Sunday, October 26, 2003
Howard Dean isn't winning in New Hampshire because of his "anti-war" stance.
The Myth Of Antiwar Democrats (washingtonpost.com)
Wrong. When the Democracy Corps team asked whether voters in those three states wanted a Democratic nominee "who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning" or one "who supported military action against Saddam Hussein but was critical of Bush for failing to win international support for the war," voters in all three states chose the second alternative. Dean's position was preferred by only 35 percent of the likely voters in the New Hampshire Democratic primary -- fewer than supported it in Iowa or South Carolina -- while 58 percent chose the alternative...
There isn't really much that separates this position from mine, that of the soft, neo-con Republican, when you get right down to it. I don't support George W. Bush out of any loyalty to the Republican Party - I had none up until recently. I support the Republican Party because at the moment, of the two big parties, it comes the closest to representing my point of view and positions, while the Democrats have abandoned me. That's how the system works, you choose the candidates that best represent your views. Now if I ran the party, it might be different. I might have some ability to directly influence the course of things, but as it stands, and is likely to stand into the forseeable future, I don't.
What separates me from this particular, "soft," form of the anti-war position - the one that says, "I support the war, but not how we went about it," is that I don't blame George W. Bush for the lack of international support. I believe it's pretty clear that the failure is not the Bush Administration's, it is the failure of certain international institutions, as well as pandering foreign politicians and an international press-corps that's stuck in an outmoded rut.
One of America's many strengths, when measured against the rest of the world, is our ability to recognize and adapt to new situations. "American Ingenuity" as paradigm...and that's exactly what George W. Bush has done ni the post-9/11 world. A President with isolationist tendencies was shaken awake and turned on a dime to react and listen to different voices who had been doing a good job on reading the signals blowing in the winds of the world.
This new spirit is best exemplified by the now famous leaked Rumsfeld memo which shows once and for all that the entrenched bureaucracy of years past is, at least in one part of the Administration, dead and buried. It's the best of American corporate culture brought into the government and taking a whip to the old ways. The Vietnam days of an American Behemoth unable to shift and adapt are gone, hopefully forever, but at least for as long as this administration inhabits the oval office.
The trouble is, most of the rest of the world can't keep up. They're lagging behind America's ability to recognize weakness and innovate. They're stuck with their own Vietnam-era-like inertia, combined with a culture chained down with Socialist tendencies so that they've allowed even their corporate ability to innovate atrophy while they wait for solutions to be handed to them on a silver platter, or "just happen."
You see, it's not just a matter of working with the rest of the world, and getting them to go along with us or, failing that, going along with them. It's a matter of examining the reasons we're often at odds these days. America blazes the trail and the rest of the world is having trouble keeping up. And that examination, that accounting if you will, shows a large credit in George Bush's account. Sadly, our own Democratic Party is a purely reactionary entity as well - reactionary against Bush policy without an identity of their own. Fanciful scenaries of international cooperation aren't a plan, it's wishful thinking. What if the "Plan A" of seeking more international support had failed? What was the "soft anti-war" Democratic's Plan B? I believe we've seen it, and it's exactly what GWB has done.
