This piece by Dana Milbank - which I discovered thanks to Crooks and Liars - follows hot on the heels of Chris Matthews calling Barack Obama's speech at the United States Military Academy an appearance in "the enemy's camp" (to give Matthews credit, he apologized for this comment). Why is it there are still those who believe - despite so much evidence to the contrary - that Democratic politicians are hostile to the military? For those old enough to remember, Jesse Helms once claimed that should then-Pres. Clinton visit any military bases in North Carolina, it might prove dangerous for the Commander-in-Chief. Rather than treat this outrageous comment with the contempt it deserved, and relegate the person who spoke it to the non-entity file, there was actually discussion in elite Washington circles over whether or not the President of the US would need a protective escort on military bases!
There is military bashing on the Left in the United States. Yet, in the first instance, with the possible exception of Russ Feingold - from just up the road in Janesville, WI - there aren't too many left-wing Democrats left. Second, Pres. Clinton managed, somehow, to use military action effectively, even though he faced opposition from the Left (wow, what a shock!), particularly in the Balkans. Pres. Obama has showed a willingness to use the military as well; consider the way the Nave SEALS managed to deal with the pirates off the Horn of Africa.
For some reason, though, there are still those who think that Democrats don't like the military, and that, politically speaking, the military mind-set and Democratic politics don't mix. This is, perhaps, the stupidest legacy of the Vietnam War. The irony, of course, is this war was waged largely by Democratic Administrations (although the heaviest casualties came with the Nixon Administration) and had some of its biggest supporters in the Democratic Party. When the country, and the Democratic Party, turned against the war, many on the right turned this rather sound and sober judgment - that the Vietnam War was quite the foreign policy blunder and we needed to get out as soon as possible - in to the slander that "liberals hate the military". This was made worse by the creation of the urban legend of returning Vietnam Vets getting spat upon by hippies. Even though there isn't a single documented case of this happening, it is far too often trotted out as evidence that yesterday's hippies, and today's Democrats, are just a bunch of unpatriotic nancy boys who hate the military.
This situation is not made easier by what Michael Berube calls "the Manichean left" - Chomskyite knee-jerk critics of any American foreign policy that includes the use of the American military. There are, in fact, left-wingers who do not reflexively consider any use of force by the United States as suspect. I count myself among them. The problem, far too often, is that in theory, at any rate, there are good cases to be made for a particular, limited use of the military (in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11, for example) that, when put in practice, end up far worse than they might have been otherwise. This does not make me, or anyone else, who believes there are cases where the judicious use of military force is both prudent and acceptable, "liberal hawks". At least in my own case, I think it makes me someone who sees the threat and use of force in international affairs - done within the limits of the UN Charter, and in concert with our allies in an agreed-upon framework - as a live possibility. That far too often the US has used the military poorly, as it continues to do in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and, no, I do not support Pres. Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan), does not mean that, at some point, we will have wiser and more capable hands at the wheel of our military machine; it just means we need to look at each instance on the merits.
In the meantime, what do we do about this ridiculous nonsense that there is some kind of innate hostility between American liberalism and left-wing politics and the United States military? Beyond calling it out for the stupid that it is, I'm not sure.
Virtual Tin Cup
