The War and the Election

Victor Davis Hanson on the war and its electoral implications in the presidential race.

Money clip:

Europe, not America, has proved most interested in Iraqi oil over the last decade. Europe, not America, is apt to tolerate massacres in the Balkans or Iraq. Indeed, the victory in Iraq emphasized that our greatest sin is in being cumbersome and often acting belatedly to stop autocratic killing — but this is a far different moral quandary than never acting at all. When you look at Iranian fascists being wined and dined in Paris, count up all the corpses from the August heat wave, and contemplate the explosive issue of school scarves, France, not the United States, is the real sick puppy.

Much is made about the security alerts here at home and the new bogeyman Attorney General Ashcroft. But apart from the (necessary) inconvenience at airports, it is hard for Americans to agree with the Democrats that we are living in a police state — or that after September 11 we have been at the mercy of al Qaeda while President Bush was purportedly asleep at the wheel...

...With all this in mind, it is hard to understand the Democrats' logic of disaster. True, we are in an election year — the stuff of predictable hysteria. Politics, of course, is an arena in which there are no laws — a gladiatorial free-for-all that (unless you are Howard Dean) you don't enter demanding the retiarius leave behind his net or the Thracian dull his scimitar. But still, both history and reason offer no support for the calculus of the candidates' current invective. The party of Harry Truman has somehow boxed itself into the corner of seeing bad news from the Iraqi theater as good news for them.

In contrast, encouraging developments — from the capture of Saddam Hussein to a return of services and gradual stability in Iraq — are embraced as antithetical to the Democrats' own election hopes. But do they grasp that very few presidential hopefuls — remember McClellan, McCarthy, and McGovern — have ever been elected during a period of turmoil through calls for a cessation of effort, which the American electorate always interprets as defeatist rather than rational? During wars the more successful candidates usually campaign from the right on matters of tactics, arguing perhaps — as an Eisenhower in 1952 or a 1968 Nixon — that the war is mismanaged and conducted haphazardly, rather than intrinsically immoral and futile.

To be fair, the Democrats do not have a large range of options. After September 11, the United States conducted two brilliant military campaigns when conventional antebellum wisdom predicted doom and quagmire. Al Qaeda has not duplicated 9/11. Saddam Hussein was apprehended far more quickly than the Balkan outlaws still on the lam. Democracy in the Middle East is becoming at least as revolutionary a movement as Islamic fundamentalism.

There is a long way to go, of course. But people who quibble about that do so only by forgetting how long it took to secure Democracy here in the US.

Posted by Mitch at January 26, 2004 05:00 AM