A few days ago Edward asked a very interesting question, namely: why do people think that Bush would be a better Commander-in-Chief than Kerry? What do they imagine that Kerry would do that’s worse than what Bush has already done? Unfortunately, the thread spiraled into an endless discussion of the history of our relations with Iraq. Since I thought Edward’s question was very much worth answering, I thought I’d ask it again. To provide a slightly different framework for it:
Both Kerry and Bush agree that whatever the merits of our decision to go into Iraq, we are there now, and have to see it through. Some people may think that Kerry is more focussed on getting our troops out, but frankly, I haven’t seen much evidence of that. Moreover, Bush also famously planned to withdraw troops fairly dramatically shortly after the invasion, but reality wouldn’t let him; there is, as far as I can see, no reason to think that if Kerry wants to withdraw troops, he would not alter his views in the face of realities on the ground if he had to. (If anything, the opposite is true, since, unlike Bush, Kerry belongs to “the reality-based community”.)
Neither Bush nor Kerry is in a position to go fighting any other wars just now. Our army is badly overextended — we have sent our training unit into Iraq, which is, as Phil Carter says, like eating our seed corn. Our soldiers are under stop-loss orders to prevent them from leaving on schedule. The guard and reserves have missed their enrollment targets. We do not have the capability to start a third war absent some extremely compelling reason, like our being attacked. Both Bush and Kerry would go to war in that case; Bush is slightly more likely to embark on a new adventure absent some such reason, but that is not at all a good thing in our present circumstances.
For this reason I think that the broad contours of our military engagements would be the same under the two candidates: war in Iraq and Afghanistan until stable governments are in place there, at which point we withdraw. The differences between them, as far as defense and foreign policy are concerned, would probably be as follows: first, the competence with which they would run these wars; second, their diplomatic efforts, and third, their prosecution of the war on terror. I truly cannot see why anyone would think that Bush is likely to do a better job in any of these areas. Before going into specifics, however, I want to quote a very good point made by Kevin Drum:
“Obsessing over Kerry’s entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
It shouldn’t, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he’s reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors’ long records before taking office — and I’d argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry’s past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.”
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