Response to left's brief against 'Party of Defeat'
...Party of Defeat is an important indictment of the anti war left and its role in the modern Democrat party. Horowitz and Johnson have been paying people to criticize the book. I am going to add the book to my to do list. It is important that Democrats pay a price for their duplicity about the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, so far they have been rewarded for that duplicity. Giving this book wider distribution might start to reset that effect.
Party of Defeat is not an argument against criticism of the war, as Korb joins others in suggesting. It does not attack opponents of the Iraq War merely because they opposed it. Party of Defeat specifically defends critics of the war. Its concern is with the reckless attacks by Democratic leaders on a war policy, and the way in which they placed party interest before country.The analysis in Party of Defeat begins with the observation that the entire Clinton national security team endorsed the invasion of Iraq, both before and after the fact. They were joined by a majority of Democratic senators who first voted to authorize the use of force and then praised the Bush Administration for doing so. One of these senators, John Kerry was the Democrats’ standard bearer in 2004. In October 2002, Kerry gave a carefully prepared speech on the floor of the Senate justifying the use of force. While he claimed to be duped into supporting the war by manipulated intelligence data, Kerry sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and in fact had full access to all the information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies about Iraq, as did all the Democratic senators who voted for the war.
The invasion of Iraq was also endorsed by non-Congressional Democrats like former vice president Al Gore. In 2002 – in his first foreign policy speech after his 2000 defeat -- Gore specifically endorsed Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech and called Iraq “a virulent threat in a class by itself.”
Yet three months into a war they had supported, the leaders of the Democratic Party reversed their position and launched a five-year campaign to stigmatize the invasion as unnecessary and unjustified, and to describe their president as a liar who had tricked them into authorizing a war of aggression against a country that had “posed no threat” (Gore).
To call one’s commander-in-chief a liar in these circumstances was unconscionable. To withdraw support for a war only three months after you have sent American youth to die on a foreign battlefield – and to do so in such extreme terms -- is morally reprehensible and not incidentally destructive of the nation’s interest. This is what we argued in our book. To indict your own country as an aggressor nation and to stigmatize it as an international outlaw for conducting a war duly authorized and specifically designed to enforce a unanimous UN Security Council resolution goes far beyond legitimate criticism of foreign policy. This is the thesis of our book. We characterized these reckless and unjustified attacks as “sabotage” of the war effort, and described them as unprecedented in the history of American politics.
In his attempt to confront this argument, Lawrence Korb follows a growing line of liberals who have evaded it instead. He offers no rebuttal of these points, and provides no reasonable argument for viewing the Democrats’ behavior as anything but a reckless and unprincipled betrayal of the national interest. As we document in Party of Defeat, the Democrats’ attacks during five years of war even included support for treasonous disclosures of classified secrets and the destruction of national security programs. Korb has nothing to say about this. Nor does he comment on our observations that Democrats conducted campaigns to tar the American military and American troops with war crimes they did not commit, and in a fashion that could only be helpful to our enemies.
As with other liberal attempts to respond to our challenge, Korb’s article imputes to us an entirely different case than the one we made. According to Korb, it is our claim that all Democrats in the last 50 years have been defeatists and it is our view that any criticism of war policy is illegitimate. To refute these straw men, Korb invokes Democratic senator Sam Nunn, who was the well-known proponent of a strong national defense. But we didn’t argue that all Democrats are defeatist. We argued that the drift of the Democratic Party since the 1972 McGovern campaign has been towards the anti-military left, which helps to explain the extremes of their opposition to the Iraq War. The career of Sam Nunn actually illustrates this trend. Widely recognized as the senior statesman in his party, Nunn opted not to run for the Democratic nomination in 1988 because there was an equally broad perception that he was too far to the “right” to win it. He retired a short time later at the age of 57.
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Never have so many been so dead wrong about a war and suffered so little political consequence as the current Democrats who voted for the war before they opposed it. I beleive these cynical Democrats would have been attacking President Bush for not over throwing Saddam if he had not liberated Iraq. It is all politics to them and no principal beyond the next election.
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