The Democrats' Great Betrayal on Iraq

At FrontPage Magazine:

Editor's note: GOP presidential primary candidate Jeb Bush is once again boldly telling the truth about the Iraq War and putting the focus on those who sabotaged it: President Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. In recent remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Bush not only highlighted the Democrats' indefensible abandonment of a once-stabilized Iraq, but explained how this disastrous decision gave rise to a new, formidable terror threat: The Islamic State. In light of Bush's statements, Frontpage is publishing David Horowitz's introduction to his book "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. III: The Great Betrayal," which lays out the true history of the Iraq War and the Democrats' policy of defeat. Read the introduction below.

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The Great Betrayal is the third volume of my collected writings that make up The Black Book of the American Left. Its chapters focus on events beginning with the Islamic attacks of 9/11 and culminating in the Iraq War. They describe what can now be seen as a tragic turn in our nation’s history that has already profoundly and adversely affected its future.

The effort to remove the Saddam regime in Iraq by force was initially supported by both major political parties. But in only the third month of fighting the Democratic Party turned against the war it had authorized for reasons unrelated to events on the battle- field or changes in policy. This political division over the war fractured the home front with crippling implications for the war effort itself and, beyond that, America’s efforts to curtail the terrorist activities of other regimes in the Middle East, most pointedly Syria and Iran. The internal divisions were greater than any the nation had experienced since the Civil War, and the betrayal by the Democrats of a war policy they had supported was without precedent in the history of America’s wars overseas.

The internal divisions at the end of the Vietnam War were not at all commensurate with those over Iraq. The 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, which called for an American retreat from Vietnam, was launched after ten years of fighting with no result, when both parties had already conceded the war could not be won. The conflict between the two major parties was over how to end the war and over what the war had become, not—as in Iraq—over whether the war was illegal and immoral to begin with and should never have been fought. The Democrats’ opposition to a war they had authorized, represented a betrayal of the nation and its men and women in arms that has no equivalent in American history.

The domestic divisions over both wars were initiated by a radical left whose agendas went far beyond the conflicts themselves. In the decades that followed their efforts to bring the Vietnam War to an ignoble end, the left had made ever deeper inroads into the Democratic Party until, in 2008, the party nominated a senator from its anti-war ranks who became the 44th president of the United States. Of far greater significance than the successful candidacy of one anti-war spokesman, however, was the path the entire Democratic Party took in first abandoning a war its leaders had approved, and then conducting a five-year campaign against the war while it was still in progress.

I have written two previous books about this defection and its destructive consequences. The first, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam And the American Left (2004), documented the emergence of the post-9/11 anti-war movement, its tacit alliance with the jihadist enemy and its malign influence on the Democratic Party’s fateful turn. The second, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11 (2008), was written with Ben Johnson and focused on the sabotage of the war effort by leaders of the Democratic Party, by progressive activists and by a left-leaning national media. This chorus of opposition took advantage of American missteps to conduct a no-holds- barred propaganda campaign worthy of an enemy, even going so far as to leak classified information that destroyed vital national secu-rity programs and put all Americans at risk. Political opponents of the war attacked the moral character of the commander-in-chief and the mission both parties had endorsed. This assault on America’s role in the war dealt a devastating blow to American power and influence from which they have yet to recover.

It is customary and natural for human beings to identify with the communities they inhabit, and on whose health and security their lives depend. This is the foundation of all patriotic sentiment. But once individuals become possessed by the idea that political power can be “transformative” and create a fundamentally different human environment, they develop an allegiance to the idea itself and to the parties and entities in which they see it embodied. Such individuals come to feel alienated from the societies they live in but are determined to replace, and finally to see their own country as an enemy because it is the enemy of their progressive dreams. This is how generations of leftists came to identify with the Communist adversary and its cold war against the democracies of the West. When the Communist empire collapsed, I was curious to see whether this progressive reflex would survive the fall. Lacking the real world instantiation of their dreams Soviet Russia had provided, would progressives continue to volunteer as frontier guards for America’s enemies, even the most reprehensible among them? The answer was not long in coming.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, liberating hundreds of millions of captive people from their Soviet prison. The following August, Iraq’s sadistic dictator ordered his armies into Kuwait and erased that sovereign nation from the political map. Unlike the Soviet rulers who paid lip service to progressive ideals, Saddam Hussein was a self-identified fascist who did not pretend to advance the cause of “social justice” or liberal values. Even by 20th-century standards, Saddam was an exceptionally cruel and bloody tyrant. But he was also an enemy of the United States, and that proved enough to persuade progressives to lend him a helping hand. When America organized an international coalition to reverse Iraq’s aggression, the progressive left opposed the action as though America rather than the Saddam regime were at fault.

At the time, the only reason there were no large protests against the war over Kuwait was because progressives were freshly demoralized by the Soviet debacle and still in disarray. But their mood changed over the course of the next decade. As the millennium approached, leftists began to regroup, organizing a series of large and violent demonstrations against “globalization,” the term with which they re-labeled their old nemesis “international capitalism.” When Islamic fanatics attacked New York and Washing- ton in 2001, leaders of the globalization protests re-positioned their agendas to focus on the new American “imperialism” in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Eventually, millions of leftists at home and abroad participated in protests to prevent America and the coalition it led from removing Saddam Hussein. Without overtly supporting the Saddam regime as they had the Kremlin, progressives resumed their role as frontier guards for the enemies of the United States...

Leftist Democrats Forcibly Remove Republican Sen. Janet Nguyen, a Vietnamese Refugee, from Floor of California Senate Over Tom Hayden Criticism (VIDEO)

Following-up from earlier, as if on cue, "Julie Roginsky Slams Communist and Nazi Slurs (VIDEO)."

It's no enemies on the left for Democrats. The late Tom Hayden was a traitor and Democrat (I repeat myself) who traveled to Hanoi with Jane Fonda to support the Communist North Vietnamese over the the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. California Senate Democrats weren't going to allow an elected Republican, and a refugee from the war, to say a honest word about their comrade.

At the Los Angeles Times, "A state senator is removed from the chamber for her comments about Tom Hayden and Vietnam. (Via Althouse.)

Here's the video and statement, "An Adjournment in Memory of Fallen Vietnamese And Refugees Seeking Freedom and Democracy":

Dear Senators and the People:

I and the children of the former South Vietnam soldiers will never forget the support of former Senator Tom Hayden for the Communist government of Vietnam and the oppression by the Communist Government of Vietnam for the people of Vietnam.

After 40 years, the efforts by people like him have hurt the people of Vietnam and have worked to stop the Vietnamese refugees from coming to the United States, a free country. We will always continue to fight for freedom and human rights for the people of Vietnam.

Members, I recognize today in memory of the million of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy. I recognize that on Tuesday you had an opportunity to honor Senator Tom Hayden. With all due respect, I would like to offer another historical perspective.

On Tuesday, instead of participating, I chose to step out of the chamber out of respect to his family, his friends and to you. In contrast to your comments on Tuesday, I want to share what Senator Hayden meant to me and to the over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans who call California their home, as well as to the over 1 million Vietnamese Americans across the United States.

As you may be aware, Tom Hayden chose to work directly with the Communist North Vietnamese Government to oppose the efforts of United States forces in South Vietnam.

Mr. Hayden sided with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family. Mr. Hayden’s actions are viewed by many as harmful to democratic values and hateful towards those who sought the very freedoms on which this nation is founded.

Were it not for the efforts of the thousands of men and women who served bravely in the United States military and the South Vietnamese military, as well as the efforts of millions of Vietnamese citizens who resisted the communists, I would not be standing here on this Senate floor humbly representing the residents of the 34th District.

In addition to the sacrifices made during war, the efforts of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s allowed many Vietnamese like me to seek refuge in the United States.

In contrast to the great many people who fought to defend freedom and democracy, Mr. Hayden supported a Communist agenda and traveled to North Vietnam during the war.

He believed that those who protested the human-rights violations of the Communists were tools of the CIA. It is known that he believed that the war was a conflict between Imperialism, led by the United States and the “free” people of North Vietnam. Former Senator Hayden was profoundly wrong in his support of the Communists.

Members, to this day, the government of Vietnam continues to violate the basic human rights of its citizens. They systematically continue to oppress freedoms of expression, religion and assembly and incarcerate those who speak out for freedom and democracy.

Thank you for allowing me to make my comments. I proudly stand before you as a Vietnamese-American who appreciates the freedoms that so many around the world do not enjoy.

Bear Any Burden? The U.S. Can Afford Iraq

There's increasing buzz on Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Here's a Houston Chronicle synopsis:

When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

That estimate from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz also serves as the title of his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, which hit store shelves Friday.

The book, co-authored with Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, builds on previous research published in January 2006. The two argued then and now that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added — such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans — they think that the wars' costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

"I think we really have learned that the long-term costs of taking care of the wounded and injured in this war and the long-term costs of rebuilding the military to its previous strength is going to far eclipse the cost of waging this war," Bilmes said in an interview.

The Chronicle article suggests the Stiglitz/Bilmes claims are controversial in Washington. The article also reviews how the administration allegedly underestimated the "social costs" of the conflict.

Stiglitz and Bilmes summarize their work in this piece from the Times of London:

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined.

The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that's $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.

Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation.

The war is expensive, however, Stiglitz and Blimes' analysis lacks comparative and historical rigor. As Amity Shlaes argues, it's just not the case that the U.S. cannot afford to fight this war:

In their best-case scenario, under which the U.S. presence in Iraq drops to 55,000 non-combat troops by 2012, the total budgetary costs for the conflict add up to $1.7 trillion. They posit that a more realistic figure would be $2.65 trillion.

When a U.S. soldier dies, the authors write, the Pentagon pays something like $500,000 to families in insurance and death benefits. Stiglitz and Bilmes claim that a more accurate price would be $7 million -- the Pentagon fails to consider the lifetime earning and spending power lost when a soldier dies.

``Instead of paying for the war in Iraq, we could have fixed the Social Security problem for the next half-century,'' the authors say, and America would have had ``a smaller mountain of debt.''

In their best-case scenario, under which the U.S. presence in Iraq drops to 55,000 non-combat troops by 2012, the total budgetary costs for the conflict add up to $1.7 trillion. They posit that a more realistic figure would be $2.65 trillion.

When a U.S. soldier dies, the authors write, the Pentagon pays something like $500,000 to families in insurance and death benefits. Stiglitz and Bilmes claim that a more accurate price would be $7 million -- the Pentagon fails to consider the lifetime earning and spending power lost when a soldier dies.

``Instead of paying for the war in Iraq, we could have fixed the Social Security problem for the next half-century,'' the authors say, and America would have had ``a smaller mountain of debt.''

`Vast and Huge' Cost

Non-budgetary and interest costs are an important part of the Stiglitz calculation. The authors worry about the deficit. The conflict's costs, they say, ``are certain to be vast and huge and will continue for generations.''

The rebuttal to this argument starts with oil. Professor Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business challenges as ``unwarranted'' their argument that even $5-$10 of the per barrel increase is because of the war.

The 2003 drop in oil production by Iraq accounted for less than 1 percent of world production. Overall, world oil output went up from 2002 to 2006.

The authors' description of the war's cost as ``vast'' or ``huge,'' conjures images of unprecedented financial sacrifice. But by the standard method of calculating costs of wars, defense spending as a share of gross domestic product, Iraq's price is improbably modest.

Back in 1986, the year before Ronald Reagan threw out his ``tear down this wall'' challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, defense spending was 6.2 percent of the U.S. economy, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, it was 9.5 percent.

`Peace Dividend'

In 2005, 2006, and 2007, defense spending was about 4 percent of GDP -- as low as during the early 1990s, when the U.S. was enjoying the ``peace dividend'' after the Soviet Union's collapse.

As for the budget deficit, it is likely to range between 2 percent and 3 percent of GDP this year, a humdrum level nothing like the heroic 30 percent deficit Washington ran as it prepared for D-Day.

Yet it is the Stiglitz-Bilmes ``what-would-have-been'' argument that will prove most contentious. Back in 2006, Davis and two colleagues made their own counterfactual case, seeking to analyze the costs of the theoretical alternative to war against Iraq: containment of Saddam.

Davis found that the costs of containment in Iraq would have been big. In certain situations, they even would have been ``in the same ballpark as the likely costs of the Iraq intervention.''

Good News

In a phone request for an update of his paper this week, Davis said sending additional U.S. troops last year, the ``surge,'' increased costs enough to make the war yet more expensive -- but not by trillions of dollars.

And where in the ``Three Trillion'' calculus does the new good news fit in, such as the International Monetary Fund's prediction that Iraq's GDP will increase by 7 percent this year?

The message of this book is that the war can be blamed for America's failure to reform domestically. If this is true, then Washington would have used the period of 1991 to 2001 to rewrite Social Security and Medicare. It didn't.

Democrats and Republicans will both find the Iraq-as- budget-buster argument convenient. That doesn't make it compelling. It is also disingenuous. There are a number of reasons to oppose the war in Iraq. Just don't say we can't afford it.

Stiglitz and Bilmes' research will likely get huge play, as Shlaes suggests, but their work's not to be trusted.

The Democrats and the Antiwar Movement

One of the most interesting political developments over the last few years has been the growing fusion between the Democratic Party and the hardline radical elements of the contemporary antiwar left.

Determining which groups and individuals actually comprise "the left" is difficult, but as I've argued numerous time, the radical left today is increasingly an online advocacy and electoral mobilization movement. From the netroots blogs such as Daily Kos, Firedoglake, and Open Left, to the various iterations of online interest groups, such as MoveOn.org, the movement for a progressive overthrow of the hegemonic, imperialist right-wing establishment (BushCo and the neocons, basically) has been the driving ideological program of today's left.

Note, of course, that with the Barack Obama phenomenon we did see members of the '60s protest generation endorse the Illinois Senator (and Obama himself has long been dogged by his own ties to domestic terrorists and his unorthodox upbringing in Marxist ideology).

I identified the hardline radical support for the Obama campaign with the notion of "no enemies on the left." While Obama's a pragmatic politician who's been known to shift to the center for electoral expediency, on the issue of Iraq he's been a godsend to the left's radical antiwar constituencies. Indeed, Barack Obama provides a near-perfect fit for the left's template of postmodern, anti-military moral relativism seeking to rein in American power and put international interests above those of the American state.

The background on the antiwar movement is told in David Horowitz's recent book, Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11, which is reviewed by Bruce Thornton at City Journal. Here's Thornton on the Democratic Party's antiwar politics:

Party of Defeat opens with the Vietnam War-era hijacking of the Democratic Party by antiwar radicals, whose ultimate purpose wasn’t so much to end the war, but to discredit and weaken the political, social, and economic foundations of America. For the radical Left, then and now, “no longer regards itself as part of the nation ... “This Left sees itself instead as part of an abstract ‘humanity,’ transcending national borders and patriotic allegiances, whose interests coincide with a worldwide radical cause.” As such, it must work against America’s interests and success, disguising its activity as “dissent” or a more general antiwar sentiment.

This stream of today's Democratic Party is either not appreciated by many or flatly denied (for further elaboration of the theme, see also, John Tierney, "The Politics of Peace: What’s Behind the Anti-War Movement?").

With the exception of some mainstream outlets like International Business Daily and National Review (who explicitly identify the Obama phenomena in class-analysis terms), and a few top bloggers like Jim Hoft and Tom Maguire, Obama's mostly discussed in terms of the mainstream social identity of the Democratic Party as a pro-capitalist, center-left catch-all party of enemy-combatant rights, diversity, and organized labor.

I haven't written much lately on the Democrats and the extreme left factions, largely because the Palin phenomenon has completely dominated the news media. But as we move into the remaining weeks of the campaign, it's important for conservatives not to lose sight of this year's epochal battle in American politics between the GOP's vision - embodied best by President Ronald Reagan, and now Sarah Palin - of peace through strength and the embrace of American exceptionalism in foreign policy, and the left's agenda of multicultural liberal internationalism (including Obama's initial call for international diplomacy without preconditions).

What stoked my reflection on the topic was an article I read earlier tonight in the International Socialist Review, while out at Borders with my son.

The piece, "Which Way Forward for the Antiwar Movement?", actually repudiates the electoral mobilization strategies of hard left organizations such as United for Peace and Justice. But the author's agenda for rekindling the currently moribund protest movement (an effort to draw on the lessons of the Vietnam-era antiwar successes) reminded me of the alliance between socialism and radical Islam that's one of the most significant threats to American national security in the current age:

To really understand the kind of mass struggle we must aim to build, we should draw on the lessons of the movement against the war in Vietnam. It was not the president or Congress that ended that war. Instead it was the dynamic interaction of 3 militant mass struggles. The mass civilian antiwar movement staged mass marches, mass civil disobedience, and a wave of campus strikes that shut down the universities and colleges of the United States.

On top of that, the U.S. troops revolted against the war. As David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt describes, civilian activists in collaboration with vets and GIs set up coffeehouses where soldiers could organize their antiwar movement and build Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In Vietnam itself, the U.S. troops refused to fight, organizing “search and avoid” missions and even threatening their officers with fragmentation grenades to prevent officers from sending them into combat. This GI rebellion essentially paralyzed the American military in Vietnam.

Finally, and most importantly, the Vietnamese people themselves forged the National Liberation Front that fought for their own emancipation. They proved, especially after the Tet Offensive in 1968, that the United States and its puppet government had no support in Vietnam, and that the people were committed to driving the U.S. out of Southeast Asia. This three-dimensional, militant movement won the liberation of Vietnam.

Okay, pay attention to that last paragraph: The implication there is that the contemporary antiwar movement needs to back indigenous resistance forces against "American imperial agression." Today, such a drive would translate into ideological and material support to al Qaeda in Iraq, Hamas in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Syria, and the Taliban in hills of Tora Bora - and that's not to mention the emerging Iranian-Venezuelan anti-US axis of evil (for more on that, see "Anti-Americans on the March").

There are some in the radical netroots - like the extremist Newshoggers - who have already mounted a campaign of ideological support for America's defeat. Others, like many Barack Obama supporters, simply fail to make the connection between unlimited face-to-face diplomacy with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and threats like the explosively formed penetrators that have killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in the last few years.

Now's the time to return to the issues of Barack Obama's radical ties. While the explicit relationship between the Democratic Party and the contemporary antiwar left is complicated, there's no doubt that many outside the realm of doctrinaire Leninist cadres seek a progressive alliance between the hardline antiwar groups and the top echelons of the Democratic Party's organization.

Rescuing Johnson's Vietnam Legacy: Why? And Why Now?

I don't really think it's time to memorialize President Johnson and Vietnam (perhaps his domestic legacy, but not the war). We entered the conflict in 1964, perhaps (in a big way at least, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). But there are many other dates that could commemorate Johnson's legacy much better, not the least of which is March 31, 1968, when he announced he would not seek a second term.

Interesting, in any case.

At the New York Times, "Rescuing a Vietnam Casualty: Johnson’s Legacy" [added Memeorandum link]:

AUSTIN, Tex. — Luci Baines Johnson leaned forward in her father’s private suite at the L.B.J. Presidential Library, her voice breaking as she recounted the “agony of Vietnam” that engulfed Lyndon Baines Johnson and the pain she feels to this day of witnessing his presidency judged through the prism of a failed war.

“Nobody wanted that war less than Lyndon Johnson,” said Ms. Johnson, 66, who is the president’s younger daughter. “No matter how hard he tried, he didn’t seem to be able to get out of that quagmire. Not only did he not get out of it in his lifetime, but his legacy indeed has that weight of the world on it.”

But now, 50 years later — with a coming rush of anniversaries of the legislative milestones of the Johnson presidency — Ms. Johnson and the diminishing circle of family and friends from those White House years have commenced one last campaign. They are seeking a reconsideration of Johnson’s legacy as president, arguing that it has been overwhelmed by the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and has failed to take into account the blizzard of domestic legislation enacted in the five years Johnson was in the White House.

On Monday, the L.B.J. Presidential Library and Museum will announce details of a Civil Rights Summit to be held here in April to commemorate Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act, attended by three of the four living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — and perhaps President Obama.

A ceremony is being planned inside the massive slab of the L.B.J. Library, to be followed by celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Johnson initiatives: Medicare, the Clean Air Act, public broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Head Start, the requirements for seatbelts, and warnings on cigarette packs. The events are intended to offer a counterweight to the way Johnson has been portrayed over the past decades.

“Our goal has NEVER been to create a false image of L.B.J.,” wrote Tom Johnson, a former president of CNN and a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times, who served for 40 years as chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, in an email to other foundation members. “What we are striving to do is to achieve recognition of the truth about L.B.J.’s years, most of which (except Vietnam and some recognition of civil rights) has been forgotten or swamped by Vietnam.”

Ms. Johnson responded to that with a one-word note: “AMEN!”

Larry Temple, a former Johnson aide who is the chairman of the L.B.J. Foundation, said the coming months might offer a last opportunity for the surviving members of the Johnson administration to make his case. “The next five years will be the 50th anniversary of everything he did,” he said.

The campaign comes at the end of a long period in which aides and advisers to Johnson, who died at age 64 in 1973, have largely stayed in the shadows, quieted by the memory of a war that still prompts anguished debate and condemnation. They have patiently watched the adulation of John F. Kennedy — whom Johnson succeeded and with whom he had a decidedly competitive relationship — that accompanied the commemoration of another 50th anniversary: the Kennedy assassination.

“I’ll tell you: I don’t think people understand that this country today reflects more of Lyndon Johnson’s years in the White House than the years of any other president,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Johnson’s top domestic aide in the White House.

This advocacy of a broader view of Johnson is not confined to his immediate circle. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who wrote a biography of Johnson. “When he left office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam. The country fundamentally changes as a result of L.B.J.’s presidency.”

Keep reading.

Look, for a long time Johnson was my favorite president. I looked especially to his domestic policies as the model for the new civil rights-era Democrat Party state. That is, of course, when I was naive and impressionistic. It turns out that the Johnson administration's War on Poverty has been a complete failure, and as much as his civil rights legacy survives it's been perverted by a Democrat-progressive victimization bureaucracy that has no intention of taking advantage of the promise of equality that is Johnson's true gift. It's a travesty of our perverted politics that this is so, but what can you say? At least Democrats back then fought the good fight against the scourge of global Communism. Today the Democrats embrace Communism while squandering American lives in a mostly faux struggle against the world's forces of totalitarian Islam.

It remains to be seen what's going to be left of this country, much less the Great Society. I would think that Johnson's heirs might be more worried about that rather than whether or not a just but bungled war has overshadowed LBJ's proper place in the annals.

At the Video: Part I of Frontline's, "Vietnam: A Television History," which first aired on PBS in 1983.

Antiwar Left Seeks to Recreate Protests of 1968

Some in the antiwar movement are hoping for a '08 reprise to the summer of '68 protests at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago that year. The Politico's got the report:

A coalition of anti-war groups is vowing to protest this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Denver under the rubric “Re-create ’68,” prompting criticism from some on the left who are loath to revisit what they see as a disastrous time for both the anti-war movement and the Democratic Party.

Capping a year that saw the assassinations of both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention erupted in violence as thousands of Chicago police officers, supported by U.S. Army troops and National Guardsmen, battled in the streets with activists protesting the Vietnam War. Inside the convention hall, the Democrats chose as their presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose the general election to Richard Nixon.

Re-create ’68?

“What’s the political calculation that speaks to them of the wisdom of civil disobedience — which means a massive media spectacle — on the brink of a Democratic campaign that could plausibly put a Democrat in the White House who’s committed to withdrawal from Iraq?” asked Todd Gitlin, an anti-Vietnam War activist who was at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. “If the objective is to put a belligerent Republican in the White House, they should keep up the good work.”

The “belligerent Republican” of whom Gitlin speaks will almost certainly be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent the summer of 1968 as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Organizers acknowledge that their “Re-create ’68” moniker has been met with skepticism as they’ve toured the country to gin up support among fellow activists. “A lot of people of course associate it with the DNC of ’68 and react negatively,” said organizer Mark Cohen. But the point, Cohen said, isn’t to reproduce the violence associated with the 1968 convention, just the strong sense of countercultural protest that coalesced against the Vietnam War. “We don’t call ourselves ‘Re-create Chicago ’68,’” Cohen offered.

If antiwar radicals want to showcase their extremist views to a national television audience, by all means, let it rip.

The more examples of hard-left extremist antics that are distributed, the better it will be to paint the Democrats as in the tank with the most nihilist forces on the fringe of left-wing popular culture.

Glenn Greenwald is Wrong About Iraq Public Opinion

Glenn Greenwald's mounted a hack and smear attack against David Kuhn and his piece today at the Politico, "Support for War Effort Highest Since 2006."

Here's Greenwald:

The Politico today published one of the most blatantly one-sided, journalistically flawed "news" articles on the Iraq War in quite some time and promoted it as its featured story, filled with dramatic proclamations certain to attract (by design) significant attention. The central theme is one which the political establishment is most desperate to believe -- that Americans are now supporting the Iraq War again and this will drastically re-shape the presidential race in favor of the pro-war McCain....

It repeats this pro-GOP assertion over and over. "The repercussions will be most acutely felt in the presidential contest." And: "Democrats' resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House." And: "The uptick in public support is a promising sign for Republican candidates who have been bludgeoned over the Bush administration's war policies. But no candidate stands to gain more than McCain."

You'll want to read the whole thing.

As I noted in my last post, I've been doing a lot of recent writing on public opinion trends, and the record shows that the Politico piece is not so outlandish as Greenwald alleges.

What's the beef here?

Greenwald essentially has a problem with the article's wording, where Kuhn suggests that "American public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached a high point unseen since the summer of 2006." That may be a poor choice of words (and the article's mistitled as well).

Why?

Kuhn's actually stressing a different issue, that a majority of Americans now believes that the U.S. will succeed in Iraq. The findings are from a late-February Pew survey, which I discussed in an earlier post.

So it's not so much that Americans "support" the war as it's that they see that we're making progress. When Kuhn's article is framed correctly as such, the analysis is uncontroversial. Kuhn notes, for example:

Democrats’ resolute support for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces may soon position them at odds with independent voters, in particular, a constituency they need to retake the White House.

Half of self-identified independents polled now believe the United States should “keep troops in Iraq until the situation has stabilized,” according to polling data assembled by Pew at Politico’s request.

These claims are in line with other recent surveys (which show very little support for an immediate withdrawal), so in that sense the perception of progress in Iraq can indeed hold implications for this fall's election, which is a major argument in the piece.

Now, you can see more to Greenwald's outrage in his comments about Michael O'Hanlon:

The whole article cites only one on-the-record source: the media's favorite all-purpose war cheerleader Michael O'Hanlon, who warns -- yet again -- that the public will soon come to see McCain's pro-war views as the "correct narrative."

Liberal bloggers have sought to discredit O'Hanlon for alleged apostasies (he's with Brookings, which is supposedly a left-of-center think tank, and he's recently been trumpeting U.S. military success in Iraq with his periodic progress reports).

But, while Greenwald is certainly entitled to criticize the Kuhn article for lack of balance, he's not in the right to dismiss the data presented there.

Greenwald goes to a lot of trouble to cite polling statistics indicating that a majority of the public thinks the war was a mistake, or that the Pew survey's an "outlier" contradicted by more recent findings. For example, Greenwald notes that:

A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted after the Politico's poll found that Americans believe we are "not making significant progress" in Iraq, by a 51-43 margin.

All of this is true, but incomplete.

Polls certainly indicate that Americans think the war's a mistake (check Greenwald's link). That's understandable: Iraq's been expensive, in material and human terms, and it's been less than a year that we've been able to show substantial progress. Americans like results, and sentiment on Iraq has followed public opinion trends in earlier conflicts, such as Vietnam, whereby support for the war fell as the level of casualites increased.

But what Greenwald refuses to acknowledge is the dramatic improvement in public perceptions of the war, which is what Kuhn's really addressing.

If you look at Greenwald's own polling data, the number of respondents indicating that the U.S. "is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order in Iraq" has fallen 15 percent since December 2006, which was a month before the initiation of President Bush's new surge strategy.

Moreover, Greenwald makes it sound as if the public wants to head for the exits, for example, when he says:

Polls - all ignored by the Politico - have continuously shown that even when American perceive that the "surge" has decreased violence, they still are against the war as much as ever before and support withdrawal.

But again, that's not complete.

American's don't support withdrawal. Particularly, only 17 percent of those polled in a recent Gallup survey indicated they'd like to remove "all U.S. troops from Iraq as rapidly as possible, beginning now."

To put this differently, a large majority of Americans opposes an unconditional retreat from Iraq. This is significant, because both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been pandering to the hardline retreatists in the Democratic Party base, even though that's a fringe position.

Frankly, those who are calling for an immediate withdrawal - which apparently includes Greenwald himself - are the outliers.

Note more from Greenwald:

How could a war that is so deeply unpopular - and that remains so regardless of claims of "progress" - possibly benefit the candidate and party perceived as being responsible for that war?...

What is the point of writing a big feature article claiming that Americans are moving towards support for the Iraq War again and this is dramatically re-shaping the political landscape in McCain's favor while purposely ignoring the mountain of extremely recent empirical data completely negating that claim?

Actually the war's not as deeply unpopular as Greenwald indicates. In fact, while
Gallup recently showed a moderate majority saying the war was a mistake, the data found a huge partisan split on public perceptions:

Attitudes about the war are strongly related to one's political point of view, ranging from 91% opposition among liberal Democrats to 80% support among conservative Republicans. Thus, while the war will be a major issue during the fall presidential campaign, its impact is less clear, since war supporters (largely Republicans) will most likely support the GOP candidate and war opponents (largely Democrats) will probably back the Democrat.

Overall, the problem for Greenwald is he's unprincipled in his analysis.

True, the war's not wildly popular.

It's not true, however, that American perceptions have not improved. As security in Iraq has increased - and as casualites have declined - there's been dramatic improvement in the number of people indicating that the U.S. is making progress (Washington Post) and of those saying that the U.S. is now likely to prevail (Pew).

Thus, Kuhn's piece in the Politico is not so off target after all. Democrats indeed may be at odds with trends in public opinion. If Clinton and Obama continue to push for a strategic retreat - at precisely the same time that public opinion acknowledges dramatic successes - the political advantage will fall to GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain. The Dems will be vulnerable to merciless attacks as hopelessly out of touch with the facts on the ground and in public sentiment.

Finally, Greenwald jumped the gun in attacking Kuhn, falsely claiming that the author relied on no other data than the Pew survey. He's now posted a retraction, but further down Greenwall offers methodologically flawed conclusions surrounding the Democratic pickup of Dennis Hastert's congressional seat last week:

Less than a week ago, Democrat Bill Foster was elected to Congress in Denny Hastert's long-time, bright red district in Illinois. The centerpiece of his campaign was opposition to the Iraq war, and he defeated a pro-war candidate whose policies mirrored those of John McCain. Might that development have merited a mention by the Politico in this piece? Public opinion on the Iraq War is "re-shaping the political landscape" alright -- just in exactly the opposition direction as Kuhn claimed here.

Greenwald's essentially committed a variation of the "ecological fallacy" in statistical research, which is the error of making individual inferences derived from aggregate-level data.

Actually, in Greenwald's case, he's extrapolating from a single-seat special election to a national level problem, victory in the general election. While it's certainly the case that this year looks to be a Democratic year, it's incorrect to say that John McCain won't be competitive nationally on the basis of the election results in one congressional election.

In sum, Greenwald's wrong about Iraq and public opinion.

Public opinion indicates that the war remains unpopular. The data also support the notion that we're winning. These are facts that are hard for the nihilist leftists like Greenwald to recognize, much less accept.

Americans Dissatisfied with U.S. Global Position

I'm having a little debate with Gayle from Dragon Lady's Den on the hypothesized representativeness of Barack Obama's lack of patriotism.

Recall my earlier post, where we find more evidence of anti-Americanism in Obama's rhetoric, "Obama: No Pride in Saying "I Am an American" (the debate in the comment thread is here).

Well it turns out, that a huge majority of Americans, in a new Gallup poll, indicates that they are dissatisfied with America's position in the world.

Now, this is obviously not evidence of anti-Americanism, per se: For someone to say they're "dissatisfied" with America's global position is not the same as claiming that young people traveling abroad can't say they're proud to be an American (which is what Obama asserted).

So, to be clear, I'm not claiming this substantiates any larger claim about the generalizability of Obama's lack of pride in country.

Still, personally, such expressions of shame are shocking to me, as it can be argued that such sentiment goes beyond disapproval of a particular administration or set of public polcies to a loathing of the United States itself. If true, that's not a healthy trend for the democracy.

In any case, here's a summary of the Gallup findings:

Americans' view of the United States' position in the world has undergone a complete reversal over the course of the Bush administration. Since February 2001, Americans' dissatisfaction with the country's position in the world has more than doubled.

Public dissatisfaction with the United States' global position was 27% in February 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It rose to 50% during the pre-Iraq war period in 2003 when the United States was actively lobbying its allies and other countries at the United Nations to support military action against Iraq. It then quickly dipped to 29% at the very beginning of the war in Iraq in March 2003, but has risen steadily since.

Today's 68% dissatisfaction rating is the highest Gallup has recorded on this question, including during the Vietnam War era. At three different points in the 1960s, the public was consistently divided in its responses, with about 44% satisfied and 46% dissatisfied. (See table at the end of this report for exact survey dates and results.)

Note something further here, and this is where we can make a tentative tie between popular dissatisfaction with America to Obama's statement of shame in nation:

Gallup's findings are highly partisan, with almost 9 out of 10 Democrats indicating dissatisfaction with America:

Current attitudes about the United States' global position are highly partisan, with a majority of Republicans (60%) saying they are satisfied with the country's position in the world, and the vast majority of Democrats (85%) saying they are dissatisfied. The ratings of political independents tend to be closer to Democrats' ratings than to those of Republicans.

Although the question is implicitly an evaluation of the nation's leadership, Gallup did not find a similarly strong partisan breach at the end of President Bill Clinton's second term. In May 2000, 78% of Democrats were satisfied with the United States' position in the world, along with 57% of Republicans.

The majority of Democrats were satisfied with the U.S. global position in the first two measures of Bush's presidency -- 69% in February 2001 and 61% in February 2002. However, their satisfaction plunged to 30% by February 2003, rebounded to 50% during the start of the Iraq war, and, beginning in 2004, has not registered more than 26%.

The percentage of Democrats currently satisfied on this measure (13%) is similar to what it was two years ago (18%). At the same time, satisfaction among Republicans has dropped by 15 percentage points, from 75% to 60%.

To be really able to link these two sentiments - dissatisfaction with America and unpatriotic attitudes - we'd need survey data with question items measuring these two notions independently (note that polls do find majorities of Americans as patriotic, Democrats less so than Republicans).

It's just fascinating that much of Obama's shame in nation is driven by expressed disagreements with our current foreign policies and our alleged lack of standing in the world.

These are precisely the same views that Gallup taps into in a second set of questions (on the "diminished perceptions of U.S. global image," which declined after 2003 and the Iraq war).

Americans should not be ashamed of their country. Indeed, we have more reasons to be proud of our nation than in any time in history. We are more prosperous and more welcoming than ever. Women and minorities enjoy more opportunities in American society today than any other time in history (meanwhile, people are so absorbed by the long drawn out Democratic primary that they forget to reflect on how awesome is the fact that we are choosing between a woman or black man to be the next Democratic standard-bearer).

Sure, we are facing some challenging times, especially in the economy and the war (which actually is getting much better), but I don't think this is cause for a decline of love of country.

Barack Obama's getting a reputation as unpatriotic, an inclination which I hope does not rub off on his supporters.

Today's Political Divisions as Bad as Vietnam Era

I don't think is "just Trump," but this is interesting nevertheless.

At WaPo, "‘It’s just messed up’: Most think political divisions as bad as Vietnam era, new poll shows: The Post-U. Md. survey reveals a starkly pessimistic view of the U.S. political system under President Trump":

Most Americans hold starkly pessimistic view of politics under Trump, say divisions are as bad as in Vietnam era https://t.co/nXcNjmVBL2

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 28, 2017

Seven in 10 Americans say the nation’s political divisions are at least as big as during the Vietnam War, according to a new poll, which also finds nearly 6 in 10 saying Donald Trump’s presidency is making the U.S. political system more dysfunctional.

The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll — conducted nine months into Trump’s tumultuous presidency — reveals a starkly pessimistic view of U.S. politics, widespread distrust of the nation’s political leaders and their ability to compromise, and an erosion of pride in the way democracy works in America.

Trump’s arrival in the White House in January ushered in a period of big political fights — over issues including health care, taxes and immigration — and a sharp escalation in personal attacks on political opponents, over social media and elsewhere.

Seven in 10 Americans say the nation’s politics have reached a dangerous low point, and a majority of those believe the situation is a “new normal” rather than temporary, according to the poll.

The poll finds that 7 in 10 Americans view the Trump administration as dysfunctional. But dissatisfaction extends well beyond the executive branch: Even more Americans, 8 in 10, say Congress is dysfunctional, and there is limited trust in other institutions, including the media.

“It’s just messed up now,” said Patty Kasbeck, 37, a veterinary technician in Bartlesville, Okla., and a Democrat. “It’s not even a political system. It’s a reality show.”

In the poll, 14 percent of Americans say they view ethics and honesty of politicians as excellent or good, down from 25 percent in 1997 and 39 percent in 1987. And 12 percent say members of Congress base their policies on a set of core values, while 87 percent say they mainly “do whatever is need to win reelection.”

By and large, Americans are feeling frustrated not only with the country’s politics but their ability to talk about politics in a civil way.

“It seems the country is being divided on so many topics and on so many fronts at one time,” said Gene Gardner, a retired communications specialist in Blacksburg, Va., who said American democracy has become “a rock-throwing contest.”

“When people have an opinion, they don’t just say it to their spouse across the dinner table anymore,” said Gardner, 68, who is not registered with either political party. “They put it on Facebook. Everything gets amplified and more angry.”

Recent surveys have shown consumer confidence is up this year and stands at the highest levels in the past decade, so it does not appear that economic concerns are driving discontent with the nation’s political system.

Rather, Trump’s presidency appears to be a more critical factor in informing the way people feel about the state of American democracy.

While the poll finds similar levels of distrust in the federal government as before Trump took office, it also finds that pride in U.S. democracy is eroding. The share of Americans who are not proud of the way the country’s democracy is working has doubled since three years ago — from 18 percent to 36 percent in the new survey conducted among a nationwide sample of more than 1,600 adults by The Post and U-Md.’s Center for American Politics and Citizenship.

And nearly half of those who say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job performance say they are not proud of American democracy today. That’s about twice as high among as those who “somewhat disapprove” of the president’s performance.

Doubts about democracy are not limited, however, to strong Trump critics. The poll finds that 25 percent of his supporters are not proud of the way democracy is working. That’s a higher figure than for the general public since at least the 1990s, polling shows.

“I think that since Trump’s election, there’s a spotlight on Washington and how it really works: that politicians are out for themselves and beholden to special interests,” said Nola Sayne, a paralegal in Logansville, Ga., who supported Trump and says she tends to vote Republican.

Sayne, 54, partly blames the dysfunction on how the Washington establishment has reacted to Trump. “People just flip out at everything he says,” Sayne said.

Elizabeth Johnston, a worker benefits specialist in Paradise, Calif., said she’s “embarrassed for the country” and primarily blames Democrats for the nation’s current political dysfunction.

“They’re acting like the mean kids in junior high,” Johnston said. “They’re all helping to make sure that the president doesn’t succeed.”

Johnston, 58, a registered independent, said there are some things she doesn’t like about Trump, like his “childish tweets.” But she said the country needs to give him a chance. “I love it that he hears us,” she said. “I love it that he wants to cut taxes.”

Strong majorities in both parties say the political divisions today are at least as strong as during the Vietnam War, a period of protest and unrest that is widely viewed as a dark chapter in American political history.

Seven in 10 Americans overall hold that view, but it is particularly strong among those who experienced the Vietnam War era firsthand. Among those who were adults in the 1970s, more than three-quarters say political divisions today are at least as big.

“I’m old enough that I remember the Vietnam War,” said Ed Evans, 67, a lawyer in Sioux Falls, S.D., and a Democrat who was a college student in Missouri at the time. “With Vietnam, at least it was focused on one issue. Here, it’s all over the place. In some ways, this is deeply more troubling.”

Ellen Collins, a retired data architect in Dayton, Ohio, said she remembers hearing her brother, who was in the Army returning from Vietnam, say that he was spit upon in the airport during a layover in San Francisco in March 1968. Still, she is among those who say political divisions in the country are worse today.

“This country is a mess,” said Collins, 69. “There’s no civility. Friends are now enemies. These issues have made people angry.”

She blames Trump in large part, saying he has used divisions “to his benefit, to play on people’s fears.”

Collins cited Trump’s recent sparring with Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) over the president’s condolence call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.

“He has an inability to say, ‘My bad,’ and he just keeps going and going,” Collins said. “He’s childish, and he’s a bully.”

Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans say America’s politics have reached a dangerous low point, though more Democrats (81 percent) than Republicans (56 percent) hold that view.

More.

Turmoil in Middle East Upends Democrat Primaries

I think Dems are jockeying to see who's the most anti-American.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S.-Iran turmoil scrambles Democrats’ 2020 race, shifting focus to war and peace":

Actually it's not just "the economy, stupid." Voters always rank foreign policy low on their priorities. But it consistently rattles elections. @hookjan anchors our look at how Iran tensions scramble the primary. https://t.co/M1zScu6z6G

— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) January 8, 2020

WASHINGTON  —  President Trump’s order for the targeted killing of a top Iranian general and Iran’s quick retaliation have scrambled the 2020 campaign, thrusting issues of war and peace to the center of a contest that so far has been dominated by domestic issues.
Iran’s launch of more than a dozen ballistic missiles against a U.S. military base in Iraq on Tuesday night guarantees that the political fallout from the killing of Gen. Qassem Suleimani will not fade any time soon.

“What’s happening in Iraq and Iran today was predictable,” former Vice President Joe Biden said at an event in Philadelphia as news of the attack broke. “Not exactly what’s happening but the chaos that’s ensuing,” he said, faulting Trump for both his past action — abandoning an international nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 — and his more recent decision last week ordering Suleimani’s death by an armed drone in Baghdad.

“I just pray to God as he goes through what’s happening, as we speak, that he’s listening to his military commanders for the first time because so far that has not been the case.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, opening a rally in Brooklyn Tuesday night, said of the retaliatory attacks, “This is a reminder of why we need to deescalate tension in the Middle East. The American people do not want a war with Iran.”

In the days before Iran’s strikes, the rising international tensions had abruptly sharpened Democrats’ disagreements about the U.S. role in the world, personified by the sparring between two front-runners for their party’s nomination — Biden, who’s had a hand in decades of U.S. foreign policy, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an anti-interventionist critic of those policies. Warren has echoed Sanders as she seeks to revive her flagging campaign.

The president’s strike order against Suleimani crystallized what Americans love or hate about Trump: It was the kind of impulsive show of force that fans embrace as tough-guy swagger, but critics fear as his dangerously erratic, even unhinged, behavior. “This brings together a lot of the critiques around Trump,” said Derek Chollet, a former Obama administration Pentagon official who is now executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund. “The weakening of our alliances, the haphazard process, the impulsive decision making, the almost fanatical desire to undo anything Barack Obama did, regardless of whether it is working or not.”

Trump’s decision, which surprised even his own military advisors, came just weeks before Democrats’ nominating contest begins with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, highlighting the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the top candidates.

Biden immediately embraced the opportunity to emphasize the value of his foreign policy experience in a world roiled by Trump’s “America first” policies, touching on his years in the Senate, including as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and as President Obama’s trusted wing man. He did so in Iowa on Saturday, but Tuesday he gave a more formal speech in New York.

Against a backdrop designed to exude presidential leadership — royal-blue draperies and a row of American flags — Biden promised relief from Trump-era chaos. “I understand better than anyone that the system will not hold unless we find ways to work together,” he said. To Democratic critics who dismiss his faith in his ability to work with Republicans, Biden said, “That’s not a naive or outdated way of thinking. That’s the genius and timelessness of our democratic system.”

Sanders has seized on the crisis to remind voters that he, unlike Biden, voted against the Iraq war and has long warned of the risks of U.S. interventions abroad.

“I have consistently opposed this dangerous path to war with Iran,” Sanders said at a recent Iowa stop. “We need to firmly commit to ending the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, in an orderly manner, not through a tweet.”

That message energizes his antiwar base but may be less appealing to party voters more broadly. A November CNN poll found that 48% of Democratic voters thought Biden was best equipped to handle foreign policy; 14% said Sanders was.

Warren has similarly expressed anti-interventionist sentiment, but Sanders’ supporters initially complained she wasn’t pointed enough in condemning Trump. That underscored the challenges she faces as she tries to appeal to Sanders supporters on the left while also appealing to more moderate voters.

Warren “wants to show contrast and pass the commander-in-chief test at the same time,” said Heather Hurlburt, a former Clinton administration foreign policy official at New America, a think tank.

For Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and an Afghanistan war veteran, the Middle East tumult is a double-edged sword, spotlighting his status as the only top-tier candidate who has served in the military, but also his political inexperience.

Whether the issue will continue to grab candidates’ and voters’ attention will hinge on the unpredictable fallout in coming days and weeks. Trump’s response to the Iranian attacks will be fraught with political risks, especially to the extent he is seen as having provoked the hostilities. Typically in campaign seasons, most polls find that foreign policy is not a high priority for voters more preoccupied with economic issues, but when American lives are at risk, the stakes rise.

In most national elections since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, issues of war and peace have been powerful factors. In 2002, Republicans benefited from the post-9/11 political environment under President George W. Bush, whose approval rating was over 60%, and the president’s party gained congressional seats in a midterm election for only the second time since 1934.

In 2004, Democrats’ growing opposition to the Iraq war helped propel Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War veteran, to the presidential nomination. “I’m reporting for duty,” he said at the convention. But Republicans savagely misrepresented his military record, helping Bush to eke out a reelection victory.

Four years later, opposition to the war also helped vault first-term Sen. Barack Obama first to the party’s nomination over Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted in 2002 to authorize the war, and then to victory over the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a hawkish supporter of the war.

When Clinton ran again in 2016, her early support for the war again was attacked by her primary opponent, this time Sanders. During the general election campaign against her, Trump tapped into Americans’ rising weariness with what he called “endless wars” and promised to bring troops home and to reduce America’s military role in the world.

To date, Democrats’ 2020 campaign had focused mostly on domestic issues — healthcare, income inequality, gun control and climate change — and on Trump’s fitness for office.

McCain Prospects Put Iraq on Front of Policy Agenda

It looks like I'm a little ahead of the media spin cycle.

In last night's post, "Security in Iraq: Will Surge Gains Hold?," I wrote "The Iraq war is starting to seep back into election year political calculations."

Now this morning's Los Angeles Times has a story on the new political developments surrounding the war: "McCain Surge Puts Iraq War at Fore":

The growing likelihood that Sen. John McCain will win the Republican presidential nomination has sparked renewed debate between the Democratic front-runners over the Iraq war -- and over who possesses the strongest credentials to challenge a war hero for the duties of commander in chief.

The issue provoked one of the sharpest moments in Thursday's Democratic debate in Los Angeles, as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York argued that the party's eventual nominee would need sufficient "gravitas" to persuade American voters that he or she can be a strong leader while arguing for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

The jousting continued Friday when a top military advisor to Clinton's rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, ridiculed Clinton's implication that she would offer voters the better credentials.

The advisor, retired Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, said in a telephone interview that Obama has "real gravitas, not artificially created, focus-grouped, poll-directed, rehearsed gravitas."

He also said Obama "doesn't go on television and have crying fits; he isn't discovering his voice at the age of 60" -- references to Clinton's much-publicized show of emotion during the New Hampshire primary campaign and her speech after winning the contest in which she declared that she had "found my voice."

So, that's it?

The Democrats, when talking about national security credentials, are weighing which candidate's least likely to break down in tears at news of an assault on America's interests?

Not good...

Here's more from the article:

The battle over who best could press the Democratic case on foreign policy is one of the key ways that Obama and Clinton are trying to distinguish themselves as they campaign for convention delegates in Tuesday's voting in California and more than 20 other states.

Both Clinton and Obama have criticized McCain for his past comments that the United States likely would have to maintain a military presence in Iraq for many years. At Thursday's debate, both offered assurances that they would start troop withdrawals within the first months of their presidencies.

McCain, a vocal supporter of President Bush's so-called surge strategy in Iraq, has charged that the Democrats have been pushing a "false argument" in focusing so much attention on removing troops from Iraq.

Noting that the United States has maintained a lengthy military presence in South Korea, he said during a GOP presidential candidate debate Wednesday near Simi Valley that "we are going to be [in Iraq] for some period of time, but it's American casualties, not American presence" that should be the main concern.

Polls throughout the campaign have shown that Democratic-leaning voters see Clinton as better prepared than Obama to be commander in chief. The survey respondents, even if they disagree with her war vote, also rate her as best equipped to end the war.

But exit polls of voters in states that already have held primaries or caucuses have found that Obama, who was an Illinois state senator in 2002 when he delivered a speech opposing the war, has made up some of that ground. In New Hampshire, Democratic primary voters were split over who they believed was the "strongest leader."

On Iraq, surveys continue to show strong public opposition to the war -- setting up what many Democrats believe is a winning campaign issue.

But, again based on the polls, McCain, a decorated naval aviator who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, appears to pose a challenge for the Democrats: The senator from Arizona scores high marks with voters for candor and his decision to back the troop surge, even when it was unpopular.

In addition, the Democratic Party's got the entire MoveOn.org Iraq surrender establishment to hammer the party's nominee to commit to a precipitous pullout, and the likely resurgence of violence in country.

As I noted yesterday, representative hard-left opinion thinks al Qaeda'a tactic of deploying Down's syndrome suicide bombers is a "brillliant" military adaptation.

Is there any question that left forces want the U.S. to lose the war? They hate the forward projection of American power, and they despise the military, as events up in Berkeley attest.

I'll be happily reassured that this campaign's moving in the right direction after the GOP nomination is wrapped up, and the disgruntled conservative base comes to its senses, lining up behind the GOP standard-bearer.

Time is of the essence. Let's get this campaign rocking with some straight talk!

Democrats Plan McCain "100-Year" Attack Campaign

This entry updates my earlier post, "100 Years in Iraq? The Left Takes Aim at McCain."

That entry discussed a liberal veterans' group attack advertisement against John McCain's so-called unending deployment to Iraq.

It turns out the Democrats plan their own smear campaign against McCain's statement on being in Iraq for 100 years, which was not a concrete committment of the U.S. for a century, but a projection of a minimal presence in Iraq for some duration, along the lines of America's commitment to Germany and Japan following World War II.

This distinction apparently doesn't matter to Democratic attack planners, as the Politico reports:

John McCain is scheduled to deliver a major foreign policy speech Wednesday in Los Angeles, one with a heavy Iraq focus, but chances are Democrats won’t be listening. They’ve already distilled his views into an easy to remember formulation: 100 years of war.

It is a reference to an offhand remark made by McCain in January about the possible duration of the U.S. presence in Iraq, a comment that Democrats now portray as the equivalent of the McCain Doctrine.

Though it’s not exactly an accurate representation of McCain’s views, Democratic strategists view the “100 years” remark as the linchpin of an effort to turn McCain's national security credentials against him by framing the Vietnam War hero as a warmonger who envisions an American presence in Iraq without end.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama began citing McCain’s remark in Democratic debates not long after he made it and their campaigns have stepped up the focus in recent weeks.

On a recent conference call with reporters, Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s bulldog operative, mentioned four times in two minutes that John McCain “wants to be in Iraq for 100 years.”

“Instead of offering an exit strategy for Iraq, he’s offering us a 100 year occupation,” said Obama last week, in a speech marking the 5-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

It's hard to see how the Democrats can possibly make a winning issue out of this.

Just yesterday Spencer Ackerman, at the American Prospect, argued that the power of Barack Obama's foreign policy message is that it transcends "the politics of fear" that has gripped Democrats in recent years, for example, with John Kerry's inability to break with the establishment foreign policy line in his 2004 campaign.

But what is this Democratic "100 years of war" formulation other than the latest iteration of the paralizing politics of fear that's immobilized the party and made it totally out of touch with foreign policy realities?

The Democratic Party needs to read the talking points of their most committed antiwar bloggers and journalists, who at least have a better idea on how to market an otherwise retreatist foreign policy agenda.

As always, check Memorandum for additional analysis.

Antiwar Columnist Wants More "Dead Americans Soldiers" on TV

Frank Rich, at the New York Times, laments the declining press coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, quoting a CBS reporter who argued that the press isn't showing enough bodies of "dead American soldiers":

THE Iraq war’s defenders like to bash the press for pushing the bad news and ignoring the good. Maybe they’ll be happy to hear that the bad news doesn’t rate anymore. When a bomb killed at least 51 Iraqis at a Baghdad market on Tuesday, ending an extended run of relative calm, only one of the three network newscasts (NBC’s) even bothered to mention it.

The only problem is that no news from Iraq isn’t good news — it’s no news. The night of the Baghdad bombing the CBS war correspondent Lara Logan appeared as Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” to lament the vanishing television coverage and the even steeper falloff in viewer interest. “Tell me the last time you saw the body of a dead American soldier,” she said. After pointing out that more soldiers died in Afghanistan than Iraq last month, she asked, “Who’s paying attention to that?”

Her question was rhetorical, but there is an answer: Virtually no one. If you follow the nation’s op-ed pages and the presidential campaign, Iraq seems as contentious an issue as Vietnam was in 1968. But in the country itself, Cindy vs. Michelle, not Shiites vs. Sunnis, is the hotter battle. This isn’t the press’s fault, and it isn’t the public’s fault. It’s merely the way things are.

In America, the war has been a settled issue since early 2007. No matter what has happened in Iraq since then, no matter what anyone on any side of the Iraq debate has had to say about it, polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans judge the war a mistake and want out. For that majority, the war is over except for finalizing the withdrawal details. They’ve moved on without waiting for the results of Election Day 2008 or sampling the latest hectoring ad from moveon.org.

Perhaps if Americans had been asked for shared sacrifice at the war’s inception, including a draft, they would be in 1968-ish turmoil now. But they weren’t, and they aren’t. In 2008, the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold. The center does.

The good news for Democrats — and the big opportunity for Barack Obama — is that John McCain and the war’s last cheerleaders don’t recognize that immutable reality. They’re so barricaded in their own Vietnam bunker that they think the country is too. It’s their constant and often shrill refrain that if only those peacenik McGovern Democrats and the “liberal media” acknowledged that violence is down in Iraq — as indeed it is, substantially — voters will want to press on to “victory” and not “surrender.” And therefore go for Mr. McCain.

One neocon pundit, Charles Krauthammer, summed up this alternative-reality mind-set in a recent column piously commanding Mr. McCain to “make the election about Iraq” because “everything is changed,” and “we are winning on every front.” The war, he wrote, can be “the central winning plank of his campaign.”

Notice the obligatory reference to the evil "neocons."

Rich goes on further down to defend Barack Obama, where he claims "he has never called for a precipitous withdrawal."

Well, sorry, Frank Rich. Throughout 2007 Barack Obama was among the most implacable war opponents in the Senate, calling the war a "failure" while pandering relentlessly to the surrender hawks of the Democratic Party base. As far back as November 2006, the Illinois Senator announced that he'd implement a troop drawdown immediately.

So what would help Frank Rich and his antiwar allies? More dead bodies on television?

We know the left cheers the bombings, and certainly the decline in violence is their worst nightmare. The fact that Obama's starting his move back to the center on the Iraq issue, as Rich strains to point out, shows his recognition that the United States has the reponsibility for the long-term security of the Iraqi people.

Barack Obama seems to know deep down - or at least he's now suggesting - that Americans have an interest in finishing the job honorably in Iraq. It goes without saying that John McCain does.

For war opponents like Frank Rich, however, there's no exit from Iraq that's too quick. Out of the way, John Murtha!!

If we see an uptick in the horrendous killings in Iraq, Rich will be among the first to revert back to the old line that the surge has failed.

It's all part the long leftist line of creative arguments in furtherance of retreat, and it's not going to work.

See also, "McCain's Won the Iraq Argument."

The Lessons of Iraq

Wednesday marks the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq.

As readers here know, there's little consensus among pundits and political scientists on the nature of military and political success in the conflict, or on the war's long-term significance for the international system.

Jules Crittenden addresses these issues in a penetrating new essay at the Weekly Standard. Crittenden was embedded with A Company of the 4/64 Armor Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division during the march-up to Baghdad during the initial invasion. Here's his take on the big picture:

We're five years into the war in Iraq now. Nearly 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Thousands more Americans and Iraqis have seen their lives shattered in what became the premier killing zone of a global war. But death and combat no longer make the front pages; the drama has been bled out of it, and the war has taken a back seat in the presidential campaign. Rather than maturing in time of war, the American people seem eager to put it out of mind.

After 1989, we were encouraged to believe that war was history. This illusion made the shock of 9/11 all the worse. Even then some people wanted to believe it was an aberration, something we had brought on ourselves and could fix with kind words and deeds. The ease of the Taliban's ouster then created the false impression that we had managed to reinvent war in a more palatable form.

In fact, all we've managed to do as a nation over six-and-a-half years of war is confuse ourselves. This is not a simple war to understand, and it has been going on for decades. It has expressed itself with everything from low-grade terrorism to conventional war to nuclear threats, across multiple continents, and with many, seemingly unconnected, adversaries. Just the part of it we call the Iraq war has involved many different, and not always distinct, adversaries in numerous, overlapping conflicts. Faced with this kind of complexity, it isn't so surprising that vague messages of "hope" and "change" resonate with the American public, and politicians vie for the right to own those terms.

The shallowness of the debate suggests our nation is in danger of failing the test of our time. The abstract circumstances of cause and consequence in this war have fostered an avoidance of reality in some quarters--and at some of the highest levels of our leadership, often quite nakedly for purposes of political gain. Would-be leaders would rather play to emotions than make the hard calculations that adulthood forces on us.

Iraq has become the central battlefield in the 21st century's Islamic war, and may have been destined to be, with or without us. Lying geographically, ideologically, and culturally athwart the Middle East, rich in resources and boiling with rage long before we got there, it is the place where the war will either be settled or truly begun. It is a fitting role for the cradle of civilization to host a war in which the very progress of civilization is being challenged.

While there were terrible errors made in going to war in Iraq, the decision to go to war was not one of them.

Saddam Hussein convinced the world he had active weapons programs. The evidence now suggests he didn't, but how active his programs were, ultimately, is irrelevant. He had demonstrated his desire to dominate the region. Our European allies were eager to do business with him despite their own intelligence reports. Absent any containment, there was potential for more terrible and far-reaching wars. It was inevitable that Iraq would undergo a post-Saddam power struggle with massive ethnic conflict and with interference by Iran and Syria. The question was, and remains, how much influence we would wield in that event.

Five years on, the threat Saddam Hussein posed to regional stability--global stability, if you consider the resources he sought to control--has been neutralized....

Those Americans who have sneered at these fits and starts of democracy are experiencing their own domestic political frustrations. Democrats are demanding more political cohesion from Iraq and Pakistan than they've been able to manage themselves. As Congress presses for disengagement with no practicable plan, we learn--thanks to the candor of a departing foreign policy adviser--that the leading Democratic candidate has no plan whatsoever for his campaign's central plank of withdrawal from Iraq.

The errors committed in this war have contributed greatly to American frustrations. There was a failure to recognize the extent of the challenge ahead, even as ambitious plans were being laid starting in late 2001. The Bush administration could have had a blank check and recruits lined up around the block, but instead insisted on taking us into war with a post-Cold War military that is only belatedly being built up. The administration failed to seize control of Iraq with sufficient urgency and, when a complex insurgency was well underway, failed to move with sufficient skill to quell it until late in the day. The greater failure was to not adequately communicate the mission to Americans and to the world.

All wars go through evolutions, and it is unrealistic to expect no missteps. In this case, however, they are cited most frequently not as arguments to improve the war effort, but as excuses for abandonment. The Bush administration has made good at last with a counterinsurgency strategy that has hobbled Al Qaeda in Iraq and has the Shiite militias in a box. Iraqi military capabilities are improving, and the next president appears likely to inherit a somewhat pacified, reconciled Iraq; an enhanced American position of influence in the Middle East; opposing terrorist organizations that are sharply compromised; and a string of nascent democracies. At considerable cost of American blood and treasure, the United States is now in a position of marked if precarious influence in the most dangerous part of the world. The new president will have to consider how much of that he or she wants to throw away or build upon.

The antiwar camp and their candidates hold a childish hope that our problems will just go away if we withdraw. They argue that Iraq was an artificial cause, that our presence fuels violence and our departure will end it, that Iran can be a helpful partner in this process, and that al Qaeda can be fought from afar. They desire nothing but a return to the innocence we enjoyed before September 11, 2001, ignoring the fact that our enemies had been emboldened by decades of American demurring, disengagement, and half measures.

The American people have been allowed to believe that getting out of Vietnam was the best thing we did there, and that there was no penalty for cutting our losses. It should not be surprising that so many believe the same of Iraq. Looking past the immediate victims of that historic abandonment, the Soviet Union was emboldened by our show of weakness, invading Afghanistan and triggering a fateful string of events. Iran, seized by Islamic zealots, staged the 1979 hostage crisis to kick off three decades of support for terrorism and a bid for regional domination. In both cases, the belligerents knew we would do nothing about it. Figures like Osama bin Laden, among others, noted this void, and created the circumstances we are currently compelled to address.

The United States has commitments to Iraq and the larger region and a pressing interest in the defense of free and open societies. If we avoid our responsibilities we simply plant the seeds of further conflict. The pressing question of the 2008 presidential campaign is whether the part of this global war that began five years ago will be prosecuted to a satisfactory conclusion, or whether the effort to end the Iraq war will be marked by a different kind of waffling, whining noise than that one I heard at dawn five years ago, followed by more devastating explosions.

This is perhaps the best recent essay I've read on the entire cultural, miltary, and political significance of the war, and I've read a lot.

There's not much more I can add except to reinforce the notion that this is the conflict of our time, and that for all the cost and sacrifice, also on the line is America's reputation as the world's leading power.

War opponents will continue to berate and demonize the war. Today the Bush administration is vilified for its foreign policy failures in 2003 through 2006, but very few are willing to concede the huge foreign policy learning that the adminstration undertook to set a new course toward victory. We are not done, as General David Petraeus said this week, but the level of violence in Iraq over the last year has dropped so dramatically that the conflict has all but disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers.

The notion of Iraq as FUBAR among implacable antiwar forces - as well as mainstream journalists - will be difficult to dislodge.

The truth, of course, is that we're winning in Iraq, and while considerable debate over the strength of al Qaeda or other anti-democratic groups will continue, the fact remains that we can simply either recognize the phenomenal progress we've made - and commit American resources and will to seeing the job through - or we can succumb to a cost-sensitivity that will set back American foreign interests more disastrously than at any time since Vietnam - an earlier, regrettable retreat from war that left the world's correlation of forces dangerously advantageous to the evil designs of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism.

We cannot afford to do the same today.

Crittenden's right: Iraq is now the world's ground zero in the battle against 21st century Islamic war. There's no retreat from the struggle, no matter the political dynamics at home. Our enemies won't rest until they've achieved their goal of the complete and utter destruction of the United States, by any means necessary.

That's a lesson that can never be forgotten this campaign season.

Photo Credit: Jules Crittenden