Obama, Security, and Sham History

We live in historic times. Certainly those who felt the power of the long polling lines, the nervous energy, and the spontaneous celebrations across the country on Nov. 4 will remember where they were, what they were doing, at that moment, for many years.

Some would rather these times weren't this historic. Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard has written a somewhat (less than) generous opinion piece lamenting that more of the country didn't see things his way. He is concerned that we, as a country, are now suddenly at a greater security risk than we would have had a septuagenarian and his girl-novice sidekick been elected.

I grant Kristol his opinion. But his justification comes from a bizarre historical narrative. He suggests that the American electorate has, since WWII, followed a consistent pattern in voting. Republican administrations make us strong and feared about the world, and then we feel happy enough to elect Democratic presidents who muck things up by being soft and squishy.

Consider:

Encouraging Americans' tendency to take hard-won national security successes for granted--once they are won--is the key to how Democrats, in modern times, win presidential elections. Dwight Eisenhower pursued a cautious but not ineffective foreign policy. Voters were unimpressed by the peace and stability of 1960 and chose John Kennedy. Partly as a result of Kennedy's initial weakness, the Berlin Wall went up and the Cuban Missile Crisis followed--and then, partly out of a felt need of Lyndon Johnson's to appear strong, we escalated in Vietnam.

Let us forget for a moment that Eisenhower was elected primarily to extricate America from an unpopular war started by a fist-pounding Democrat, and that Kennedy campaigned as a stanch cold-warrior to the more moderate Nixon. Let us forget that the Soviets did not need anyone's permission to build the Berlin Wall and weren't "waiting around" to do it. Let's keep our eye on the larger narrative. Kristol continues:

The voters elected Richard Nixon to extricate us from the quagmire in Vietnam with honor, which he did, and Gerald Ford attempted to prevent the Democratic Congress from walking away from our ally and our responsibility. Voters decided, however, to give the presidency back to the party of JFK and LBJ--by this time more the party of George McGovern--and we got the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

So Americans elected Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and--stunningly--they won the Cold War virtually without firing a shot. (Bush also drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.) Voters were able in 1992 to take peace for granted and to focus on domestic policy. "It's the economy, stupid" was stupid but successful just as its equivalents had been in 1976 and 1960.

Kristol is right that we elected Nixon to extricate ourselves from Vietnam, presumably with honor. He ended up bombing Cambodia. The bombing continued for years before he left with the same terms he could have gotten at the beginning of his tenure as president. Given the recent evidence that Kissenger may have sabotaged the peace talks under Johnson in order to prolong the war for an incoming Nixon administration, the idea of Nixon's failed Vietnam policy amounting to "peace with honor" is something of a joke. The Iranian Revolution occurred--if I read Kristol correctly--because we were not hard enough on Iran? As if the secret police we trained for the Shah and the support we gave him to keep Iran a client state was not enough. Would he prefer we had provided more weapons of repression to that regime? Does he really suppose that the Iranian revolutionaries cared who was president back in the United States? Nor did the election of Ronald Reagan do anything to convince the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. And the USSR's protracted presence in Afghanistan played its part in its own demise--a lesson we may want to take to heart before we jump into any more wars in the name of strength and national security.

What is most disheartening about Kristol's analysis are the assumptions that govern it. Events that occur during a presidency--carefully selected and pruned of any meaningful context--are attributed to the sitting president. One could just as easily construct a counter-narrative which is even more compelling.

Start with World War II, instead of avoiding it as Kristol does. Our Democratic president and his Democratic successor achieved the impossible: getting powerful, industrialized fascist countries to surrender unconditionally. Harry Truman, in his zeal to stop the totalitarian Soviet Union from expanding its reach, combatted communism in Korea. The American people, confident that we were powerful enough to stand some peace, elected Dwight D. Eisenhower. By the end of his term, the Soviet Union had achieved the H-Bomb, was more powerful than ever, and ready to move on Berlin and Cuba. Americans elected John F. Kennedy--a chest-thumping cold warrior--over the more moderate and level-headed Richard Nixon. Kennedy met the Russians face-to-face and took us to the brink of nuclear war in order to defend freedom, including engaging in a hot war in Vietnam. Nixon would be elected in 1968 to extricate us from the war, much as Eisenhower had before him. Nixon ended up pursuing a policy of appeasment with communist Russia and communist China. Reagan's administration fared no better than Carter's, given our meager victory in Grenada and the more substantial embarrassment that was Lebanon.

I could go on, but there is no point. The counter-narrative is just as empty and inspid as Kristol's narrative. I use it only as a heuristic device, and only to demonstrate that Barack Obama's election does not signal that a confident public believes it has been protected by the last administration and now is ready to "take a chance." Many Americans rightly believe that this last, failed presidency has seriously weakened us as a country, that we can no longer defend ourselves the way we might have eight years ago. Kristol's inability to acknowledge this simple truth is, on his part, both an intellectual and a moral failure.

Maintaining Freedom

There is, these days, a political mantra that seems both undebatable and incontrovertible: "support the troops." The mantra is intoned at political rallies, by talk show hosts, in the streets, and the media at large. No matter where a candidate for the presidency stands on any given foreign policy issue, respect is due to the troops who put themselves in harm's way to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief.

I have no truck with such a sentiment. Soldiers face the gravest of risks and of all our public servants are the only ones repeatedly asked to put their lives on the line. That they do so deserves and demands our respect, which is precisely why the mantra works.

The problem, however, is what the mantra hides. To "support the troops" does not mean to "support the war." To call attention to the atrocities of war is not to countermand the order to "support the troops." And to suggest that we need a less intrusive foreign policy (three cheers to Republican Ron Paul for calling attention to the American Empire) has nothing to do with "supporting the troops."

Granted, this has not been as much of an issue in the last year as it has been in times past. Jingoism will always be invoked by some, but its capacity to persuade has been diminished by the dismal results of Bush's ill-fated adventure in Iraq.

Which brings us to the surge, sure to be an issue in this November election, and a major question for voters to address at that point. John McCain has staked his presidential bid on the success of the surge, which he has been trumpeting for some time now. The media, for the most part, seems to be agreeing with him. Violence, after all, is down -- and General Petraeus has the numbers to show it. With progress comes the hope of more progress, leading to the ultimate success of the intervention in Iraq. And, if McCain's 2007 Foreign Affairs article is any guide, it is a blueprint for future operations. McCain's presidency would likely see the rebuilding of the military to handle these situations and engage in more nation-building exercises.

I do not admit the surge's success. Violence only declined when Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire in August of 2007. Granted, he did so under enormous pressure from the United States which only could have been contemplated with the surge. But additional factors pressured Muqtada as well, including a growing dissatisfaction on the part of Shiites within Iraq with the corruption that was accompanying the Sadrists rise to power. And there has been great cost with the surge's success. The most important may prove to be the deals struck between the U.S. military and anti-Sadr militias. Empowering local thugs to fight against other local thugs may not prove to be the best bet to secure a stable democracy in the Middle East, even if it does provide some order and put America's enemies on the run. Most of the American media establishment is oblivious to such details, preferring the much simpler argument of whether the surge is "working" and what "defeat" might mean for the United States (forgetting, it would seem, the Iraqis who must live amidst this violence).

So will "support the troops" translate into a "support the surge" come November? It will if the American media continues to conflate concepts and slip promiscuously from one idea to another in repeating the mantra. To give but one horrific example, the ladies from _the View_ on ABC debated Gloria Steinem's remarks about John McCain's POW experience. One of the vapid hosts--Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whoever she is--took Steinem's simple statement that military service was not a prerequisite for high office and turned it into a syllogism that would have made George Orwell blush: 1. Gloria Steinem argued that John McCain's POW experience did not qualify him for high office; 2. Gloria Steinem argued that military training does not in-and-of-itself qualify somebody to be commander-in-chief; 3. Therefore, Gloria Steinem argued that our men and women in uniform are bad because they are trained to kill; 4. This is evil because it denigrates our men and women in uniform.

Simple logic has never been easy for talk show hosts, so I don't want to dwell too much on Hasselbeck's inability to reason from premises (1&2) to necessary conclusions (3&4). Suffice it to say that it does not follow logically.

What I do want to dwell on is the latter assumption, revealed noisily by a frustrated Hasselbeck when pressed on this point by Barbara Walters and others on that show. She blurted out that we wouldn't be free if it wasn't for our troops in Iraq.

There is, needless to say, a huge difference between "supporting the troops" and claiming that the only reason we enjoy, say, the privilege of blogging, is because they are in Iraq right now. It represents the worst in logical fallacies, complete with internal inconsistencies and faulty premises.

But it does raise the question of what precisely it takes to maintain freedom. Doubtless, a strong military presence is important. More debatable is whether that military power ought to be projected or not (or, perhaps more accurately, when it should be presented). But strong militaries have not traditionally been the sign of a healthy, free society. Certainly no one would argue that a strong military is more important to a despotic state than a free one.

So what else does it take to maintain a free society? I am hoping to solicit some responses that list some of the requirements for maintaining freedom. It may be the only way to get past the mindless and uncritical United States media and its coverage of U.S. power abroad.