Samantha Power: The Democrats & National Security. Meant to write something on this a while ago, but it's been a long slog just to read it. It's nominally a book review of J Peter Scoblic: US vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security (which I've read and posted notes on -- the book page is here), and Matthew Yglesias: Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, which I haven't read, although it's piqued my attention. I have been looking at Yglesias's now-discontinued Atlantic blog lately: I've been impressed by the analysis, but perhaps even more so by his ability to put up 8-12 posts per day -- he's so prolific that most people could spend their entire browsing lives just following him around.

Let's start with a couple of Power quotes reviewing Yglesias's book:

Yglesias is persuasive in showing how mainstream Democrats, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, caricatured the antiwar left as a way of flaunting their national security bona fides. The intraparty squabble inhibited the creation of a pluralistic coalition united against the administration's unilateralism and militarism.

Such a "pluralistic coalition" would have had to unite Democrats who were opposed to war as America's default means of dealing with international predicaments and Democrats who had no problem with that concept but merely thought that invading Iraq was insane. In other words, two groups delineated by one spending more time and energy attacking the other than their nominal prowar opponents, in large part because the two groups were separated by more fundamental distance than the latter group had from the warmongers.

Actually, the Democrats split up into four camps: the antiwar people; those who opposed the Iraq war on pragmatic grounds but were at pains to oppose the antiwar people; those who couldn't resist the idea of a popular war (who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and now mostly oppose it); and Joe Lieberman. The middle groups, including those like Power who love a good humanitarian war, are intrinsically muddled, trying to defend an idealistic vision of war, and therefore of American military might, that is impossible to implement. The net result is that the antiwar people those Democrats ceaselessly attack are the ones who in the end are always proven right.

Yglesias also gives an important account of the different positions that led to Democratic acquiescence in the war in Iraq -- an acquiescence that neutered or delayed many Democrats' criticisms of the President. For some Democrats the Iraq war was the natural culmination of the thinking that earlier gave rise to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. [ . . . ]

We don't know how events in 2003 would have progressed without the Kosovo war, but it is hard to imagine that President Bush -- a man who repudiated five treaties in his first year in office and has consistently ridiculed the UN -- would have been deterred in any way by the absence of past precedent.

Moreover, while some prominent "liberal hawks" favored the Iraq war, plenty of those who had supported NATO action in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons opposed the war in Iraq on those or other grounds. Yglesias wrongly implies that support for one war inevitably entailed support for the other; he also unfortunately lends credence to the surprisingly prevalent fiction that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian purposes.

People forget that the US was already at war with Iraq before Bush decided to launch his invasion. Clinton and Bush had repeatedly bombed Iraq, in what basically amounted to a less intense version of the Kosovo operation: the aim in Iraq was more to intimidate Saddam than to force any specific action, although had Saddam invaded Kurdistan the Kosovo model could easily have been employed to persuade him to withdraw. Some people opposed invading Iraq precisely because they thought this "containment" war was working perfectly well. To call either operation "humanitarian" was pretty strange, possible only by the distance air forces enjoy from their killing.

Kosovo didn't make much of an antiwar splash -- Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn wrote books about it, but that was about it -- because it never engaged the American people is any practical way. Maybe it should have, but with no political leaders in either party questioning it, there wasn't anything practical to rally around.

Yglesias is most convincing when he discusses the other two factors behind the rush to war -- an international security hawkishness among Democrats, who accepted Kenneth Pollack's argument that Iraq was indeed a "gathering storm"; and domestic political opportunism rooted in the belief that Washington careers would be ruined by the failure to support a war that proved successful (the so-called "Sam Nunn effect," after the Georgia senator whose presidential hopes were widely seen to have been dashed by his opposition to the first Gulf War).

I think of the latter more as the Clinton-Gore effect, since their support of the 1990-91 Gulf War put them in good position to taunt the first Bush for failing to finish off Saddam. Their belligerence resulted in the "containment" operations that kept the Iraq war on a low simmer, ready for the next chef to crank up the fire. Without Clinton and Gore, their political success in 1992 and their preservation of the Iraq issue, Bush would have had a much harder time selling his invasion.

Power quotes Yglesias:

Conservative Republicans have not merely made some mistakes on Iraq, and some other mistakes on Iran, and some other mistakes on North Korea, plus some mistakes on Syria, while mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, by coincidence, damaging our relationships with formerly close allies. Rather, they are making one big mistake in seeking to transform the United States' role in the world . . . to that of an imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.

How many Democrats have you ever heard talking about that one big mistake? Something close to a majority of the Democratic Party rank and file would agree with that critique, but it is all but impossible to find a Democrat in Washington to say as much. Bridging that gap strikes me as the real challenge of the antiwar movement right now, because if we can make militarism and war a partisan issue, we can raise the real issue, and in the process separate the enablers from the warmongers.

Unfortunately, if Samantha Power has anything to say about it (and presumably her purge from the campaign will be temporary), Obama won't be the one to "end the mindset that got us into war in the first place" -- as he memorably put it. The last third of the piece is her political platform, with lots of hugs and kisses for the military:

Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable. He will not order young cadets and reservists to carry out cruel and inhuman acts against foreign detainees and then abandon them when it becomes politically inconvenient, allowing them to be court-martialed while those who authorized the practices take up high-paying jobs at corporate law firms or prestigious teaching posts at top-flight law schools.

There are lots of problems with this, starting with the fact that the military needs stress to survive and grow, and that means they need war. Officers need war to advance through the ranks. The Marines in Generation Kill need war for their self-identity. The military-industrial complex needs the cash flow, not just for weapons but also to keep the political machine well oiled. You can't take the pain out of the military without questioning why is exists in the first place, and that's the one thing no one with a stake in the racket can risk, because quite frankly there is no good reason for the US Dept. of Defense and its various arms (except maybe the Coast Guard, and some reserves for disaster duty) to exist.

She goes on and on. When she says, "Democrats must play up the sharp differences that exist between the two parties on national security," she's trying to sharpen differences that hardly exist. Coddling the troops doesn't make war less painful, nor does it make war less likely. If anything, the promise of painless war -- what Clinton's nearsightedness thought he had seen in Kosovo -- reduces the inhibitions of future leaders against starting such engagements.

While it's easy to pick on Democrats, I think the antiwar movement is at least partly at fault here as well -- at least those who have tried to justify opposing the war as a means of helping (showing support for) the troops. I don't have a big problem with veterans benefits and such -- other than that I think many non-veterans are at least as worthy of our support -- but we cut the ground out from under ourselves by offering comfort and support for the mechanics of war. Back in the 1960s there was a slogan that went, "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." The fact that people still come out for war, that they sign up and march off, may be a small part of the problem, but it is a real one. I still believe now as I did then: that everyone who does so has acted wrongly, and that it's not too much to expect otherwise.