I did a Current in which I briefly wonder why it is Republican members of congress seem to have convinced themselves that the alleged success of the surge is a great campaign issue for them. All the data I can find indicates that the war continues to be extremely unpopular, with only a third or fewer of the public wanting some kind of open-ended commitment to seeing the job through.
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The Lemming Strategy
09 Apr 2008 03:43 pm
Comments (46)
What else do they have to run on?
Methinks the GOP is listening too much to the likes of Cokie Roberts.
In any event, "Teh Sure is Working" will be the centerpiece of McCain's campaign so since it's now his party the Republicans will hitch their wagons to his star. You won't see a man or woman running away from that meme. And they're betting the Versailles press corps, forever enthralled with McCain's POW story, will tip the scales their way -- not such a bad bet, I'd say.
Republicans realize that the function of issues in a political campaign is not to convince people that you agree with them on the issues, but to serve as markers in a narrative about what kind of person you are.
And they still think the public trusts them more on war, security, and foreign relations - not agrees with them on the issues, but trusts them to perform better in the job. Even after 2006, they think this.
Maybe it's the least worst strategy for them.
I agree with blah. What else is there? The economy? Immigration? It's unclear what a winning republican strategy could be.
why it is Republican members of congress seem to have convinced themselves that the alleged success of the surge is a great campaign issue for them.
Because most of them are (incumbents) in largely Republican districts where local opinion isn't very well reflected in national polling on any particular issue.
Jeffrey Davis writes: "Why? Because they know something's coming in October."
That's entirely possible. Dumbya and Cheney are just crazy, evil, and stupid enough to start a war with Iran in their Final Days. How that would play out in the election is hard to say, but they do love their "fun."
All the data I can find indicates that the war continues to be extremely unpopular, with only a third or fewer of the public wanting some kind of open-ended commitment to seeing the job through.
But, of course, a third or fewer of the public support the Democrats policy of "surrender immediately and remove all the troops posthaste". Republicans are making a play for the broad third of the public in the middle - those who are unhappy with the war but are willing to stay another year - and betting that in November they will still think we should stay another year because, between now and November, we will continue to make progress.
Maybe it's the least worst strategy for them.
This seems right - I think they (the GOP elite that is) wanted Romney for this very reason, he'd give them something else to build a campaign around. McCain leaves them with nothing but the war to run on. It's a strategy driven by necessity.
I always thought it was pretty likely it would take at least two, and maybe more, losing elections before the GOP fundamentally changed course.
And 2006 was just number one. Hence, I find this dynamic kinda unsurprising.
The Republican mindset has been, since the 90s, to ignore the polls and play to the base. This strategy follows that logic. Simply read the comments on conservative blogs (search using the words Iraq and failure). It is interesting. They seem pretty unanimous in their thinking that the Iraq war was a good thing, it has gone terrifically well, and we need to stop listening to defeatocrat socialists who are in bed with terrorists and simply stay the course. Iraq is already a democracy, we can't cut and run, yadda yadda yadda. It is what the base thinks, and their strategy was and is to play to the base.
All they have to do is put the thought in the public's mind that the surge has made things better, even a little better, and hold that until November. Even if they get crushed, they're making a bet that withdrawing troops will cause a catastrophe that they can blame on the Dems, sweeping themselves back into power in 2010/12 using the stabbed in the back theme.
it's the same old tactic: intimidate the democrats.
they think that they will be able to convince democrats that there is at least the possibility that something really good will happen as a result of the surge. and if there is at least that possibility, democrats will be much less vigorous about stating that the surge and the war, generally, have been abject failures.
if they simply keep repeating that the surge is a success, and if they lessen democratic enthusiasm for attacking the war, by even a slight amount, then the strategy will have been a success.
democrats need to ignore the bluster and proceed with a full frontal attack on bush's policies and the probable continuation of those policies by mccain.
if they do that, they will score a resounding electoral victory.
if they shy away from that aggressive stance, they will suffer.
Joe is exactly right. The argument that the Democrats are ignoring the succes sof the surge ties in quite well to the overall meta-narrative of liberals being weak, unpatriotic, anti-military, adverse to hard work, etc. When liberals respond by parsing the various groups and interests at play in Iraq it plays into the idea that liberals are to PC and multi-culti to understand the core "truth" that post 9/11 the only good arab is a dead arab, america needs to kick ass and take names, etc. McCain's hope is to tap into this sentiment, and re-frame the failure of the Bush administration not as an ill advised decision to go to war in the wrong country, but as a failure to go into Iraq in sufficient force to kick ass and scare the rest of the middle east straight. This approach can have a lot of appeal, because it lets pro-war people off the hook for theirs mistakes while still acknowledging the now obvious incompatance of the Bush administration. I.e. "I was right all along, we just needed a real tough American like McCain in charge"
Is Washington Monthly Al substituting for our regular Al?
So the way to get to McCain's 100 years is to keep "staying another year" 100 times? Surely the public will catch on eventually. At least the new method requires convincing them only half as many times as doing it 200 times with Friedman units.
If they reversed now, they'd take an even more savage beating. It's easier to be consistent than admit you were wrong for years. Political expedience.
The upside for the GOP is that when a Democratic President eventually takes on the failure that is Iraq, they can jump up and down and say "See! The Dems LOST THE WAR!" It's classic. A Dem has to clean up their failed policy, and the Repubs project their own failure onto them.
It worked the same with the Bill Clinton's tax hikes. We had a tax policy that eventually helped bring us a balanced budget and cleaned up an enormous amount of fiscal bleeding caused by overdone Reagan and Bush I policies, but the GOP faulted him for it and used it to gain seats in Congress. If we had followed their tax cut plan, we never would have seen a balanced budget. (Just look at the budget results under GW.)
Blaming the Dems for their own messes really is the Republican way.
Republicans are making a play for the broad third of the public in the middle - those who are unhappy with the war but are willing to stay another year...
Except not. Rasmussen: "A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 65% of Americans would like to see U.S. troops brought home from Iraq within a year." I guess you could try to contort yourself to claim that there's a subset in there that want to stay exactly 365 more days (damn but that "within" sure is a bitch, isn't it?), but even then the notion that this constituency wants troops to hang around for that period to see if things work out is a fallacy. Rasmussen's other choice was "want troops to remain in Iraq until the mission is complete," which of course attracted only the lizardbrain constituency (31%). The 65% is the constituency for withdrawal by a date certain, period. The only disagreement is on the timetable.
There is no "broad middle third" that wants to "wait and see." The "wait and see" constituency is on the right, and while I'm not sure what a "broad third" is, I'm pretty sure they're not it, since it only clocks in at 31%.
They need to continue to pound McCain on "100 years" comment. No need to deny that he said 100 years IF no U.S. casualties. That's what he said and that's fine, but that seriously opens up McCain to having to provide additional answers.
First, what is his timeline IF we do continue to have U.S. casualties? Or what is the metric? Saying "100 years" if everything is hunky dory is all well and good, but what if things aren't so good? Basically, he must define "failure".
Second, he must also define "success". He's staked his entire campaign on the need for success in Iraq, yet he continues to refuse to identify it. Is he cowardly or confused? He needs to be savaged until he answers. It is wrong, SOOOO wrong, to promote the continued deployments, deaths, and injuries of U.S. troops while simultaneously refusing to define the endpoint of their mission. (George W. has done that for 5 years, and it's disgusting.)
Finally, what in all of that region's history makes McCain think that 100 years with no U.S. casualties is a view even worth considering? If I could eat tacos and s*** gold I'd be rich, but it's not something I'd discuss seriously. Why will the region's people act differently today than they have for the past thousand years? He needs to answer for that. Should be a piece of cake, right? After all, he's the expert and the man with all the experience.
Straight Talk Express, my ass.
Lindsay Graham is still talking like Lindsay Graham because South Carolina will still vote like South Carolina. Case closed.
By the way, there is a sense in which the GOP just had bad luck with the timing. Al's "wait and see" strategy actually barely worked back in 2004, so the GOP just missed getting their first losing election then. Which means Al and Co. might actually have learned their lesson after 2006, and might have adopted a new approach by now.
Of course, one might think Bush winning in 2004 was worth delaying the adoption of a new approach, but I kinda doubt it. First, Bush's second term hasn't been particularly productive. Second, I think a good case can be made that the timing of all this will lead to a lower low-point in Congress for the GOP before they begin to turn things around.
Indeed, in an extreme case they might well be forced to start a "new" conservative party (I'm still rooting for the Whigs, although the Federalists is more likely). In any event, with the benefit of hindsight I suspect the GOP barely winning in 2004 with a strategy that has such poor long-term prospects will not seem like much of a victory.
Ugh, frankie d, and pickandroll are all pretty much right: it's about the perception of 'winning,' or at least avoiding the feeling of having lost. People hate to cut their losses, walk away, concede, and the GOP's essential purpose is to keep pounding at that little aggressive, reptilian spot in voters' brains that makes taking a public beating seem more appealing than the shame of admitting defeat. It's no different from carnival barkers' tactics to keep people forking over money for a chance to win a crappy stuffed toy, long after their rational brains have recognized that they could buy something better for far less.
DTM - Check this out, in regards to the GOP "barely winning" in 2004 with the "American-hating, terrorist loving liberals" line:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/info/graph.html
Kerry started out with the thing in the bag. The swift-boat ad destroyed him, but then he gained ground on Bush again in the debates, but it was too late. The GOP knows that's a tried-and-true strategy.
Why? Because they know something's coming in October.
Well, they know that The Man Named Petraeus will be back in September after Teh Pause After Teh Surge, coincidentally just after the conventions, in order to interject himself into the presidential campaign.
socctty,
Indeed, and I would agree that when viewed in isolation, Al's "wait and see" strategy actually failed in 2004 (although admittedly not nearly to the same degree as it did in 2006). It just turns out that between the Swiftboat episode and Kerry having voted for the Iraq War, he was not a particularly good candidate to press this advantage.
But of course people like Al are unlikely to see 2004 in this way. Which just further confirms that the GOP got a bit unlucky in 2004, meaning they missed an opportunity to start the process of correcting course much earlier.
Continuing the progress in the war in Iraq may be unpopular, but the opposite course -- abandoning Iraq, come what may -- is less popular. Key Democrats understand this as well. That's why we are still in Iraq now. Despite their promises during the campaign for the '06 midterms, Congressional Democrats have continued to fund operations in Iraq, and in fact, funded a significant increase in the number of troops last year with the surge.
There really isn't a whole lot of daylight between the two parties' positions on Iraq right now, despite Dem attempts to pander to their base. There has been too much progress in the last year to honestly claim that their is no hope of further progress in Iraq, and regardless of who is elected president in November, we will still be in Iraq years from now. At least McCain is being honest about this.
A wider strategy
Not that this makes this strategy any easier to understand, but going hawkish, going out of their way to seem as hawkish as possible, even when appearances could easily have been softened, just when hawkishness over this war became electoral poison, has been the policy of all stripes of Republican since the 2006 elections.
The 2006 elections delivered the message in unequivocal terms that they needed to lay off the hawkishness ref Iraq, and the ISG report that came out at the same time gave them all the cover they needed to both soften their own stance, and, more importantly, get Dem buy-in to a moderated position on the future conduct of the war that would spread the responsibility for this turkey to both parties before the 2008 election.
Instead of this, they chose a substantive policy that wasn't really any more aggressive on Iraq, but insisted anyway on calling it a Surge, and pretending it was some sort of escalation, just when the electorate had turned decisively towards de-escalation. Troop levels had been higher in the past without raising any debate or even attention. Not that the president needed Congressional approval to raise troop levels, and therefore, had any need to make any sort of issue out of raising troop levels, just when raising them had been proven to be bad PR. And the one outstanding qualitative difference in strategy with the Surge, co-opting the Sunni tribes and tribal militias, is a conciliatory, concessive measure, not a firm, strict, oppositional or escalatory measure. Look, if the administration really thought that the various substantive things they've done under the rubric of the Surge were needful to make progress in Iraq, they could still have done all of them, while simply not calling these things an escalation, a Surge, but instead mouthing reasonable bromides co-opting ISG and Dem de-escalatory ideas in order to take the popular tack and help share the burden as much as possible for the residual undeniable failure in Iraq with Dems.
These observations are all by way of unpacking Jeffrey Davis' conjecture above that they are planning an October Surprise. These people can read a poll as well as anyone, and they know perfectly well that hawkishness on this war is electoral poison. They have never shown any fastidiousness about abandoning positions they no longer find useful, and besides, contrary to the explanation that some above give, that they are simply too stubborn to abandon prior hawkishness despite the electoral price now, they have actually gotten more hawkish, more out-in-front-of-the-Dems isolatedly hawkish, precisely since the time when hawkishness over Iraq turned to poison in their chalice.
They could only be gambling it all on hawkishness if they know that, by Election Day, hawkishness will be judged, not by Iraq hawkishness, which has already been thoroughly discredited, but in the light of some new war that they will start before Election Day.
Easy. They've convinced their base that the war is holy and just and brilliant and crucial and can and must be won. They'll lose more and more moderate voters by continuing to support the war indefinitely, but that's nothing compared to the mutiny of the base they'd face if they backed away from it.
Congressional Democrats have continued to fund operations in Iraq, and in fact, funded a significant increase in the number of troops last year with the surge.
This is a lose-lose situation for Democrats. Stop funding the war and you're not "supporting the troops", or even worse, you get accused of "hating the troops" or of being "anti-American" and "laying in bed with the terrorists". Fund the war and you "talk the talk but don't walk the walk". I think Senator Webb's stance on continuing to fund it is pretty sound: Congress shouldn't lay the groundwork for the Executive branch to start cutting even more corners and putting more US lives at risk.
I suppose Congress could cut funding next time, hold the President hostage and force him to either bring all the troops back, or threaten to impeach him if he keeps them there without funding. That would be quite a gambit and wouldn't assure anything.
Fred,
As others have noted, public polling doesn't support your claims: you can call it "abandoment" if you like, but the bottomline is that most Americans want us out of Iraq within a year, and they have felt that way for several years now. And furthermore, whatever progress you think the "surge" has achieved hasn't changed their minds about that. Indeed, I think one of the things the GOP doesn't get is that the American people are fed up with the heads-we-stay-in/tails-we-stay-in nature of the GOP's argument (ie, whenever certain conditions don't improve that shows we need to stay in longer, and whenever certain conditions do improve that shows we need to stay in longer).
Incidentally, part of the reason the Congressional Democrats haven't forced this to happen despite that being what the American people want is that President Bush and his loyalists in Congress still have the power to dramatically restrict Congress's options, and the remaining options (like cutting off funding) are the most dangerous politically. Of course one can argue about whether or not the Congressional Democrats should take those political risks anyway, but the bottomline is that if President Bush is replaced with a President who supports withdrawal, then at that point their options will greatly expand.
So, I wouldn't count on the Congressional Democrats behaving in the same way once they have a new President. Indeed, that is going to be their case against McCain and the GOP loyalists in Congress running for reelection: that in order for the American people to get what they demanded in 2006 and are still demanding now, the American people will have to complete the task of removing the GOP from power.
...but that's nothing compared to the mutiny of the base they'd face if they backed away from it.
I think that's an interesting way to put it, sort of what I was getting at with the Lindsay Graham/SC snark. I suspect the GOP got this whole "carte blanche for war = patriotism" ball rolling and now it's just got too much momentum in their base to stop it. To not go with it as an incumbent, even if you don't believe it yourself anymore, is to neuter turnout in your base and assure Democratic gains in your district/state.
That mega-patriotism strategy might have quieted a bunch of independents and Democrats for a while, but they tired of it and saw through it eventually. Meanwhile, the GOP base is still convinced that this is a logical stance - that only terrorist-sympathizers think the war isn't made out of sugar and spice and everything nice, and that you get a free flag pin with your birth certificate these days.
I repeat: Josh Bolton said, "The Dems will lose over Iran" in 2006.
They didn't try it then. They will try it this year.
Not only does it give them a "war bounce", it also ties the hands of the incoming administration.
And it's like Clinton pardoning Marc Rich as his last act - thumbing their noses at the electorate as they walk out the door.
socctty,
The problem is that when you define the GOP base as people who believe all that, you get a minority party on the national level. Indeed, you basically don't get a national party at all, but rather a merely regional party. That is part of why I do in fact wonder if all this may lead to the need for American conservatives (more broadly defined) to start a "new" party for themselves, since the GOP in its current form seems to have been captured by this dogmatic group which is a minority among the general electorate, but just large enough to block internal GOP attempts to change course.
DTM - The days of new parties are over. You have to change parties from within, as the duopoly is too entrenched. As long as winner-take-all elections encourage voters to vote for the least-worst option, the duopoly will stay.
That said, it's hard to know what an American conservative is anymore. A Libertarian? Ron Paul, Barry Goldwater? I did engage in hyperbole to deride the GOP base, of course.
Unless there's some extremely motivating issue (like the war in Iraq), politicians generally dictate the opinions of the general voter, not the other way around. For example, on the economy, politicians can win votes by claiming that we need bigger government programs to create jobs, or they can go the other route and advocate removing government programs in order to save money. Over time, a general voter becomes attached to a politician and just parrots what they say.
So until there's some watershed moment to prompt such a change, I think the GOP will continue to be the party of aggressive defense policies and Christianists claiming the whole moral majority angle, and will marginalize the Goldwaters of America, who begrudgingly support the GOP in elections if only to keep government welfare programs down. Maybe that watershed moment is giant gains by the Dems in 2008.
As a side note, the meme has always been that liberals (A) do a poor job of encouraging Joe Sixpack to show up for them and (B) conservatives show up disproportionately at the polling place. I don't know if any of that is true, but I do know that of all the people I know personally that complain about things like the war, probably 4 out of 10 of them vote. But the GOP base that I derided, the people that fit that description - they ALWAYS vote, and they're very clear about why: things like stacking the SCOTUS to overturn Roe v. Wade.
It's not entirely attributable to this, but I'm sure if you're a consistent church-goer, and your pastor keeps banging this SCOTUS/abortion drum, you'll show up and vote for that if you agree. Liberals, in general - outside of the blogosphere - don't really have a social institution where they are encouraging one another to vote. So I do think the meme has validity in that sense, that the "moral majority" types have a reinforcing social institution to encourage them to vote, and the liberals have... dailykos?
socctty,
The two party system is certainly a logical consequence of our electoral system, but that doesn't mean the current two parties are necessarily going to be the same two parties we have in the future. So, I am not envisioning a "new" American conservative party becoming a third party. I am envisioning a "new" American conservative party replacing the current Republican Party as one of the two major parties. Indeed, that is part of why I am putting "new" in scare quotes, because if this happens, likely much of the GOP membership and infrastructure will migrate to this "new" conservative party. In that sense, this would be more of a rebranding exercise than anything else.
I also agree partisanship tends to trump ideology among many people, but in addition to certain events sometimes causing a widespread realignment, parties also face the more general problem of needing to recruit new members (e.g., if nothing else, eventually all the old members will pass away, and there is also a growing trend of people becoming independents). And the GOP is currently facing a huge recruitment crisis, and for the very reasons we have been discussing, it can be very hard to turn such a situation around once it gets out of hand.
Anyway, I am not actually predicting this will happen. I just think that the longer the GOP sticks with its current branding, the higher the possibility that American conservatives will eventually end up deciding to dump the brand and start a "new" party.
DTM - I think I can generally agree with that, although I hesitate to believe that the Christianist and hyper-militarisms sects will ever go away, so I think this "new" conservative party will still have those elements. Especially the former; they're too reliable of a constituency for a party to ignore or not pander to.
I could maybe foresee an isolationist conservative party. Ron Paul built up a lot of credibility with people in 2004, and that resulted in his pretty impressive fund-raising this year, which was ultimately fruitless. Maybe he can keep the thing going until 2012.
Outside the bookend echo chambers of the Left and Right, most people are simply unaffected by the kind of mutual demonization that's accepted as insight there. The absurdity of the "Swiftboaters" was fully matched by the absurdity of Bush's forged "National Guard records" and various other hysterical and factually unsupportable propaganda like "Bush lies sent us to war". Most thoughtful Americans knew Iraq had been at least a Big Problem if not a full-blown war for over a decade by that election, as it is now and will by any reasonable calculation continue to be for a long time into the future.
In fact, Kerry lost because he was utterly incoherent on the most important issue of the election, and perhaps of the generation. Democrats who just couldn't believe they'd lose in 2004 didn't, and to a large extent still don't accept that the majority of voters don't subscribe to some of the articles of faith about Iraq that aren't seriously questioned on the left.
It seems unlikely that the Dems will find a way to lose this time, especially if Obama gets the nomination. But there's lots of evidence that many party activists are as clueless about average Americans as they were in 1972. The public is not so much against the war as they are against continuing to lose the war. The Republicans have done a pretty complete job of screwing it up, and they'll most likely be punished for it. But lots of Dems make a serious mistake by thinking polls showing that the public is tired of the war as it's been fought mean that the public agrees with them in their analysis of the basic issues involved.
Republicans are making a play for the broad third of the public in the middle - those who are unhappy with the war but are willing to stay another year - and betting that in November they will still think we should stay another year
Al, you and your party evidently think you've invented a perpetual motion machine.
socctty,
Oh sure, the people you are talking about won't go away. But to be blunt, whatever form it takes in the future, the American conservative party can't let those people keep running the show and expect to remain viable. Rather, it has to do just enough for them to keep them in the party, but not much more.
Robert Powell,
I think it is true that if it were somehow possible for America to "win" the war in Iraq before withdrawing, that would be the first choice of many people. But I think it has also become clear to the American people that this is a war that America can't "win", since fundamentally it really is an Iraqi civil war. Indeed, I think most Americans intuitively understand that if this war was something America could "win", we would have won already. So, the basic proof that this isn't a winnable war for America is that we haven't won it.
DTM--
I hesitate to speculate on exactly what has "become clear to the American people" about Iraq, but I'm pretty sure the idea that we, and by extension the vast majority of the Iraqi people, must inevitably "lose" isn't a widely held view. To a significant extent we already "won" when Baghdad fell and we captured Saddam. We could have, and perhaps should have, pulled out in 2004.
On the evidence, those who were convinced we couldn't win in Korea by 1954 were surely the majority, but to the extent that South Korea is now a successful, prosperous US ally I'd say they were wrong. We've got a much easier path to "victory" in Iraq than we ever had in Korea, especially if winning is simply defined as a reasonably stable and democratic, reasonably pro-Western Iraq in any of several configurations, at peace with its neighbors and pumping oil.
This is not Mission Impossible unless those who are convinced that they can deduce the will of the Iraqi people by bogus polls, mental telepathy, and political stereotype prove correct. In my view most of Iraq would be more than happy to see a gradually-declining US presence in tandem with a gradually-increasing Iraqi role in maintaining order. This is likely to feature a lot more local autonomy in terms of security than the Bush people imagine, but they've been wrong about lots of other things too.
Robert Powell,
First, I agree we "won" the part of the war where the mission was to remove Saddam from power.
Second, the fact that America can't "win" this civil war in Iraq is independent from the problem that this civil war in Iraq will inevitably produce Iraqi "losers" as well (although arguably if the Shiites "win", then a majority of Iraqis will have "won").
Third, I fail to see the relevance of South Korea. Our primary military mission in South Korea since 1953 has been to help prevent a North Korean invasion, and we have indeed succeeded in that mission. That would be relevant if our primary mission in Iraq was, say, to help prevent an Iranian invasion--we would be very good at such a mission.
But unfortunately, that isn't our mission in Iraq. As you have defined it, our mission is apparently to transform Iraq into "a reasonably stable and democratic, reasonably pro-Western Iraq in any of several configurations, at peace with its neighbors and pumping oil." The problem is that isn't a military mission, and depends entirely on the Iraqis making the decisions and taking the actions necessary for that to happen.
In short, what you are defining as our mission in Iraq simply isn't something the American military can do--they are going to determine what path Iraq follows as a nation, not us. So, that is why America can't "win" by those terms--nor for that matter can we "lose" by those terms. Rather, the whole idea of America somehow winning or losing based on the path chosen by the Iraqis is fundamentally misconceived, and that is what I believe the American people long ago figured out for themselves.
Given the substantial momentum the Republican party has it'll take a series of brutal losses before people are actually willing to abandon that brand name.
But it could happen. People assume that the parties will always drift towards a 50/50 split. But I don't see that as necessary. The current Republican party is premised on ideals that are growing more an more anemic to the general American public. On the other hand, the appeal of those ideals is simply growing stronger in certain geographies of the country. This means that surviving Republican congressman are not likely to move the party in a different direction. What would be nice would be the complete dissolution of the Republican party and a split of the Democratic party.
I think that if there were no longer a party catering to and stoking the fires of militarism and christianists you could see a substantial reduction in their support among the public -> say 30% falling to 15%. This is one way the party could shift substantially to the left.
I would regard that as a truly happy development, even though I suspect I might fall on the right side of the spectrum at that point.
This is one way the party could shift substantially to the left.
By party I meant country.
DTM-
Work with me here. Our "mission" in Korea was basically identical to our mission in Iraq--assisting in the birth of a credible and legitimate state in place of a totalitarian dungeon that existed before.
Robert {Powell,
But that is simply incorrect. Our mission was simply to protect South Korea from North Korea. We were not trying to shape the specific path South Korea would take in the future.
Indeed, I don't know how much you know about the history of South Korea, but between 1953 and 1960, it was ruled by an autocrat, Syngman Rhee. He was overthrown by a student revolt (the "April Revolution"), and briefly South Korea has a parliamentary government (the "Second Republic"). That was overthrown by a military coup in 1961, and for a long period South Korea was governed by a General, Park Chung-Hee. Although Park did stand for election periodically, he also rewrote the Constitution to eliminate term limits, and periodically declared states of emergency and jailed dissidents. Park was assassinated in 1979, and another military coup took place. Protests against autocratic rule led to civilian killings, and after rising protests, South Korea finally had its first truly democratic elections in 1987, 34 years after the armistice in 1953. The first civilian President since the short-lived Second Republic was elected in 1992, and the first peaceful transfer of power between parties happened in 1997.
And what was America doing all those years since 1953? Guarding the DMZ. Because that was our mission in South Korea, not trying to determine the political path of the nation.
I'm pretty familiar with Korea. I know that at the end of WWII it had been the subject of one empire or another for nearly a century, but before that had been a single nation since it was unified under Shilla in 668 AD. The division between North and South was an incidental effect of the end of WWII, and was supposed to be temporary. Official US policy was that it was an area of no important American interests, and would probably devolve into the Soviet sphere of influence. No one seemed to care much until Truman decided on the spur of the moment to resist the attempt by Stalin and Kim Il Sung to reunify the peninsula in 1950.
As I have noted above, we had a much more difficult path to "victory" in Korea than in Iraq. After achieving a stalemate with the North at the cost of about two million lives, including about 40,000 GI's, we supplied significant support and assistance for the gradual development of South Korea from a ruined backwater with a starving population and a military dictatorship to a thriving, democratic ally. I think it won't take as long or cost nearly as much to support Iraq's recovery.
Comments closed April 23, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Why? Because they know something's coming in October.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 9, 2008 4:07 PM