Dan Senor and Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not 'Obama's War'
[Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They both served as officials in the administration of George W. Bush.]
In his column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the influential conservative George Will provided intellectual fodder for the campaign among some Republicans to hang the Afghanistan war around the Obama administration’s neck. Washington, he wrote, should “keep faith” with our fighting men and women by “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan.” “Obama’s war,” a locution one is now beginning to hear from other conservatives, is an expression of discontent that has been smoldering beneath the surface for several months.
The weakening public support for continuing the counterinsurgency campaign is not surprising. In the midst of an economic crisis people are tempted to draw inward. Add to that a general war weariness in the U.S. and the fact that the Afghanistan war is not going well right now—violence in Afghanistan is already far worse this year than last—and you have the makings of an unpopular conflict.
But the case of conservative opposition to the war in Afghanistan—as well as increasingly in Iraq—is symptomatic of something larger: the long history of political parties out of power advancing a neo-isolationist outlook. For example, Democrats were vocal opponents of President Reagan's support for the Nicaraguan contras and the democratic government in El Salvador, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, and the forceful stand against the Soviet Union generally.
Many Democrats were also uneasy with or outright hostile to the policies of President George H.W. Bush. That included strong criticisms of the U.S. liberation of Panama and widespread Democratic opposition to the first Gulf War, which only 10 Senate Democrats voted to authorize.
The tables were turned in the 1990s: Then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay called Kosovo "Clinton's war" and a majority of Senate Republicans voted against a bombing campaign, even after the Serbs had created half-a-million refugees in Kosovo and were on a path to destabilizing southern Europe. And, unlike today, this was not at a time of economic insecurity at home. Nor were we shouldering the military burden alone (18 other nations fought alongside us in the Balkans). Conservatives also argued that President Clinton's strikes against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1998 were meant to distract the nation's attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2000, in a sharp rebuke of the Clinton administration's nation-building, Condoleezza Rice—then a top adviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush—said that the 82nd Airborne should not be walking kids to school.
In this decade, Democrats were fierce opponents of President Bush's Iraq policy, going so far as to declare the war lost and doing everything in their power to stop the surge—which turned out to be enormously successful—from going forward.
Our concern is that this tendency for the party out of (executive) power to pull back from America's international role and to undermine a president of the opposing party will gain strength when it comes to President Obama's policy on Afghanistan...
Read entire article at The Wall Street Journal
In his column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the influential conservative George Will provided intellectual fodder for the campaign among some Republicans to hang the Afghanistan war around the Obama administration’s neck. Washington, he wrote, should “keep faith” with our fighting men and women by “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan.” “Obama’s war,” a locution one is now beginning to hear from other conservatives, is an expression of discontent that has been smoldering beneath the surface for several months.
The weakening public support for continuing the counterinsurgency campaign is not surprising. In the midst of an economic crisis people are tempted to draw inward. Add to that a general war weariness in the U.S. and the fact that the Afghanistan war is not going well right now—violence in Afghanistan is already far worse this year than last—and you have the makings of an unpopular conflict.
But the case of conservative opposition to the war in Afghanistan—as well as increasingly in Iraq—is symptomatic of something larger: the long history of political parties out of power advancing a neo-isolationist outlook. For example, Democrats were vocal opponents of President Reagan's support for the Nicaraguan contras and the democratic government in El Salvador, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, and the forceful stand against the Soviet Union generally.
Many Democrats were also uneasy with or outright hostile to the policies of President George H.W. Bush. That included strong criticisms of the U.S. liberation of Panama and widespread Democratic opposition to the first Gulf War, which only 10 Senate Democrats voted to authorize.
The tables were turned in the 1990s: Then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay called Kosovo "Clinton's war" and a majority of Senate Republicans voted against a bombing campaign, even after the Serbs had created half-a-million refugees in Kosovo and were on a path to destabilizing southern Europe. And, unlike today, this was not at a time of economic insecurity at home. Nor were we shouldering the military burden alone (18 other nations fought alongside us in the Balkans). Conservatives also argued that President Clinton's strikes against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1998 were meant to distract the nation's attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2000, in a sharp rebuke of the Clinton administration's nation-building, Condoleezza Rice—then a top adviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush—said that the 82nd Airborne should not be walking kids to school.
In this decade, Democrats were fierce opponents of President Bush's Iraq policy, going so far as to declare the war lost and doing everything in their power to stop the surge—which turned out to be enormously successful—from going forward.
Our concern is that this tendency for the party out of (executive) power to pull back from America's international role and to undermine a president of the opposing party will gain strength when it comes to President Obama's policy on Afghanistan...