Despite what some may see as my overwhelmingly “conservative” views on some subjects, I find myself in a funny position with conservatives on the War in Iraq.
Over the last century, up until the time of Ronald Regan, the Democrats were consistently the pro-war crowd. An interesting mix, they were domestically and socially liberal but very strong on national defense, especially through the Cold War.
The one exception before Regan was Teddy Roosevelt, but I don’t really count him as a Republican. He acted way more like a Democrat. He was a hard liberal who also happened to be a Republican. He picked a fight in Central America so he could build the Panama Canal.
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president during WWI, a fairly reasonless war when you come right down to it. To give Wilson credit, he wasn’t a war hawk necessarily, but as allies with Britain and France and popular opinion swaying against Germany, he knew it was only a matter of time.
FDR, a Democrat, was president during WWII. Truman, a Democrat, dropped not one but two atomic bombs and then got us involved in the Korean War.
Who got us out of the Korean War? Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and a general who knew a little about war.
The next major conflict the US was involved in was Vietnam. The presidents responsible for that debacle? Two Democrats for the price of one, Kennedy and Johnson (especially Johnson). We could also talk about how Kennedy’s presidency was the closes we ever got to real nuclear war with the Cuban Missle Crisis … but let’s stick with the Vietnam War.
While a noble cause during the Cold War, the US lost from the beginning. Vietnam had been yanked around by the French, then raped by the Japanese, then got corrupt leaders supported by the West, all until they were completely tired of Western aggression and imperialism. Communism sounded pretty good (it does at first … Yes We Can!) and the people were in love with Ho Chi Min. While we won every battle we fought in that conflict, the hearts of the Vietnamese people were lost from the start. We had supported and set up too many opressive and corrupt leaders.
So in ’68, Nixon was elected as president by advantage of a severely divided Democratic party over the Vietnam War. Nixon gets a bad rap because the liberal media hated him and he was a paranoid grump. But he was probably one of our better presidents this century … I’d probably put him ahead of all or most of the Democrats.
Who pulled us out of Vietnam? Nixon, a Republican. You know what else Nixon did? He met with Mao Tse Tung. That was one crazy Chinese communist dude, but Nixon was teh first American president to personally reach out to him and recognize the communist Chinese government … during the Cold War.
Jimmy Carter was the first Democratic president in 50 years NOT to get us into a war. He was such a weak president in EVERY area that Regan was a shoo-in.
With Regan, you had a Republican president strong on defense and domestically conservative. For his views on defense, Regan could have been another JFK. The Carter/Regan transition is where the Republicans picked up this war hawk mentality that had previously belonged to the Democrats.
Okay, so what’s the lesson here? Two things: first, the Democrats should love Nixon. He was a cheater who pulled the country out of an unpopular war and met with an infamous dictator. He should be their hero. And they should be careful criticizing modern Republican war hawks – there’s plenty of violent war blame to go around in their party, too.
For the Republicans, they shouldn’t demonize Obama for suggesting the very things Nixon did over 30-40 years ago in the midst of the Cold War.
I’m not saying Obama will be a great commander in chief. I think I have more military experience that he does, but to demonize him as a “cut and run” guy and willing to meet with evil dictators “without preconditions” is not necessarily anti-conservative or anti-Republican or always the wrong thing to do.
One of the things I respect most about Obama is he voted against the War in Iraq in the first place. At least he’s been consistent. I might have voted against it, too. Not because I believe that Bush was a liar or some insane guy after Hussein, but I felt at the time it wasn’t the wisest of things to do.
Before you give me Hannity’s talking points, I understand we don’t want to leave it in worse shape than before, but that could realistically take another decade depending on your criteria. We’ve done some good things in Iraq, a new government, trained their security forces, improved their infastructure. Maybe it is time we have faith in what we’ve done and let go.
Peace.
Obama didn’t vote against the Iraq war – he was not a US Senator until 2004. As Illinois state senator, he gave a speech to a heavily liberal/pacifist/anti-US audience in Chicago in 2003. That’s his claim to “taking a tough stand” on that issue.
The recent liberal/Democrat love of anti-war is their perceived victory of ending the Vietnam war. The young anti-establishment crowd of the 60′s went to the political party that most shared their other political views, the Democrats. The shift is very interesting, but not really all that surprising.
The problem with arguments about whether we should or should not have done something is that we don’t know what would have happened if we had not have gone into Iraq, obviously. I’m less worried about the arguments of whether or not we should have gone in as I am about how the Democrats have continually tried to undermine the effort – including Obama’s inaccurate assessment of the surge (he thought it would make things worse), Kennedy calling it a “quagmire,” and Reid and others saying we had already lost it. They’re all proven wrong now, but none of them will admit it. And now they’ll be in charge of it.