21
Jan
2008
Democratic leaders: progressives in the mold of Dick Nixon
Note to regular patrons: you’re not hallucinating. This piece is an updated and greatly expanded version of the previous one.
Nancy Pelosi is at it again. On Friday, she reiterated her opposition to impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, saying that impeachment “would be very divisive in our country” and that despite increasing heat from constituents and fellow lawmakers, impeachment remains off the table.
Yeah, it would be divisive: on one side you’d have people who think the Constitution matters and on the other, those who don’t. What a tragedy that would be.
Pelosi also appears to think the issue is all about her, saying that “I go through airports, and people have [impeachment] buttons as if they knew I was coming.” And in an interview last year, she complained about activists protesting the Iraq occupation and calling for impeachment outside her San Francisco home, resentfully noting that “if they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.”
Curse those people for expressing their opinions in the same airports Pelosi uses. Damn that First Amendment. And while we’re at it, screw the poor, too; maybe we can’t arrest Bush and Cheney for wrecking the country, but we can still arrest anyone who sleeps on sidewalks reserved for the soles of the Speaker’s elegant shoes.
Having been homeless in the all too recent past, albeit under unusually gentle circumstances, and continuing to live under the threat of that condition (and under less gentle circumstances), I take Pelosi’s remarks perhaps more personally than others might. No doubt it is annoying to have your home besieged by protesters, but Pelosi’s dismissive attitude toward the First Amendment and the casual disregard for the poor is not what one wants to hear from a leader of the party that at one time staked its existence on support of civil rights and the institutionalization of a social conscience.
In short, her attitude is not what one could call progressive. I’ve been on both sides of that counterfeit coin—the rabble hiding behind the First Amendment, and the human rubbish with nowhere to hide at all—and Pelosi’s attitude toward both of me is depressing.
I suppose that’s in part why I reacted so strongly to Barack Obama’s context-free and not so innocent nod to the Reagan Revolution. Those were bad years for a lot of people. Obama has declared himself to be a progressive candidate, but his version of progressive doesn’t seem expansive enough to include (either of) me; he’s progressive only within the framework of a corporate- and military-dominated society.
That’s nowhere more apparent than in his foreign policy platform. Among other things, he calls for adding 100,000 troops to the Army and Marines.
It’s an expensive proposition prompted, Obama intimates in his essay at Foreign Affairs, by the lessons of Iraq. We need, he says, to “retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests”, and we must “also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability — to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities.”
In other words, we must adopt the Bush Doctrine, only as administered by presumably sane people.
A Congressional Budget Office report commissioned by Robert Byrd in 2003 indicates that the money required for Obama’s proposal is indeed significant. Extrapolating from the report, which contemplated smaller increases, we learn that the cost of the expansion would be somewhere in the vicinity of $100 billion up front, with another $30 billion annually to maintain them.
That’s probably a low estimate, since even the more modest expansion examined by the CBO would take about five years to complete, and since the new troops will have to be outfitted with new equipment more expensive than what CBO contemplated five years ago.
That’s on top of the money required to reconstitute our existing forces post-Iraq, assuming Obama is actually able to get us out of there.
So if you’re expecting an Iraq peace dividend to help pay for Obama’s modestly progressive domestic initiatives, stop it.
In Obama’s defense, he’s not alone in supporting an increase in the size and cost of the military; among the 2008 presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and the now-departed Bill Richardson oppose such increases. But having lots of company tends to flag almost any position as less progressive rather than more.
Hillary Clinton also participated in the Foreign Affairs essay ritual; she doesn’t mention expanding the military—it’s a pretty vague exposition, sounding more like Obama than Obama does in some passages—although she’s on record elsewhere as supporting the notion.
The final question on the matter is what the candidates plan to do with their newly engorged toy. Obama is pretty openly proposing an interventionist foreign policy; he plans to use the new troops in a worthy cause to be named later. Clinton is less explicit, but she does say that “I will order specialized units to engage in targeted operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations in the region“, which strongly suggests that she too views the world as our oyster and the military as our oyster knife. We know she shares a bond with former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who once famously chastised Colin Powell by asking, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it.”
The odds are high that both candidates would, as president, sooner or later deploy their reinvigorated military in its time-honored role of killing lots of people, most likely off-white ones or darker, who don’t deserve killing. On your dime.
John Edwards, in his own Foreign Affairs essay, doesn’t rule out increasing the size of the military. Although he notes that any increase will take years and so come too late to relieve the plight of our troops in Iraq, he also says that “[w]e must have enough troops to rebuild from the debacle in Iraq, to bolster deterrence, to decrease our heavy reliance on National Guard and Reserve members in overseas missions, to provide additional support for our brave troops fighting in Afghanistan, and to deploy to other trouble spots when necessary.” His most egregiously militaristic note comes when he says flatly that “Iran cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.”
I like Edwards considerably more than I do Obama or Clinton, which is to say, “some,” but his stance on these matters doesn’t fill me with optimism any more than theirs.
It’s Martin Luther King day, which it wouldn’t be if John McCain and other “I’m not racist” types had their way.
King thought a lot about about peace; among his thoughts was, ultimately, that blowing people up or gunning them down isn’t part of the process that leads us to that happy condition. King has gotten a lot of attention during the past few weeks, but somehow that very substantial part of his message didn’t figure into the various invocations of his legacy.
I suspect King might have had pointed words for Nancy Pelosi and her peculiar views on the hazards of division. I know he would remind Barack Obama that the act of standing up and branding one’s self a “committed Christian” imposes a special burden on anyone hoping to gain control of this country’s power over life and death here and abroad.
We live in different times now; people are jaded, timid, frayed. The kind of passion King raidiated and evoked is mocked now, when it’s not forgotten or airbrushed out of the picture by those who witnessed it, or altogether unknown to those who didn’t. But we’ve arrived at a point where, in an unfortunately subtle way, we’re perhaps further from peace and justice and a humane culture than we were in 1964. Certainly we’re far removed, most of us, anyway, from the passion and energy of those days.
That’s why Obama’s chant of hope and change rings hollow to me. His goals are so modest—don’t go nuts with the wars, resurrecting Richard Nixon’s health care reforms—that I just want to throw something, or up, when I hear the soaring rhetoric in which he wraps them.
Is that how far we’ve come in 40 years? Well, obviously, yes. I read here and there that we’re enjoying the strongest Democratic presidential field in years, and that we should be happy to see any of them win. Since the alternative is seeing none of them win, I suppose the sentiment has some merit. But lord, I never dreamed I’d see the day when Democrats were running progressives in the mold of Dick Nixon.
Is this what winning feels like?
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Well done, good and faithful servant. Check out Robert Wexler, now driving to impeach. Maybe there IS a man in the House in addition to Henry Waxman who can drive this necessity home triumphantly.
Nancy Pelosi should be REMOVED from the Speaker’s seat, she has squandered her position; she is a “loyal Bushie.” Will Kucinich serve as Speaker? Then impeach.
In gratitude, I will negotiate Pay Pal in support of your courage to declare the truth.
January 21st, 2008 at 5:18 pmI think Nancy Pelosi should walk through an airport with a sticker on her forehead that says “LOSER”. Pelosi is afraid if they go through with an impeachment of Bush and Cheney, she and her Democratic clonies might then have to make a decision, and we all know they are not capable of doing that, look how they gave all the power over to the President, instead of saying NO to this rediculous warmongering monster. We need to bring our troops home now, that is what 70% of America wants, lets see our Congress do something about that, they won’t, they do not have the integrity. I wish they would all have listend to the only sane man speaking in the house at the time, and is still doing so, that would be RON PAUL.
January 21st, 2008 at 5:51 pmI WOULD have made a donation but I don’t like the way you handled Edwards…once again, another dismissal of the only candidate who CAN bring this country together. The only mention you give him is an exception – uh, he WOULD have advisors and cabinet who certainly could steer him in a different direction from what you highlight. Thanks for contributing to keeping Edwards on the back burner..A G A I N.
Sorry – no donation. Give him full exposure? Donation.
Guess in keeping w/our sick society, it all DOES come down to money, pardon my cynicism.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:01 amHi, Mary. Too bad—I could use the money. Not enough, though, to pretend that Edwards is saying things he isn’t, or isn’t saying the things he has. Regarding the notion of advisors and cabinet members steering a wiser course … isn’t that just what we were promised in 2000 with George Bush?
I’ll certainly revisit him if, as I hope, he hones and highlights his more progressive approach to domestic issues. With the stock market tanking and a recession on the way, the opportunity is certainly there. But on foreign policy, there’s just not much separation between him, Obama and Clinton.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:26 amWhat’s your take, in principle, on having the capacity to intervene to prevent genocide? I know, the UN should do that but it won’t unless our military has the laboring oar.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:11 amIn theory, I’m in favor of interventions on the side of the angels. In practice, by the time everyone agrees on the need for it, it’s usually too late. But if we had a president adept enough to do the diplomatic grunt work necessary to either avert such things without the threat of force or to garner the support necessary to do it with the threat of force, more power to him or her.
My problem with increasing the size of the military is that unless we’re looking at the possibility of either staying in Iraq or of occupying another country, we don’t need more troops. We don’t have enough for a conventional war with any country that could pose a genuine threat, and another 100,000 won’t remedy that—if we get in a land war with anyone substantial, we’ll need a draft.
If we don’t get out of Iraq, then, yeah, we need more troops. But the largest UN peacekeeping force to date, the one in Sudan, numbers about 20,000 troops and another 3 or 4 thousand police, and the total number of troops involved in all UN peacekeeping operations is about 75,000. If we’re not in Iraq, we could bolster UN forces by half all by ourselves (as opposed to our current contribution of, um, eight soldiers and 291 cops) and still return to a sane rotation schedule, and still have troops available for the anti-terrorism activities everyone seems to anticipate. The likelihood that we would ever be asked to contribute that many troops is nil.
So if we avoid invading and occupying other countries, even ones that really, really ask for it, we should be just fine without adding to an already absurdly high military budget.
adding, the paltry contribution to UN forces isn’t ascribable to Afghanistan and Iraq. In December of 2000, the numbers were 0 troops and 800+ police.
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:33 amWell, there is the issue of what about Afghanistan? Then too, it appears that at some point Pakistan may offer “challenges” as the administration might say and down the road who knows? In addition, there is the question of how large the active military should be as opposed to the reserves and national guard who have been stretched way beyond what they or the military establishment ever envisioned. There are times (Katrina, wild fires) when we need the guard at home.
January 22nd, 2008 at 3:55 pmJack, I think our position in Afghanistan is due for a serious reexamination. There’s a weak central government, headed by a US-picked and backed president, with a generally non-functional army that has the same tendency as the Iraqi one to be perpetually a year or two away from self-sufficiency, that controls a very limited amount of territory. Opium accounts for nearly a third of the country’s GDP, with all the consequences you would anticipate for law enforcement and governance. Reconstruction and development projects are suffering because the neediest areas are also the most perilous ones.
So questions about what we’re attempting to accomplish, and whether whatever that is is realistic, need to be asked and answered.
As for Pakistan, well … it’s a nation of more than 160 million souls—as opposed to Iraq’s 25 million—with an army of about a half million, and territory that includes incredibly dense urban areas and extremely inhospitable rural ones. Are we really going to launch a ground war there, or even send in any significant number of troops? I’m afraid whatever challenges Pakistan poses will have to be met more creatively.
I know the Army and Marines are overextended. They wouldn’t be had we not invaded Iraq. The lesson here is that we do not have enough troops to manage a long-term occupation, not just in Iraq but in any country with a population of more than a few million. According to Army doctrine, a successful counterinsurgency/peacekeeping operation in Iraq would require deploying about 500,000 troops there; we barely have 500,000 troops in the entire active duty Army, along with about 180,000 in the Marines. If we want to be able to manage that sort of thing with reasonable rotations and without depleting the Guard and Reserves, we need to add more than a million active duty soldiers and Marines, not a measly 92,000.
So I come back to the question of what do we want to do with those extra troops? What is it that can’t be accomplished with what we have, assuming what we have isn’t stapled to the desert in Iraq, or that wouldn’t require a draft even if we actually have those additional forces (which won’t be available for several years anyway, since they have to be recruited, trained, integrated and equipped)?
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:05 pmFWIW, Martin Luther King’s son wrote a supportive letter to John Edwards to keep the struggle going. The guy looked a bit tired on Dave last night. Tiresome being largely ignored and told to quit in a self-fulfilling prophecy by the PTB (including in the blog world), I guess.
The “angels” bit reminds me that Samantha Power is a senior advisor on Obama’s staff. Her opposition to the Iraq War (2.0) added to my cynicism at those who supported it for humitarian reasons.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 amI like Samantha Power, among other things for her allegiance to GB Shaw’s homage to the unreasonable man.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Hear, hear.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 amPoint taken on Afhanistan. However, there is still Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda to be dealt with. An American operation may become necessary to go into the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. If so, that will require a substantial ground force.
On the absolute size of the active army and marine force, I agree that ultimately that turns on one’s view of the likely potential mission/missions of that force but, as I indicated above, I don’t think we should go forward on the assumption that should something come requiring sustained action, we should simply indefinitely activate the reserve and the guard.
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