“No one quite knows or will probably ever know the
exact financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself.
Some estimates put it at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion…. [NBC national affairs
writer Tom] Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office report saying the Iraq
operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012. Whatever the number, it
added to deficits and debt, and along with the Bush administration's domestic
spending helped erode the Republican Party's reputation for sobriety in fiscal
affairs.”— Peggy Noonan, “Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?” The
Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2013
You can read from here to eternity all the analyses
of what ails the Republican Party. The general tone about its problems with
Hispanics, gays, women, you name it—i.e., that the party has just sustained a huge
gash in its well-heeled ocean liner, and that all aboard have spilled into the
icy waters, where they’ll drown in the near future—sounds awfully familiar to
me. I read similar obituaries about the GOP in 1977, after a shellacking over
Watergate and an intraparty nomination slugfest left it without control of the
White House and Congress. Come to think of it, I heard the same thing about
them four years ago, before they assumed control of both houses of Congress.
Much of the same wailing could be heard about the Democrats, in fact, in the 12 sorry
years before Bill Clinton was elected.
Think of it another way: The party fielded a
hapless candidate that New York Times
columnist David Brooks rightly likened to Thurston Howell III of Gilligan’s Island, and it still polled 47% of the vote in the last
Presidential campaign. A full-fledged economic or military disaster tagged to the Obama administration would put the Oops! (sorry, I mean Opposition) Party back in business.
But Peggy Noonan’s column, I think, is onto something important. Tones, even
policies, on social issues can be adjusted. But the Iraq War delivered a body
blow that the Republican Party, and the nation, could ill afford to sustain.
“Did the Iraq war hurt the GOP? Yes,” the former
speechwriter for Ronald Reagan bluntly admits. “The war, and the crash of '08, half
killed it. It's still digging out, and whether it can succeed is an open
question.”
The damage to U.S. lives is, in comparison with
other U.S. wars, not so steep: roughly 4,000 deaths, plus another 2,000 for
Afghanistan. The two combined are roughly comparable to losses sustained in the
Spanish-American War and the far less-well-known subsequent struggle to quash
the Philippine independence movement. But they pale in comparison, both in
absolute terms and as percentages of the total population, with deaths in the
War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the American Revolution, Korea, Vietnam,
WWI, WWII, and the Civil War.
But the cost in other ways is as bad as these other wars, perhaps even
more so. Noonan’s column—which should be required reading at GOP
headquarters—takes note of how the war affected perceptions of its foreign
policy, the meaning of conservatism, the dominance that began with Reagan,
dissent within the party, and the reputation of its Washington establishment.
But the fiscal damage caused by the war—the one
alluded to in this quote--might be most insidious. Following the war, no
Republican really had the right to complain about deficits caused by President
Obama—they began on George W. Bush’s watch. More than a few longtime party
members knew this, which is why, for instance, Noonan's normal criticism of Democrats was considerably more muted in the '08 Presidential campaign, and why Christopher Buckley, son of the founder of the modern conservative movement, came out and actually endorsed Obama. The rising tide of right-wing discontent about Dubya’s
domestic spending would not have risen so sharply without war-worsened budget
deficits. That energized the libertarian/Tea Party wing of the GOP, with
consequences its Establishment members are still trying to contain.
The low-level civil war now occurring among
Republicans nearly claimed a prominent victim a few weeks ago. For years, Chuck
Hagel had a well-deserved reputation for fiscal and social conservatism, and
had even supported President Bush’s invasion of Iraq 10 years ago. But his
increasing criticism of the conduct of the war and those who supported it left
him, in a real sense, as a man without a party. His onetime Senate friends on the Republican side of the aisle can't abide that he was right to question the disastrous military policy perpetrated by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, or that his disgust with the Iraq War was so complete that he refused to endorse old friend John McCain for Presidents. He begins his term as Secretary
of Defense with neither bone-deep loyalty from Democrats nor good will from his
former GOP colleagues.
There are other costs to the Iraq War, as we take
stock this month 10 years after the Bush administration turned the War on Terror into a bridge too far:
*A more polarized
electorate. Even as the GOP Establishment has been discredited and the Tea
Party emboldened, the most socially liberal faction of the Democrats has taken
firmer control on the other side of the partisan divide. Increasingly limited space exists for
political centrists of either party, not to mention the spirit of compromise.
* A politicized
intelligence unit. Dick Cheney conclusively demonstrated how easy it was to
shift intelligence estimates toward the conclusions that one highly influential administration official wished to draw.
It is a foregone conclusion that the citizens of other nations, already ambivalent
(or worse) about America, might recoil from any suggestion that we might be
facing a mortal threat. Now, U.S. citizens, remembering those phantom WMDs, are
likely to do so, too, even if the suggestion comes from a Democratic President.
* Strengthened
isolationism. Reluctance to use military force is a good thing, but now
that they are back in power, the Democrats are facing increasing pressures
against using non-military means as well. At this point, foreign aid is squarely in the sight
of budget-cutters. Now, it is China that is in a better position to use its
financial resources to further geopolitical aims. Rest assured that those aims
will not be for humanitarian purposes. And that brings
us to the biggest victims of all in the Iraq War…
*The Iraqis
themselves. Now, after a decade of death, dysfunction and division, they
face their future—though the word “they” must be highly qualified in a country
now experiencing the ethnic cleansing of Christians and other minorities by
Islamic militants, harassment and worse against women’s rights activists, and a
government still all too internally fractious.
God help the Iraqis—because, courtesy of a former Republican
administration and its then-compliant, now-confused, Iraq-wrecked allies in the
legislative branch--the United States is no longer of a mind to do so again anytime
soon.
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