The Shotgun Marriage
By Bill Paisley April 6, 2010Region: North America
Topic: Emerging Threats
The headlines over the past weekend talked about President Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan. “Rallying the troops!” cried Fox News. “…a rousing welcome…” said the Los Angeles Times. A recent Washington Post poll showed that Afghanistan is one of the administration’s strongest issues – the only one where he earned majority approval, so one should not be surprised to see more of these trips in the future.
Is this some new-found respect for the military and our foreign policy goals?
Hardly. The union of these two entities – a democratic administration and a cogent and effective foreign policy involving the US military - could be characterized as the classic “shotgun marriage”- a union of necessity rather than love - a constitutional mandated joining of the two, not something they wanted to do, but something they had to do.
Anyone doubting this dysfunctional Democrat/Military relationship has only to recall Bill Clinton’s famous letter to the head of the ROTC at the University of Arkansas where he explains why he reneged on a promise to enroll in the university and join the ROTC program and then characterized himself as “loathing the military”. Who can forget President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy idealism (naivety?) and how it did not meet up with the way global events really occurred? The Camp David Accords of 1978 notwithstanding, President Carter’s term as US Chief Executive oversaw not one but two of the worst foreign policy crisis in any administration – the fall of Iran to Islamic fundamentalists and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While there wasn’t much he could do concerning Iran, President Carter, a US Naval Academy graduate and nuclear-trained submarine officer, addressed the seriousness of the Soviet invasion by his steel-fisted boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. President Lyndon Johnson’s hyper manipulation of the North Vietnam bombing campaigns meant navy and air force pilots had to return time and time again to bomb meaningless targets and, after questionable bombing pauses, face a reloaded and resurgent North Vietnamese air defense system with Soviet Union-delivered SA-2 missiles. The complex interrelationship between civilian control of the military and letting the military take care of the business you charge it to take care of has never been a strong point of the Democrats.
Fast forward to more recent times. Wishing to not only levy a political defeat on President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a host of high-ranking Democrats did everything they could to denigrate and drag down the Bush administration and the soldiers themselves by trying mightily to lay a military defeat on him, as well. Senator Reid exclaimed ”This war is lost” when talking about Iraq even as the Surge was beginning to make inroads. Speaker Pelosi called the Iraq War a “failure” and “grotesque mistake” and dismissed the long-awaited report from the commanding general in Iraq with a flippant “It doesn’t matter” retort. The late John Murtha, promoted by the Democrats as a leader on military issues because of his Vietnam US Marine Corps service, advocated a withdrawal to Okinawa by claiming that is still close enough to Iraq for a “rapid response” should military action be needed. Okinawa is nearly 5,000 miles from Baghdad. Not really much of a “Rapid” response capability there. Not content to stop with this brilliant tactical move, Congressman Murtha went so far as to accuse a group of US Marines of cold blooded murder. Senator and erstwhile presidential candidate John Kerry accused American soldiers in Iraq of “terrorizing” women and children, which added to his “Winter Soldier” accusations in the early April of 1971 that he witnessed US troops who “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads…” President Obama even got into the act, implying in 2008 that all US troops were doing was “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” and opining that even a genocide involving the people of Iraq would not be enough to justify US troop engagement. These are hardly the thoughts and comments of solid supporters of national security missions and challenges.
This is not a new phenomenon. Democrats and foreign policy have never really gotten along over the last half century. Even today there is ample evidence of the difficulties the Party of Jefferson have in articulating a foreign policy that gains strength from our friends and allies and draws a line in the sand against our foes. Israel was minimized and embarrassed during a recent visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu, with the administration exacerbating a dispute over new housing construction in East Jerusalem. Britain no longer holds that “Special Relationship” with the US that has been present for decades, made even clearer by the Obama administration seeming to side with Argentina over the never-ending Falkland Island dispute. Turkey, such an important ally in the war against terror in helping establish and maintaining some sort of stability in the volatile southwest Asian region said it would oppose sanctions against the Persian nation’s nascent nuclear program – a clear failure of State Department diplomacy. Canada recently reiterated its intention to withdraw all combat troops in 2011, refusing to reconsider leaving them in place to share in President Obama’s Afghan war plan.
So when President Obama heads out on a secret 6-hours-on-the-ground trip to Afghanistan to address the troops with teleprompter-based speeches and photo ops, why should anyone see it for anything else other than what it is? A trip to the Credibility Bank to make a withdrawal. Poll numbers for the President remain in historically low regions for a first-year chief executive. Congressional numbers, with both houses led by Democrats for the past 4 years, are even worse with an 18% approve to 72% disapprove margin. Whatever statistical “bounce” President Obama might have received from the “historic” (a relative word – “historic” can also mean historically bad) Health Care Bill was either nonexistent or evaporated within days of passage and signing. Critics point to the lack of any serious work on stemming or reversing the job hemorrhage - 8.4 million lost since this recession began, many of those on President Obama’s watch. Independent voters, the block of the electorate who can be credited (or blamed) for much of President Obama’s success in the Nov 2008 election have been leaving in droves, resulting in governorships changing political hands in Virginia and New Jersey and the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat going to a Republican for the first time in over half a century.
So why go to Afghanistan? President Obama has his solid progressive left sewn up. They may not appreciate all his perceived failings – Health Care did not go far enough, drilling for oil off Virginia is heresy, Guantanamo Bay should have been closed down and locked up months ago, troops should already be home from Iraq and Afghanistan, “War Crime tribunals”, CIA tortures, Patriot Act, wiretaps, drone warfare – but there is no way they will abandon him. This sort of monolithic support from the President’s left means he can begin to nibble on what support he can steal from the right - hence the War President persona, or as Victor Davis Hanson characterizes it, Bush without the Stetson.
In other words, heading to Afghanistan was like a trip to the Credibility Bank. The problem is that account has been closed for years.
