AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2008 > March > 01
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Are liberals not supportive enough of our military?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
I’m not really a wear-your-heart-on-your-car kind of gal, but right about now I want to slap a big bumper sticker on the back of my van that says, “You can support the troops AND be concerned about this war. I think we all know that. Now, stop tailgating me.”
If troop morale is in danger, I doubt it’s due to antics in The Peoples Republic of Berkeley or the justifiable disappointment of decorated marine colonel John Murtha, (who magically transformed into a liberal the second he parted ways with the official stance on Iraq.)
We could guess how the troops feel — but why not just ask them? The Military Times did, finding in a recent poll of active-duty service members that a third of respondents do not feel that their own commander-in-chief has their best interests at heart. Perhaps that’s why active service troops are increasingly less inclined to align with the Grand Old Party. Sixty percent of respondents identified themselves as Republican in 2004.Three years later, only 48.9 percent claimed the GOP as their party of choice. I wonder what “systemic flaw” in troop-think is causing this abandonment?
The troops do need our support, now more than ever, but with our advocacy for their protection, not with bumper sticker platitudes that solve nothing, help no one. To call such advocacy liberal might startle moderates and conservatives; all Americans are more than capable of recognizing that our brave men and women face an uphill battle, for not even an encouraging surge can insure permanent stability in Iraq.
Black and white stereotypes simply don’t hold up in this gray-area war on terror. For any of us, supporting the troops should mean acknowledging that in a front-less war where enemies and allies change in an instant, giving our soldiers tools for diplomacy and education is just as vital as decent helmets and body armor.
If there’s a “systemic flaw” to be found here, it’s in my colleague’s temptation to consider an entire group of people naively immune from reason, yet expect them to work with her towards democracy. That doesn’t play any better here than it does in Iraq — and it certainly doesn’t support the troops.
Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
In February, the Berkeley, California, City Council passed a measure saying Marine recruiters were “not welcome in our city.” The measure emphasized, “If recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” and asked residents to “impede…the work of any military recruiting office.”
Shock and outrage swept the country. It’s one thing for private citizens to exercise their freedom of speech; quite another for the government itself to undercut national security and military morale. Even many liberals decried the Berkeley action as extreme, saying their fellows should oppose the war, not the military.
The Berkeley action may be extreme — but it’s also a natural and almost inevitable outgrowth of what I believe is a systemic flaw in liberal thinking. Liberals tend to believe that people are inherently good, so problems can almost always be solved by working harder at understanding, education and dialogue. Under this reasoning, the use of force (e.g. the military) becomes not only counterproductive but often shameful and wrong.
Well-intentioned people on the left, therefore, frequently have an inherent tension and discomfort with the military, and a deep lack of understanding for its importance. And that translates into policies and actions that look non-supportive or even hostile.
Some of those actions may be merely frustrating, like Toledo’s Democrat mayor recently refusing to let Marines into his town for a pre-approved training exercise. But others are far more demoralizing, such as when congressman John Murtha read an early and very inaccurate news release of a battle in Iraq and called a press conference to say Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” And still others are deadly serious, like President Clinton’s enormous shrinking of our military forces; 30 percent in the Air Force alone. He promised to shrink defense by $60 billion, then struck $120 billion from the defense budget. Yet, he sent more troops abroad on operations than in the previous thirty years. By 1999, more than half of those enlisted planned to leave the service at the earliest allowed time.
Unfortunately, perhaps influenced by ideological discomfort with military action, both another Clinton and Obama are refusing to recognize that we are now winning in Iraq, and threaten to return lower morale to our military when we can least afford it.