This reminds me a lot of the noises some Republicans made during Clinton's Kosovo intervention. The reaction to both of those interventions strike me as simple mirror-image permutations of the political process we work under: ipso facto, any military intervention taken by the domestic political opposition must be wrong, foolish, ineptly executed, and/or doomed to failure. The political stakes in such an intervention are so high, I think, that the two-party political calculus makes it very difficult for the situation to be otherwise. It's not a coincidence that whichever party is out of executive power in America nearly always tends toward non-interventionism, or even isolationism. And in some sense, we should probably be glad about that, because that not only puts a lot of pressure on the administration in power to wage war effectively and for good moral cause when it does go to war, it makes the decision to go to war a very risky one politically, which certainly helps explain the phenomenon of the Democratic Peace
Oct 22, 2005
Dem opposition to the war inevitable?
Is this true? Dave Price on Democratic reaction to the war in Iraq:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment