anything else would require too much mental effort - is some version of, if we're going to war, we oughta fight to win! And if someone unaware of the inner wisdom of that statement asks, the alternative suggested to "win" will be something along the lines of, "We shoulda just killt us a lot more them dang hajis".

Now, Bills Buckley and O'Reilly are unlikely in the extreme to be endorsing Hillary Clinton or Howard Dean for President in 2008. Nor are they likely to win many voters among mean-minded white folks who get off by fantasizing about killin' foreigners.

What this kind of argument does do, though, is to give people who are disturbed about the war a way to rationalize voting for the Republicans even though they may be appalled by their foreign policies and by the Iraq War. We news junkies can easily make the mistake of assuming that voters are processing issues through the same kind of elaborate ideological structures that we get used to seeing from politicians, analysts and publicists.

It's important to recognize that this kind of nativist-isolationist criticism is in a real sense the flip side of Bush-style unilateralism. And even calling it the "flip side" may understate how similar their assumptions are. Old Right isolationists are also opposed to US participation in the United Nations and to nuclear nonproliferation agreements. Radical free-marketers see international efforts to combat global warming as a deadly danger to their golden calf, Free Enterprise. And they are perfectly willing to promote a hostile nativism, just like supposedly "moderate" Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger are doing in pandering to the far-right Minutemen militia groups.

It's not at all far-fetched that a significant number of swing voters could be convinced that the Republicans are less warlike than the Democrats. One of the more lucid of the isolationist critics of the war, and one who is coming from what I would describe as largely an Old Right perspective, is Justin Raimondo, editorial director of the Antiwar.com site (which by no means restricts itself to highlighting only conservative critiques of the Bush policies). In a recent column at that site entitled Arianna Huffington, Racial Profiler, in which he defended the controversial UAE ports deal,he wrote:

She's right that the pro-war, pro-spending, pro-big government consensus extends to both parties, overarching the Left and the Right, but she seems blithely unaware that her own commentary best reflects the staleness of this orthodoxy. Nothing exemplifies this better than her view of the controversy surrounding the granting of Dubai Port World (DPW), an international shipping and port management company based in the United Arab Emirates, a franchise to manage maritime facilities in major American cities, including New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans. ...

I really don't have the stomach to wade through Arianna's farrago of falsehoods and catty cheap shots and follow down each and every link to its absurd dead end - go ahead, be my guest. But I'll say this: The HuffPuff and her gaggle of wild-eyed Democratic Party bloggers have no interest in this issue, or any other issue, except as a bludgeon with which to bash George W. Bush. They aren't antiwar - they're anti-Bush. Otherwise, they wouldn't be so eager to join in this latest orgy of Arabophobia. They would be sensitive to the atmospherics - to the clear message being broadcast by the U.S. Congress that Washington has no use for Arabs of any sort, no matter how pro-American, secularized, and capitalistic they may be. ...

Parading her ignorance with all the arrogance of a wealthy dowager flashing her diamonds, Arianna doesn't even begin to realize that her polemics could have dangerous - and even deadly - consequences. By ratcheting up the atmosphere of hate and hysteria that has characterized the relations between the Arab world and the West in recent weeks, she is lining up with the War Party. In open alliance with neocons like Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and the National Review/Weekly Standard crowd, Huffington and her fellow "progressives" are poisoning American politics to the point that "World War IV" - the wet dream of every neocon - becomes a distinct possibility.

The more stuff I see like this from Raimondo, the more reluctant I am to quote him when he actually does a good analysis of an issue. Which he often does. But what I want to illustrate with this point is how someone taking an antiwar stance and criticizing the Iraq War can rationalize that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, if not worse, when it comes to issues of war and peace. Raimondo is trying to make some other elaborate ideological point, which probably has something to do with his favorite obsession, alleged Israeli plots. ("War Party" in caps is used by Old Right isolationist types to mean "the Jews", as Raimondo surely knows.) But for all his antiwar fervor, which in many ways is in agreement with liberal critics of the Iraq War, he has no trouble making harsh propaganda against the Democrats.

Conclusion

In other words, its not be any means automatic that the Democrats will benefit politically from the debacle that the Iraq War has been pretty much since the day that Bush declared Mission Accomplished, if not even before. If the Democrats go down the road that Hillary started down by trying to sound more warlike on Iran's nuclear program than the Bush administration, they could very well fail to take advantage of a crucial opportunity to appeal to swing voters who are against the war.

And, more importantly in the long term, they could pass up the opportunity to reframe the national security issue on a much more constructive and pragmatic basis. We just have to get away from an atmosphere in which "sounding tough on national security" is equated with military threats and advocating war.

To gain an advantage from Bush's foreign policy and national-security failures, they will have to differentiate themselves on national security issues, hopefully by positioning themselves for a broad attack on Bush's foreign policy: pragmatic attacks on the Bush's administration's failure to adopt sensible "homeland security" measures; emphasizing how thin the administration's actual record on prosecuting terrorists and breaking up terrorist plans actually is; criticising of the Iraq War and all the deceptions and illegal actions connnected with it head-on; begin challenging some of the blatant waste in the military budget (e.g., Star Wars) and the crony-capitalist excesses that are part it.

Ultimately, what the country needs is a much more realistic foreign policy, one that does is not based on illegal, preventive wars of aggression as the Bush Doctrine is. One that is not based on the assumption that the United States must spend most of the military dollars of the entire planet. And one that deals realistically with the still very real threat of international and domestic terrorism.

posted at 5:10:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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