Dems Walk an Anti-War Tightrope
By Callimachus | Related entries in General Politics, In The News, WarBull Moose speaks softly, but makes it stick.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 and is filed under General Politics, In The News, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.[D]oes the Democratic Party really want to re-litigate the arguments to go to war? Maybe so, but keep in mind that many Democrats voted to grant authority to the President to go to war. And most still stand by that vote.
This author argues that while the Bushies went to war with insufficient troop levels and mishandled the post war situation, it was inevitable and just that Saddam was removed. In the post-9/11 environment any American Administration would have erred on the side of vigilance concerning Saddam’s threat. That may not have been wise, but it wasn’t a case of lying and massive deceit.
The Moose does not have to trust George W. Bush to hold that view. He believes Tony Blair. For that matter, most of the Clinton national security team was convinced that Saddam posed a threat to American interests and security. It was hardly a vast neo-con conspiracy that brought us to war.
Will the American people have faith in and trust a party that claims that it was gullibly duped, or as George Romney claimed about another war - that it was “brainwashed.”? Moreover, should the objective be re-fighting the reasons to go to war and making the Democrats the official anti-war party or should the goal be achieving reasonable success in Iraq? If you believe in the former than you would encourage more efforts like the one Senate Democrats undertook yesterday. If you believe in the latter, you want the opposition party to present a better plan for winning this war.
While the war is increasingly unpopular, the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security. It may provide immense partisan satisfaction to flummox the Republicans on a procedural maneuver, but beware of the long-term impact on the party which already suffers from a perception of being weak on national security.
During the late 90’s the Moose was appalled by the behavior of many of his fellow Republicans who ascribed the worst motives to President Clinton for attacking Saddam and going to war in Kosovo. Clinton drove the Republicans to lose all judgement. Although it involves different different players, the Moose is feeling deja vu all over again.
November 2nd, 2005 at 11:53 pm
Gee, I said just about the same thing . . . less softly.
November 3rd, 2005 at 10:41 am
The Dems, “gullible, feckless and indecisive” on national security? I’m shocked. They’ve become the scions of Taft’s isolationism- just as Bush has assumed the mantle of Wilsonian interventionism. History is a strange thing. Bull Moose is correct in reminding us that the GOP decried Clinton’s Kosovo venture. We would benefit greatly from a bipartisan, pre-Vietnam War foreign policy approach.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:49 pm
I wish he had made more of a point of it during the campaign, but I clearly recall Kerry saying at the time of his vote that he was trusting the President to exhaust all other options before going to war, but that he felt it was important to give the President the authority to act if necessary. Several other Dems said essentially the same thing.
The point about the Rule 21 maneuver, which granted may be difficult to communicate, is that the misuse of intelligence by the Administration is central to the decsion to go to war. The Administration likes to keep beating the drum that everyone looked at the same intelligence, but I don’t believe that’s true. Dick Cheney making repeated, unprecedented trips to Langley to bully analysts into intepreting intelligence his way, which means that what came out of the CIA was already skewed to the Administration’s wishes. The Senate doesn’t maintain its own intelligence service. It can only look at what comes out of the CIA and other agencies. If the Administration was gaming the system, then they should be held responsible. And the point isn’t that the Democrats were lied to. It’s that the American people were lied to.
Everyone in politics who commits a major blunder or deception chants the same mantra: “Only losers look at the past. What happened happened. We should be looking to the future.” The American people aren’t that dumb, and they’re not that forgiving about being lied to.
Of course, all of this is based on speculation. I don’t really know what happened with the intelligence, because somehow the Senate hasn’t gotten around to looking into it. Until this week, that is.