Not all reporters are as driven by ideology and ignorant of the conservative movement as is the New York Times. Others have not ignored the obvious conclusion that today, conservatives as a group are more pro-Israel than are liberals as a group. Josh Rogin reported back in July:
Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers cosponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.”
The lead sponsor of the resolution was Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, one of four congressmen to announce the formation of the 44-member Tea Party caucus at a press conference on July 21. The other three Tea Party Caucus leaders, Michele Bachmann, R-MN, Steve King, R-IA, and John Culberson, R-TX, are also sponsors of the resolution. In total, 21 Tea Party Caucus members have signed on, according to the latest list of caucus members put out by Bachmann’s office.
Rogin noted that isolationist Ron Paul did not sign on. But Ron Paul is a barometer of conservative foreign-policy opinion only in the imagination of New York Times reporters. As for the rest of conservatives, the overwhelming number are, for reasons ranging from religious faith to enlightened self-interest (i.e., Israel is a valued democratic ally), extraordinarily pro-Israel — a fact that the Times chooses not to share with its left-leaning readership.
And stop calling me Shirley.
(Someone had to say it and now its out of the way)
Damn, Turfman, you got there first.
Although I agree with Shirley on his final point:
Conservatism must be once again about being the philosophy of less government, more freedom and being the ideology of the future. And get to work putting socialism on trial in America, once and for all.
I wonder if Mr. Shirley is mistaken when he makes the argument that:
Conservatives know that, despite the Election Day results, this is still a right-of-center country. By an overwhelming majority, Americans favor less government, less services and less taxes over bigger government, more services and higher taxes. A recent Rasmussen poll indicated 59% of Americans agreed with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that government is the problem and not the solution.
If he is correct that America is still a right-of-center country then why did we just elect a far left of center president? Is it that Obama cloaked his true political philosophy from a sufficient number of voters, or is it that the aggregate level of education of the electorate insufficient to discern a socialistic political philosophy when it hears one. I, for one, am removing all timidity about invoking the term “socialistic” where the Obama administration engages in policies, however small, incremental or shaded, demonstrate such a philosophy. Unlike the use of the term “Neocon” as a pejorative by the left during the Bush administration, I intend to point to the policy as socialistic, not the policy maker as a socialist.
We are, unfortunately, on a collision course with the answer to that question. There is little to impede the implementation of the socialistic creed for the next two years. The question then becomes who will reintroduce the basic tenets of conservatism to America as the right and proper means by which a government under the United States Constitution should operate.
If Reagan is the measure of “the work of advancing democracy,” particularly in the Middle East, why not look at what Reagan did in Lebanon? After the attack on the Marine Barracks, the neocons, most prominently Charles Krauthammer, advocated increasing ground troops. Reagan did precisely the opposite. He “redeployment of the Marines” from Beirut to ships in the Mediterranean.
If Reagan was unwilling to risk more American lives in the Lebanon Civil War, is it reasonable to think he would have invaded and occupied Iraq? Or would Reagan have recognized the futility of trying to nation build in a Muslim country with no history of self-determination and three mutually antagonistic population groups?
Shirley is living in a pre 9-11-2001 world.
The work of advancing democracy is for charities, not for governments, and certainly not for the United States government as it is nowhere allowed in the Constitution. The neoconservative ideology and its apparatchiks such as Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith and most of all the idiot Bush, have already entangled the US in hugely expensive and useless foreign adventures where thousands of American GIs have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and trillions of dollars wasted. Neoconservatives have concocted a ludicrous “Freedom Agenda” that has achieved exactly zero of its positive goals, while achieving 100% of its downside. As a matter of geopolitical reality, Bush and the neocons have left the United States weaker than they found it, and President Obama will need the help of decent and patriotic conservatives to undo the damage.*
The neoconservative movement finds its roots among the City College of New York intellectuals who espoused Trotsky, as opposed to Stalin, in the heyday of the American left. Trotskyite ideology is typified by a belief in “permanent revolution,” and by a desire to export the “revolution” to the entire world. The movement suffered a serious crisis of identity in the 1960s and 70s when many of the goals of the respectable American left, such as desegregation, Medicare, Student Loans, etc., were achieved through liberal politics without the need for revolution. Irrelevant at home, neocons turned their attention to foreign policy and determined the United States as the force that should fight for global democratic revolution at any cost. These shameless scoundrels have been pushing foreign misadventures ever since, from Vietnam to Iraq, and with similar results for America and for American soldiers, all in the name of “permanent revolution,” which they cynically re-brand as “global democracy.”
Democracy is rule by the people, and conservatism is intended to limit rule over the people. But neoconservatives evidently feel that New York intellectuals in league with Texas oilmen know better, and they have pushed the US into every corner of the primitive Muslim world trying to force democracy, which by definition cannot be forced. In order to enforce their ideology, they have also espoused non-conservative Orwellian policies such as the “Patriot” act, Guantanamo and FISA.
Once a Trostskyite always a Trostskyite–Shirley is right, neoconservatives are dangerous permanent revolutionaries who are not conservative by any measure. Good thing this election made the neocons irrelevant.
*(Neocons will now rush to argue that the Maldives held elections as proof of their success, they will rush to point out that “only” 4200 Americans have been killed in Iraq, they will rush to spin every failure into a success.)
Inagua, there you go again. If you continue to try to force the invasion of Iraq into the false template of “nation building”, you will never understand. Actually, I am sure you know that was not the motive. But, I hope that you do not believe that once the Sadaam regime, which everyone at the time believed was a threat, was overthrown the prudent couse would have been to walk away and leave chaos in this strategically vital country.
Face the facts man, even if President-elect Obama and his acolytes will not. It has been a hard struggle, but unless Obama totally screws up at this point, we will leave Iraq a much better place than we found it. There is reason to hope that it will be a stabilizing influence in an area of extreme volatility and crucial importance (important that is until Obama turns the continental U.S. into a windmill farm).
In my opinion, the big stain on Reagan’s Presidency was putting those Marines in Lebanon without a clear mission and goal. An even bigger mistake was terminating the deployment without crushing the forces who attacked them. Much mischief flowed from that show of weakness.
“The neoconservative ideology and its apparatchiks such as Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith and most of all the idiot Bush, have already entangled the US in hugely expensive and useless foreign adventures where thousands of American GIs have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and trillions of dollars wasted. Neoconservatives have concocted a ludicrous “Freedom Agenda” that has achieved exactly zero of its positive goals, while achieving 100% of its downside.”
Newsflash: We’ve made significant progress towards establishing a stable, democratic, pro-American government in the heart of the Middle East. The notion that this constitutes a “waste” of US blood and treature betrays exactly the ideological zealotry and immunity to facts that you attach to “neo cons”.
“Craig Shirley appears to be part of that strand of conservatism that finds the work of advancing democracy to be an unworthy aim of American foreign policy ”
that’s not a “strand” that IS conservatism.
#8- the only stable democratic nation at the heart of the Middle East is Israel. So it was before the idiot Bush, and so it shall be after.
Iraq is neither stable nor democratic: one election does not a democracy make, and stable countries do not require 140,000 American troops to keep the peace.
The ability of neoconservatives to ignore and spin reality to suit their ideology is another symptom of the lingering Trostskyite tendencies.
This is the conservative vs libertarian argument. If Reagan was for leaving countries alone when they didn’t attack us, what were the Contras about ? Once we stopped Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait (He had a valid argument that Kuwait should be part of Iraq), we were committed to making him behave. He didn’t. What then ?
Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon was the first (after Iran) indication that we would recoil if attacked. Osama took that lesson to heart. “Neocon” is just a slam at the Jews who became Reagan Democrats. The old “dual loyalty” thing.
#12- false if not slanderous. The vast majority of American Jews, myself included, reject neoconservatism completely. 78% of Jewish Americans voted for Obama, a similar number are opposed to the fiasco in Iraq. The neoconservatives are NOT Reagan Democrats, they are Nixon Republicans. Ask Podhoretz, Kristol or Feith who their daddies supported in the 1960s and the answer is Nixon.
11- reagans efforts towards fighting communism cannot be equated with the neocons desires to make israel safer.
Okay, so the five stages of electoral loss are denial, grief, anger, debating the future direction of the party, and acceptance. My suggestion is: let’s skip the last two steps – especially the part about debating the future of the party.
WE ARE CONSERVATIVES! We don’t choose our ideas, they choose us. We can’t just get together and make up a bunch of blather that sounds good, and then go out and sell it. We can never compete with the other guys on that basis. We will never be the mommy party, uttering comforting and soothing words to the voters because we feel their pain. (“Let Barack kiss it and make it feel better. Hope and change, hope and change!”) We hold our ideas because they WORK, and they have been proven to work time after time.
We address the problem of crime by throwing criminals in jail and arming the citizenry because those things work. Social programs to eliminate the “root causes” of crime don’t work.
We believe in building the economy through law-abiding but free markets; not through government-imposed command and control regulation. Everywhere our approach is used, people prosper. Everywhere their approach is used, people suffer.
We believe in liberty – giving people the opportunity to advance themselves through entrepreneurship and hard work, and rewarding the people who advance. They believe in equality – spreading the wealth from those who produce it to those who “need” it, and vilifying people who advance. Their approach sounds good, but our approach works.
We recognize evil when we see it, and we know it won’t go away if we just ignore it. They think that if we all just sit down and talk things out everything will be fine, and we can get rid of that awful military-industrial complex and spend the money on health insurance.
We are conservatives. Our ideas will never SOUND as good as the other guys’ ideas. But our ideas are right. Our ideas are true. And our ideas WORK. So here is the future of our party: We have to explain the truth to people who don’t want to believe it and don’t want to listen. We have to teach economics and history to people who would rather pick leaders who spoon-feed them clichés about hope and change. We have to make arguments that don’t fit on bumper stickers. The other guys have a lot on their side. They have the media, the academy, the bureaucracy, the big Hollywood names, lots of billionaire donors, and an endless ability to attract voters who choose with their feelings instead of their brains. But we have one thing going for us. Our ideas WORK. And THAT is the future of our party.
#10: Are you prepared to revise that argument if troop deployments are reduced to German/South Korean levels and the Iraqi government continues to meet democratic benchmarks? Or will you continue to dismiss the war as a “waste” regardless of conditions on the ground? As a supporter of the war, I’m prepared to do the converse if the country regresses to dictatorship or civil war but your ideological contempt for “neo-cons” appears to preclude this intellectual honesty.
#14- It was Dwight Eisenhower who warned against the “military-industrial complex” dragging America into weird foreign misadventrures like the Iraq fiasco. Conservatives used to be opposed to sending our troops all over the place with no exit plan and no discernible strategic goal (Iraqi democracy is not an America problem.) Even the idiot Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and “no more nation building.” But the neoconservatives Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Abrams, Feith, etc., managed to drag the country into a trillion dollar fiasco in Iraq, which on top of everything else has hurt our legitimate efforts in Afghanistan, spiked the price of oil to the point of driving into recession, and led to the defeat of Republicans in the2006 and 2008 elections. Moreover, the Constitution begins with a preamble about “promoting the general welfare,” so a healthy population is clearly what the Founders imagined, but the Constitution is conspicuously silent about the federal government sending American troops and trillions of dollars to democratize the primitives of the Muslim world under some strange quantitative social studies theory developed at Harvard Government seminars.
Neoconservatism is the most pernicious ideology of the post-WW2 period. It must be fought and resisted by true conservatives and liberals together, before they drag us all into another endless war and bankrupt the country even further.
Reagan’s comments were made in the context of countering an aggressive and ideological foe that sought the destruction of our way of life. Of course, there is a parallel with Islamic fundamentalism, but we have to be careful how close of a line we draw.
The Soviet Union, in it’s aggression, pursued a traditional military strategy as well as funding and financing rebels and, where available, regimes who sided with them. Hence the need for us to fund and finance rebels and, where avilable, regimes who would counter them, as well as build up our defenses. In contrast, the war against radical Islam is one in which our enemies seek to destroy us through asymmetric warfare. Arguably our greatest mistake in Iraq was not recognizing this. When we realigned our mission to be able to meet and defeat an asymmetric foe (through the surge and increased tactical alliances of local political powers) we were able to push back and, perhaps, ultimately win the ground war in Iraq.
So the lesson to take away from Reagan’s speech, I think, isn’t that we should always and everywhere be advancing freedom, as much as we might wish to advance it. Rather, the message is that when a counterveiling global ideology rises up to strike at the values that we hold dear, we fight back. The tactical lesson when reviewing history is that we fight back appropriately, there’s no point in fighting today’s enemies with yesterday’s ideas. And, frankly, we’re still figuring out how to take the fight to the jihadists. That requires some patience on our part and careful thinking on the part of leaders. Worse, however, is Russia is working on opening a second front against us.
It’s not a world where I have a lot of confidence that a political neophyte can pull us through, but as an American I hope he succeeds.
Oldflyer,
I apologise if nation building is an objectionable term for what has became the dominant justification for the Iraq experiment after Chalabi failed to set up the government our war planners sought. Please tell me what term you prefer, and I will use it.
Not everyone believed prior to the war that Saddam posed a threat sufficient to justify violent overthrow. Some of us, surely a minority, thought that a punative raid into Afghanistan targeting al-Quaeda and the Taliban would, if successful, provide a sufficient object lesson to temper Saddam’s extraterritorial ambitions. At any rate there would have been plenty of time to deal with Saddam after we delivered justice to those who actually attacked us, which unfortunately we did not do. Instead, a bunch of advisors dusted off a plan that Netanyahu had rejected, and sold it to Bush as an appropiate response to 9/11, which it wasn’t.
None of this was even remotely Reaganesque, which was the point Peter Wehner was attempting to make.
I hope you are correct that Iraq “will be a stabilizing influence in an area of extreme volatility and crucial importance,” but I see scant evidence for optimism. The fact that the Iraq cannot even get an oil revenue sharing plan in place is very discouraging.
#16, far from my point, but fyi Eisenhower’s farewell speech, warning against the dangers of the “military industrial complex,” had nothing at all to do with getting dragged into foreign misadventures. (You can read it here:http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm). Eisenhower was warning against the erosion of traditional American values by excessive government power. He was concerned that a larger more powerful government, and the business interests it controlled through its spending, would endanger individual liberty, entrepreneurship, innovation and free intellectual inquiry. Among other things, he worried that research and invention would become captive to a beauracratic machine, which would use government money to impose an official, inflexible orthodoxy on scientific and intellectual inquiry. (Think global warming — perfect example.) Money quote from the speech:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”
Eppur Si — Hear, hear! The one thing I wouldn’t be so pessimistic about is how conservative principles “sound.” They only sound bad if we cede the framework of the debate to the left. We need not do that.
We are not the movement that is “against helping the poor,” we are the movement that is FOR giving the poor unfettered opportunity. Everything from lower taxes to preventing unions from holding workplaces in a hammerlock improves opportunity for the poor.
We don’t think it’s useless to try to prevent crime by addressing the common pathologies of the criminal class — we strongly advocate churches and community groups doing that work, because when THEY undertake it, as opposed to the government setting up programs, they change lives.
Some of the most important history we need to teach people is the history of the evil produced when the state extorts and overgoverns the people. One of the greatest lies ever told is the one that modern left-liberalism embodies an idea of more freedom and opportunity for people, in comparison with historical forms of government in which monarchs and oligarchs were arbitrary and absolute. The modern left seeks to impose on us precisely the sort of rule favored by rapacious ruling cabals throughout history. Assuming charge of the people’s income, wealth, and finances, for example, is far more like the prerogatives kings and emperors traditionally exercised, than is the American conservative ideal of a minimal state, and an empowered individual.
Left-liberalism is in the long human tradition of a coercive, intrusive state: the condition in which most people have always lived. It is the conservatism recognized in America today — called classical liberalism in Europe — that truly envisions freedom and opportunity for the individual, and is truly in the unique and opposite tradition of the American Founders. The understanding of history is so limited and distorted among Americans today, particularly younger Americans, that it will take some doing to expand and improve it.
JED says
“We are not the movement that is “against helping the poor,” we are the movement that is FOR giving the poor unfettered opportunity.”
They(the poor) need “working capital” to start small enterprises,to get an education,to get a better job etc. etc,,but they don’t qualify for that working capital within the free market. I’d pay higher taxes gladly if I knew that my contribution went to a solid program of business loans to the poor. Please don’t tell me that a program like this will be mismanaged/I understand the liklihood of that.
RCAR — it is completely inaccurate to say that the poor don’t have access to capital in a free market. The free market is the ONLY economic system in which the poor have access to capital. People still come to America, even now, and build capital by working and saving. Some actual native-born Americans even do that, shocking as it may seem.
Americans have set political standards for what’s acceptable in a poor person’s life that actively hold people back, if they buy into those standards. Plenty of people still come to America with, literally, nothing, and do things we might consider appalling: live eight to a small apartment, work three jobs apiece, never waste money on amenities like cable TV, movies, liquor, or any clothes they don’t absolutely need, make sure any children in the family are excelling in school, and save every penny they possibly can, to start a small business in parts of town many of us finicky Americans won’t even go into.
Asians have been doing this for decades: Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans. Africans are doing it. Latin Americans are doing it. Middle Easterners are doing it.
And quite a few of the white and black working poor who were born here do similar things too. Access to capital in the free market is a matter of willingness to work, and willingness to defer gratification.
You probably don’t know that by far the biggest source of capital for new small businesses in the US is home equity. In no other nation on earth is access to home ownership as wide open as it is here. Poor people own homes in the US, and not only own them, but are able to borrow against them to start and expand businesses. Read Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, on the uniqueness of those facts in comparison with the rest of the world.
A poor man here needs only an old used truck and a lawnmower to become an entrepreneur. And don’t YOU tell me he can’t become successful and self-sufficient by starting that way. Too many people have done it.
RCAR, business loans to the poor, eh? We just finished with a little left-lib experiment in giving home loans to the poor. How’d that work out?
I do favor business loans to the responsible — poor or rich, doesn’t matter. And there are programs to do just that — both private and public. In fact, programs like KIVA are exactly the kind of thing conservatives believe in and support.
I do not favor government loans to the irresponsible — say, $25 billion to the “American auto industry” (euphamism for UAW health and pension funds).
However, there is a problem with these kinds of loans if they are institutionalized and sponsered by the government on a massive scale. Consider student loans. When I went to law school in the early 1980′s, government guaranteed loans were available up to $5,000, and my tuition was — big coincidence — $5,000. Later the government jacked up the amount of available loans to $25,000 and tuition went up to (wait for it…) $25,000. Now The One proposes to go beyond forcing college students to mortgage their futures under a mountain of debt. He proposes to permit them to sell themselves into indentured servitude (pardon me, mandatory volunteerism — I forgot that The One speaks Orwellian rather than English) in order to raise the money for their college education. Would you care to take a guess at what is going to happen to college tuition costs? No need to guess, really. But DAMN, it sure sounds good.
JE Dyer,
Or as Abraham Lincoln put it, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”
Inagua — nice. Notably, today’s MSM and Democrats would consider Lincoln a rustic buffoon.
Lets see. In recent times we have had Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Kuwait, Kosovo, Somalia, Lebanon. Yep. Before those evil neocons took over the US never bothered with the internal affairs of other nations. And they pressured Clinton and Congress to make regime change in Iraq US policy. Thank God we’re rid of them.
the military industrial copmlex IS the leftist intrusive state. it intrudes both in our own economy and in the lives of people in other countries and eventually in our own: 9/11 , 4,000+ troops dying etc)
ther eis nothign conservative about empire. ALL SPENDING IS LIBERAL
#27, OK “all spending is liberal” = no roads, no schools, no navy, no space program, no food stamps, no medical research, no weather service, no border guards, no cops, no firemen, etc etc etc
Is this the neocon agenda?
Ian,
In what way, exactly, do you find invasion and occupation of Iraq similar to “Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Kuwait, Kosovo, Somalia, Lebanon?”
Please keep in mind that the original thesis of this thread was Peter Wehner’s contention that the Iraq policy of George Bush was consistent with Reagan’s world view.
Uh, no, “no sale”, #27 is describing paleoconservatism, AKA Pat Buchanan and the VDare crowd.
And Peter Wehner is too nice and polite to say that bluntly, as in “Craig Shirley appears to be part of that strand of conservatism that finds the work of advancing democracy to be an unworthy aim of American foreign policy and genocide to be a matter of moral indifference.”
Again, that isn’t conservatism, it is neoisolationism, circa 1952 and the Robert Taft campaign that lost the nomination to Eisenhower. Unfortunately, the American public is not as fiscally conservative as many would like to dream- and its devotion to freedom and national security is roughly a two year deal. Just as with the British people after WWII, when they threw out Churchill as thanks for him saving the country, America wants to burrow the collective head into the sands of history and pretend that if we can’t see them, the bad people in the world will go away. Or that the US version of government health care will somehow work differently than it does in Britain.
One only hopes we wake up again from this stupor before it is too late.
#29-I recall that Reagan had an interventionist foreign policy, particularly in places like Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Lebanon. The so-called Reagan doctrine was based upon actively rolling back communism. Bush I’s foreign policy in Kuwait and Panama has been identified as essentially a continuation of this doctrine. In light of that, if the claim is that Reagan would have opposed the Iraq war then some evidence needs to be forthcoming. If you have it I’d appreciate the edification.
As the examples I cite indicate, US intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations is not some aberration of the Bush II presidency.
I do not see the Iraq war as the product of some special neo-conservative influence. Putting aside the question of just who was a neoconservative in the Bush administration, the decision for war actually had bipartisan support, as well as the support of the electorate and even the media. Of course to disassociate the Iraq war from the Reagan and even Clinton legacy facilitates the contention that this is the result of some special ideological variant. Whether this is done to shift criticism or to build up a supposed ideological antagonist tends to vary.
Ian,
You offer Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Lebanon as examples of Reagan foreign policy interventions that are consistent with what Bush did in Iraq.
The first three are good examples of resisting communist agression, a central objective of Reagan foreign policy. In each case there was an existing non-Communist political/military entity in place that we backed. This was not the case in Iraq. The Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi, who we supported financially and relied upon for what we now know was faulty intelligence, had almost no domestic political support. There was no effective opposition for us to back in Iraq, and I think it likely that Reagan would have noticed this potential problem.
Lebanon is a much better example. It was not about resisting communist agression, something Reagan cared deeply about, it was about acting as peacekeepers in a civil war in the Middle East. And Reagan got out as soon as the situation turned ugly, never again to return to the region.
Also, there is the issue of scale. None of these interventions ever came close to the size of the committment to Iraq.
The fundamental problem with Iraq is the difficulity of presenting an opportunity for self-government to a country not ready for it. I think, but of course cannot prove, that Reagan would have recognized this, and stayed away. I also think, but cannot prove, that Reagan would have acted decisively against those that attacked us, al-Quaeda and the Taliban.
The interventions enumerated were not completely identical with Iraq in scale or purpose. But to me the question is not so much did Reagan commit the US to the exact same type of intervention, but rather would Reagan have gone to war with Iraq in the same perceived security environment as the nation faced in 2002-early 2003. In fairness maybe not, but I don’t see this result as inevitably flowing from the nature of Reagan’s foreign policy outlook. In 2002-2003 the war, while not supported universally, had substantial support across the political spectrum, building on a consensus that had developed through the Clinton administration. In 2002 it was generally accepted that getting rid of Saddam’s regime was in the national interest. I’ll leave the wisdom of the Iraq war to history, but I find it difficult to say that Reagan would have taken a different course, something you honestly acknowledge cannot be proven.
Re ian and Inagua — one point on Reagan is that he had the Soviet Union as his primary security problem, and the military capabilities of the time to constrain him. Given that he operated in a different context from Bush II, I’m not sure we can accurately judge what his ideological sentiments about regime-changing Iraq, under the conditions Bush II has had, would have been.
For one thing, Reagan could take no action in Asia that did not consider the probability of the USSR attempting to counter it. Vietnam was the model for this discouraging apprehension: the US trying to stabilize and enhance a Western-oriented, proto-democratic political environment in an Asian country, and the Soviet Union backing — supplying, training — the opponents of that effort.
Bush II did not have to worry about Russia doing this. That he should have worried earlier about Iran performing a similar role is an issue of planning, intelligence, and strategy; but the point that Reagan and Bush II operated in significantly different global security environments remains valid. Iran is not, and has never been, geopolitically the equal of the former Soviet Union.
Moreover, many have trouble remembering that Reagan entered office at the effective outset of the precision/IT explosion in warfare, and had nothing like the highly potent force we have today, which achieves so much with smaller numbers. Non-military today often have an outdated understanding of our current capabilities. We did not invade Iraq with the same force we used to kick Saddam out of Kuwait — and we didn’t have the force of 1991 when Reagan took office, ten years earlier.
For example, the Tomahawk missile wasn’t even deployed in the fleet when Reagan first took the oath. (Indeed, the Soviets tried repeatedly to negotiate it away in the 1980s, hoping to prevent us from deploying it.) In Desert Storm, we used the Tomahawk in a way not originally envisioned — and planning for each target literally took days. By the time of Iraqi Freedom, the Tomahawk could be employed on short notice, and it wasn’t even a premier capability any more.
In 1990, the Army needed half a million troops to push Saddam out of Kuwait. In 2003, General Franks and his tactical commanders were prepared to invade Iraq and regime-change Saddam with only a quarter that number of troops. Whether we agree with the strategy or not, in terms of its impact on the follow-on problem, the point is that it was technologically possible in 2003. Reagan never had that option; neither, in fact, did Bush I. Not only didn’t have it; it wasn’t even envisioned in 1981. The military problem that drove our thinking was Central Europe, Warsaw Pact v NATO, with a little Far East in the mix: everything else was just a lesser version of that standard.
In 1991, tactical air targeteers spoke of how many sorties (one aircraft, one mission) were required to service a particular target. By 2003, targeteers spoke of how many targets could be serviced per sortie. In 1991, the Air Force’s “global airpower” — bombers launching from the US to attack targets overseas — was still a strategic capability, ponderous and non-agile. Targets overseas were in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, not Iraq. By 2003, the agility and responsiveness of global airpower had progressed in a manner similar to employment of the Tomahawk missile. The orientation and decision cycle for targeting of all kinds had been shortened dramatically. Bush I’s opportunities to put a missile on specific enemy leadership — opportunities Reagan never had and didn’t even dream of — look laughably primitive compared to what was later offered to Bill Clinton and Bush II.
Reagan regime-changed Grenada in 1983, a feat well within his forces’ capabilities. Bush I regime-changed Panama in 1989, a substantially larger but then-feasible enterprise. Regime-changing Iraq in 1991 was considered, however, a bridge too far, not only because of political constraints (the Coalition didn’t want to), but because of the kind of fight it would have been.
Clinton got Serbia to eject Milosevic in 1998 with an air campaign: not a full-scale regime-change, but nevertheless a political rupture on the order of what Bush I did in Panama. The history is of technology rendering bigger regime-changes easier over time. Afghanistan in 2001, rather than Iraq in 2003, was the regime-change that stretched our planning and logistics to the limit, since we had to set up new bases for it, in unfamiliar territory, and use combat, air refueling, troop insertion methods we were not previously set up for. We didn’t have to do those things to begin the invasion of Iraq.
But the principle of regime-change had already been set (indeed, was set much earlier in the 20th century, with small adventures in the Caribbean). To even get to the stage of spreading democracy and nation-building, you have to mount the invasion and regime-change first; and it is those elements of policy that have become increasingly more feasible, and lower cost, with every decade.
I don’t think we know what Reagan would have done with the capabilities Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II have had. He didn’t have them — and he did have the Soviet Union to worry about, as a source of push-back.
Ian and JE,
You both make excellent points. And you both conclude that we cannot know what Reagan would have done. I entirely agree, which is why I criticized Peter Wehner’s post.