GOP war support showing cracks

Chuck Hagel and the RINOs are worried.

Yes it's true, we are all abandoning the war effort. Anybody know how to join the Cindy Sheehan campaign?

Happens every time I disrobe.

I guess Katrina is fading from the bright white lite of the media's attention span. I guess they are bored and will now turn to other ways to screw the President.
If the GOP has any sense, they'd realize that that really loud noise they hear off in the distance is the sound of the Democrats clearing out their desks.
If the media had any sense they'd realize that sound THEY are hearing is their collective influence being flushed.
Music comes in many forms, does it not?

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University in 1998, he taught at West Point and at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Bacevich is the author most recently of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005). His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002) and The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003). His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Conservative, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among other newspapers.

Professor Bacevich served for seven years, from 1998 to the summer of 2005, as the Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. In 2004, Dr. Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has also been a fellow of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Dr. Bacevich has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Moncado Prize given by the Society for Military History and the Arter-Darby Military History Writing Award.

Good job

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

Well that's certainly an unbiased source.

He'll be on CNN and pMSNBC tomorrow with a headline like that!

But Republican pollster David Winston cautioned against interpreting concern over war strategy as skittishness from the President's base and a lack of support for war overall.

BINGO

IDIOTIC ARTICLE:

"Staunch supporters of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq have become more vocal with their concern over the way things are going."

NOPE. The ones who get the air-time are the ones who are NOT supporters. Most supporters see the progress made and support continuing until we win.

"Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and professor of international relations at Boston University, said he sees a marked shift. "There are people who view themselves on the right, who were enthusiastic supporters of the war, who are now greatly concerned that the Bush administration or more in particular, the military, is losing its focus, its heart, and isn't fully committed," he told Fox News."

More hogwash. Why doesn't this article mention, even briefly the fact that we killed hundreds of terrorists in recent days, the fact that constitutional elections are scheduled, that the Iraqi army improves each day, etc.? There clearly is a commitment to win using a strategy of giving more responsibility for security to Iraqi forces as they are able to take it up.

"President Bush has said repeatedly there will be no exit timetable, but some of his supporters are saying the White House needs to be clearer about its strategy."

Another semantic bait-and-switch. No time-table because there is no plan to exit until the job is done, but a clear strategy of training the Iraqi security forces, establishing the legitimate democratic Government of Iraq, and rebuilding the country so Iraq is a free, sovereign, stable nation.

"Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, said Republicans have become more vocal about needing clarification on the war strategy and a better explanation to the American public."

A Liberal notes that some Republicans, seeing the media bias, want better PR campaign from the White House. I'm underwhelmed. The false implication is that there isn't a 'war strategy', which is a lie. There is one and it is executed every day.

"But Republican pollster David Winston cautioned against interpreting concern over war strategy as skittishness from the President's base and a lack of support for war overall. "There is still support for this war," Winston said. What people are looking for from the president, he said, are more specifics and measures for success."

This statement is a fair assessment. The Bush white house, gun-shy about making specific claims of success, due to the media ignoring those proven right and emphasizing nay claim that later founders, has fallen back to generalities and bromides. It's a pity. If the President were to announce what I've mentioned, that we killed a number of top terrorist leaders in Iraq in recent months, that the Iraqi army now has more battalions in active pursuit of terrorists than ever before ... that would mean something.

This article distorts lack of PR for a strategy into 'lack of strategy'. I hate media bias.

Nuts

Flawed thoughts on war

Oxford University Press, $28

by James S. Robbins

Andrew J. Bacevich promises that his new book will be about "misleading and dangerous conceptions of war, soldiers, and military institutions." Sure enough, his earnest tome is full of them.

War has become an unhealthy obsession for American society says Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who is now a professor at Boston University. In "The New American Militarism," he argues that a combination of Wilsonian foreign policy and dominant military strength have seduced us. The result is a rising tide of militarism on both left and right that is leading to financial and spiritual ruin

Unfortunately for Bacevich, who poses as a kind of cultural conservative even though he has written recently for the New Left Review, his argument rapidly breaks down. He portrays today's all-volunteer force as a symptom of militarism, preferring instead the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s when "citizenship and military service remained intimately connected." Does he really believe that conscription during the Cold War was less militaristic than present-day voluntarism?

Another alleged symptom of militarism is the lack of service records among many of our politicians. Bacevich argues that decision makers who "opted out" of service are less sensitive to the sacrifices of war, and thus more willing to use force. Perhaps that makes intuitive sense to Bacevich, but he can't prove that this phenomenon exists because there's no clear evidence for it. So he satisfies himself by calling it a "paradox" and moves on. By his reasoning, our society would be less militaristic if our politicians were retired generals and admirals. In jabbing at the president's landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, Bacevich says Bush sought to become the "first warrior President." (Hello, George Washington?)

The defense budget is another sore point for Bacevich He notes that military spending is currently 12 percent larger than the inflation-adjusted average during the Cold War. He takes this as proof of a wasteful obsession - a reckless willingness to spend more even as threats decline. That is one way of looking at it. A better way, however, is to analyze defense spending as a percentage of GDP. In 2003, the United States spent 3.7 percent of GDP on the military. The average per year from 1949-1989 was 7.6 percent, more than double today's rate. Combined with higher operations tempo, it indicates not that our country has grown more preoccupied with wielding global power, but more efficient at it.

In one of the most puzzling sections of "The New American Militarism," Bacevich castigates the armed services for their emphasis on "dominance," which the Defense Department defines as having enough power to act freely on the battlefield. "When it comes to military power," he chides, "mere superiority will not suffice." No, but dominance sure is nice - even for the losers. Bacevich ignores the fact that overwhelming power saves lives. It is not only an effective deterrent, but if we do go to war, we have the capability of finishing the conflict swiftly and with fewer casualties on both sides. Bacevich denounces the brutality of 20th-century warfare, such as the grinding trench combat of World War I, but that is precisely what today's military leaders have sought to avoid, and very successfully.

Bacevich also frets over the United States spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined. So how much of our edge must we give up? Perhaps he would be happy if our potential foes evened the balance by spending more. By this logic, more North Korean nukes, more Syrian scuds, more Iranian rockets, more Venezuelan fighter jets, and more Chinese troops would make the world a safer place.

Throughout the book, Bacevich ignores important distinctions between the Clinton and Bush years and seeks commonalities that strain credulity. He makes light of the sterile technocratic defense ethos of the 1990s without drawing the obvious conclusion that it was this impression of moral weakness that emboldened Osama bin Laden to bring his war to the American homeland. He also refuses to acknowledge that by the time al-Qaida did strike, the United States had a new leader who didn't shrink from using overwhelming force against our enemies. It is perhaps worth noting that in 2001, Bacevich was warning National Review readers that the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a terrible failure. "Caution and half-heartedness - not boldness, not ferocity - have been this campaign's signature characteristics," he wrote, adopting a rather militaristic tone. About a week later, the Taliban regime fell.

Bacevich's solutions to the new militarism are about what you would expect. He calls for more self-restraint when crises erupt, increased congressional involvement in security policy, reduced defense spending, and emphasis on non-military means of coercion such as economic sanctions (which, in the case of Iraq, succeeded mainly at making Saddam Hussein and U.N. appeasers wealthy). But these rather moderate fixes address a problem that exists only in Bacevich's imagination. The U.S. military is active today more by necessity than choice. We live in a time of global instability, due in large measure to our victory in the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet Union. Bacevich's fundamental concern is less with the military than America's inherited position of global leadership.

Well, why shouldn't the United States be the dominant military power in the world? Who better?

James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council.

http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/22//opinion/books%20and%20culture//85books18robbins.txt

I stand behind this war with all that is within me. Only those who are totally uniformed are not behind it. That is this lady's opinion anyway.

["There are people who view themselves on the right, who were enthusiastic supporters of the war, who are now greatly concerned that the Bush administration or more in particular, the military, is losing its focus, its heart, and isn't fully committed," he told Fox News.]

And to assume that it means they are lessening their support for the war would be wrong.

Those people (myself included) want there to be a little less concern for making this war seem more humane in a futile attempt to try to placate the cowardly and the pacifists among us, and a little more concern for killing as many jihadists as possible, regardless of whose skirts (or burkas) they're hiding behind.

Why is this still even being called a "war?" It's not a war.

He went over to the dark side. Too bad.

I agree. I hope the President does too.

Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and professor of international relations at Boston University

Humph. (Farrrr left wing guy)
If this guy feels he has to publicly spew this venom, that means Bush isn't doing so bad after all.

Ah, yes, we've all seen the light and will vote for the counterpart to Kerry in the GOP; That much acclaimed RINO Chuck Hagel.

What this article means is that they've finally recognized that Democrats and the Cindy S's of the world with the support of the press cannot defeat the war. What they have realized is what the Libs have realized on judges, the only way to defeat the war is to break the Republican base. Because the Democrats only power is limited to obstruction. They cannot end this war.

They tried to splinter the base over Roberts. Now they are going to actively try to encourage us to follow the RINO off the cliff. They can go to hell.

I don't back down for ANY damn RINO or Liberal agenda. The only thing the Republicans need to worry about is offending me to the point where I say they are of no use to me anymore. And that point arrives when they cannot be counted on even in the WOT, Judges and taxes. If the Reps turn tail and run on the WOT, I withdraw my vote, buy a gun, and defend myself here at home from the incoming terrorist threat because it's damned sure neither Rep or Dem would do it.

That's what they had better understand clearly. If I want a Liberal pacifist that hikes my taxes and promotes Ginsburg's and O'Connor's intentionally, I'd vote Democrat. I don't want that, so I vote Rep. Become a Democrat, lose your majority.