Could we actually fight terrorists?
I'm getting more than a little tired of the perpetual charges from the right that liberals are "soft on terrorism."
Liberals (as distinct from leftists) were all in favor of actually fighting terrorism--that's why there was no meaningful opposition to the war in Afghanistan. (Remember, a grand total of one Democratic congressperson in either house voted against that war.) What we objected to was shifting focus away from Afghanistan to a much larger, much messier, much less obviously needful war in Iraq. We objected even more to lumping the two wars together--the Afghan war was obviously justified by 9/11, while the Iraq war was only connected by being in roughly the same part of the world.
We'll see tonight if Mr. Bush has any serious plans to deal with the situation that he's created. Remember, given the Army's recruitment problems, "staying the course" isn't a serious option short of some plan to provide the necessary soldiers (whether by increasing compensation, resuming the draft, or by some other means). Given this administration's tendency to simply ignore opposition, though, I'm not overly optimistic.
Liberals (as distinct from leftists) were all in favor of actually fighting terrorism--that's why there was no meaningful opposition to the war in Afghanistan. (Remember, a grand total of one Democratic congressperson in either house voted against that war.) What we objected to was shifting focus away from Afghanistan to a much larger, much messier, much less obviously needful war in Iraq. We objected even more to lumping the two wars together--the Afghan war was obviously justified by 9/11, while the Iraq war was only connected by being in roughly the same part of the world.
We'll see tonight if Mr. Bush has any serious plans to deal with the situation that he's created. Remember, given the Army's recruitment problems, "staying the course" isn't a serious option short of some plan to provide the necessary soldiers (whether by increasing compensation, resuming the draft, or by some other means). Given this administration's tendency to simply ignore opposition, though, I'm not overly optimistic.
posted by The Polite Liberal | 3:28 PM
3 Comments:
I really need to make two basic points:
If you read my original post and then your response, you'll see that you didn't actually respond to my argument at all. Instead, you led off with a series of arguments that I didn't, in fact, make. If you want to argue with Moore, I'd suggest finding the blog of someone who doesn't think he's a twit. (Moore's in the other wing of the Democratic party from me. Arguing with me as a proxy for Moore is like arguing with a libertarian Republican about Pat Robertson.)
As for your counter-factual, I'd have to reply with exactly the argument that conservatives used to make about a lot of Democratic initiatives: You can't do everything at once, particularly if you're not prepared to pay for it. We were already engaged in Afghanistan when the Iraq war began. Now, instead of pouring resources into Afghanistan, and ending up with one real success story, we run the risk of having two failures.
You're ignoring the opportunity cost of the war in Iraq. We have indeed acomplished some real good in eliminating Hussein et al. In doing so, though, we've added a vast new expense to the budget, and one that's orthogonal to protecting us from terror (that is, even after fighting the war in Iraq, you still need to spend the money to protect us domestically and avoid a new 9/11). The problem is compounded by the Republican insistence on not raising the needed money through taxation--at the moment, we're simply borrowing the entire additional expense.
Everything you say about Iraq is, of course, quite likely true. The problem is that it's also true right now of North Korea, which in addition poses a genuine threat to the United States (a much greater threat than Iraq, in fact). The fact that our troops are now fully committed to Iraq and Afghanistan will make it very difficult to respond to any new threats. That's genuinely dangerous--more so than continued containment of Iraq, in my opinion.
No worries about the confusion. The Democratic Party of the United States is a sufficiently broad coalition that hardly anyone--including many, many Democrats--can figure out just what we believe.
The Bush administration has done exactly this in each of the previous few years--it issues a dismal budget forcast, beats it, then crows about what a wonderful job of fiscal management it's doing.
333 billion is still the third-largest budget deficit in our history. The increase in receipts is entirely on corporate taxes--corporate profits have been up, and a short-term stimulus tax break put through after 9/11 expired. Personal tax receipts are still lower than expected.
Another worry is that there are two big structural issues that will arise in the next 10-20 years---the AMT needs to be reset to avoid wiping out the middle class, and Social Security will stop subsidizing everything else in about a decade. (SS is currently building up a large surplus to deal with the retirement of the huge post-war generation; that surplus is largely invested in T-bills, subsidizing the current deficit). Both of those changes will necessarily make our fiscal situation worse; this is _not_ the time to be running record deficits!
This is what's wrong with your assertion that we can afford this war--quite literally, we can't! We're fighting it on money we can't afford to borrow.
I'm not as optimistic as you are about Afghanistan--failure there would be a disaster, and it's very much an option. The warlords retain a great deal of power there, the Taliban continues to be a serious threat, and drug-trafficing threatens to destabilize everything. I'd be much happier if we had more resources to commit to Afghanistan.
No, of _course_ I wouldn't be quibbling over AMT if we had a straightforward and compelling casus belli. What has that to do with anything? That's so far from reality that it's irrelevant to the current discussion. In such a situation, the war wouldn't have caused us nearly the diplomatic damage that the current war did.
Even in that situation, I'd object to Mr. Bush's decision to finance the war entirely by deficit spending. Cutting taxes in wartime is fiscally insane, as we've seen from the last several deficits.
"Turning the public against us?" You don't suppose that the fact that we still haven't stabilized the capitol city (much less the country) two years in might have a bit more to do with that? Or the fact that the cost of the war has now reached levels that were denounced as absurd when predicted in 2002? Or that the main rationale given for the war--the threat of Iraqi WMDs--has turned out to have been entirely wrong? (Yes, I'll concede that it was a reasonable position to take in 2002, but that doesn't affect the problem it causes now.) I could keep going, of course.
What exactly is the problem with postponement? Since when is fighting every possible opponent simultaneously a sensible strategy?
Of course, I share your hope that all will end well--that Iraq will become a stable democracy. I'm discouraged, though, by the fact that the situation in Iraq doesn't appear to be improving as time passes.
I think you're judging the move by the standards of UK politics, though--there was nothing "brave" or "unpopular" about the decision to invade Iraq in the United States. At the time of the invasion, support here was around 60%. It was only later that support began to fade.
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