For over two decades, the bond between the GOP and the U.S. military has

[thedrifter]

Washington Monthly (long story, but possibly significant)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.wallace-wells.html

November 2003

Corps Voters
For over two decades, the bond between the GOP and the U.S. military has
been getting stronger. Since the invasion of Iraq, that may be changing.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The Jacksonville unit of the North Carolina National Guard held its
mobilization ceremony on the lawn of the local armory during an unseasonably
chilly day last month, and even the town cut-up came, a shambolic, gray
bearded, big bellied man. He was wearing a neck brace so loosely fashioned
that it looked less like a helpful medical device than a prop from a
high-school play, and at 10 o'clock on this soberingly cold morning, he
seemed drunk. Five minutes before the ceremony began, he lurched past the
microphone: "Don't worry," he called out to the crowd, "I'm not the guy
who's speaking." Most of the crowd giggled nervously, embarrassed for him.
The company, 120 men standing in columns behind four sergeants, listened to
speeches from a half-dozen local dignitaries about the importance of their
mission, the pride the community had in them. Then a member of the company
stepped up to the microphone with a black acoustic guitar and sang "I'm
Proud to be an American" in a high, country-styled voice.

There's a line in the chorus that goes "I gladly stand up next to you/ and
defend her still today," and when the singer hit "stand up" for the first
time, the soldiers stiffened to attention. On the second chorus, the
officers and dignitaries who had addressed the soldiers stood up, as one.
The third time through, the crowd itself, a ragtag bunch that had come in
run-down pickups and Trans Ams, stood up together, with military precision,
with no prompting. I looked over at the town cut-up; his fingers were
clutching his temples, and he was bawling his eyes out, loudly and
unabashedly. These are deep bonds. In an all-volunteer army buttressed by a
volunteer reserve, soldiers don't fight simply for abstractions. When
soldiers find themselves in tough spots, they tend to find solace and vigor
in the conviction that they are fighting not just for their president or
vague notions of patriotic duty, but for specific civilians they know from
their hometowns, and that in battle they are defending the freedoms of the
people they grew up with. The American military is composed of thousands of
men and women who have made these deeply personal, I-and-thou contracts with
their friends and families: The soldiers promise to die, if needed, to
defend your freedoms, and the civilians promise to honor them.

In this section of coastal Carolina, fewer than 30 miles from the Army's
Fort Bragg, the Marines' Camp Lejeune, and the Air Force's Seymour Johnson
Base, these promises are made more frequently and taken more seriously than
in most places around America. It is the presence of the military and their
willingness to sacrifice that give this town its sense of its own values,
that it is more than just another section of sprawling, strip-malled
blacktop. It gives citizens the sense that everything they do to support the
troops has deep import. In this deeply Southern town, a visitor comes across
the unlikely sight of a white grandmother volunteering to pay for the meals
of a couple of off-duty black enlisted men who are eating in the local
Bojangles fried chicken joint. At the mobilization ceremony I attended, an
old man with a veteran's cap told his grandson importantly, "Four companies
in a battalion, four battalions in a regiment." And a sergeant acting as
usher asked a lanky young man whether he was here with any families or
friends with whom he wanted to sit, but the young man said no, "Just here to
support."

Six months ago, that patriotic support extended to President Bush and the
Republican Party. This section of coastal Carolina is staunch GOP territory,
with Rush Limbaugh on the radio and flag decals--American mostly, but a few
confederate--on the back of the pick-up trucks. "That's the recent tradition
here--being a patriot and supporting the military means being a Republican,"
says Lockwood Phillips, publisher of the Jacksonville Daily News and
conservative host of the local political call-in show. The Third
Congressional District, which includes Jacksonville, gave President Bush a
23-percent margin over Al Gore in 2000, and even favored Bob Dole over Bill
Clinton by 15 percent in 1996. Six months ago, you simply didn't hear
anything against Bush in Jacksonville, and if people had doubts about the
war in Iraq, they kept them to themselves. But these attitudes have begun to
change. The local newspaper's editorial board, which has been vocally
pro-Bush throughout his administration, ran an editorial at the beginning of
October criticizing the administration's policies on Iraq, and suggesting
that the campaign could end in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Soldiers' wives ask
reporters why their husbands are still being sent off to Iraq, to face car
bombs and chaos, months after the president said the war was over. Returned
reservists, who saw their return dates pushed back again and again while
they sat in a chaotic war zone, call the same radio station to say they
didn't sign up for this sort of treatment, and they won't be reenlisting. If
pressed, most people you talk to around here still say they'll support Bush.
But their faith in him, and the GOP powers in Washington, has been rattled.
"I'm a strong Republican, but the Republicans have been the problem; we've
been treated like second-class citizens," a retired Vietnam Marine
helicopter gunnery sergeant named Don Beaver told me in North Carolina.
Elsie P. Smith, the town's Republican mayor, says: "There's a few people who
have become very hostile [towards the Bush administration]. . . the longer
the war goes on, the more of that subtle shift you're going to see."

This subtle distancing of Republicans from Bush has begun to show up,
locally and nationally, even among those conservative politicians who spent
this administration's first two years hugging the president as if their
political future depended solely on the strength of their grip. Rep. Walter
B. Jones Jr, (R-N.C.), Jacksonville's man in Congress, has joined other
pro-military conservatives in stepping out of line with House leaders and
criticizing the administration's policies towards veterans; Jones has said
the administration treats vets like "second-class citizens." Conservative
Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) led vocal
Republican opposition to the administration's $87 billion supplemental
spending bill for Iraq in September, a move which found conservative allies
from Sen. Kay Bouley Hutchinson (R-Texas) to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).
House majority whip Roy Blount (R-Mo.) has taken the administration to task
over its troop-rotation policies.

A similar mood is emerging in small, patriotic towns around the country.
According to a study conducted in mid-October by Stars and Stripes, half of
American soldiers in-country say their units have low morale, that they were
insufficiently trained, and that they won't reenlist. The ubiquity of email
in Iraq means that husbands, wives, families, and friends of these troops
have a mainline to these gripes, and to the day-to-day grit and threat of
combat, that they haven't had in previous wars. Holly Rossi, whose husband,
Rob, is an Army reserve engineer out of Londonderry, N.H., has watched the
Family Support Group for his unit, wives who started the war as staunch
pro-Bush patriots, come to doubt the political mission. "A lot of people
feel tugged. We have built our lives around ... patriotism no matter what,
but we're feeling very abandoned." Charles Carter, a retired Naval chief
petty officer, told Knight Ridder: "I will vote non-Republican in a
heartbeat if it continues as is."

Carter's opinion is representative. While the GOP hasn't lost the military
vote, if present trends continue, it could see substantial defections in one
of its core constituencies. Even small numbers can swing an election. Almost
all observers concede that heavily Republican overseas ballots, with much of
the margin coming from military personnel, handed Florida, and the
presidency, to Bush in 2000. Some of the most closely contested states in
the last election have the most dense populations of military voters:
Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Nevada. But beyond the military voter
is an even larger electoral bloc: tens of millions of "national security
voters," who are not themselves necessarily connected to the military, but
who judge a president's capacity to defend the country by how well he treats
the troops, and by how much the troops support him.

contiued......

[thedrifter]

The administration, armed with a new U.N. mandate, has recently begun a new
effort to solicit money and troops from other nations, while maintaining
that it is not willing to turn over control of Iraq. Unless these efforts
are successful enough to permit the administration to withdraw large numbers
of troops and unburden itself of the financial responsibility for
reconstruction, the White House remains in an unenviable position. To quell
the uproar among its own ranks, the administration will be strongly tempted
to pull back troops and slight investment in Iraq. But that will almost
certainly undermine the administration's stated policy of democratizing Iraq
and, through it, the region. If, on the other hand, the White House chooses
to maintain high levels of aid and manpower in Iraq, it risks fracturing the
GOP and losing the 2004 election. Either way, the searing experience of
young soldiers in Iraq today will likely have profound effects in coming
years on the GOP's foreign policy and on the military's attitude toward
civilian authority.

Voting right

Trying to suss out the voting patterns of the military, and the ways in
which their professional frustrations and satisfactions spill over into
politics, has always been a murky, Kremlinology-like game. The Department of
Defense, which since 1955 has had an office designed to promote voting among
the military and track participation rates, does not keep statistics on how
many soldiers vote Democrat or Republican, though it does know that they
vote at slightly higher rates than average Americans. And ever since shortly
after World War II, when academics first became numerous and frisky enough
to want to poll soldiers, there have been laws making it illegal to do so.
Scholars who study the politics of the military rely on what scraps of data
they can assemble, and then, squinting, try to understand a pattern. They
look at surveys of the political attitudes of high school seniors,
cross-referenced by whether the students plan to go on to college, to work,
or to the military. They note those national opinion surveys which ask
participants whether or not they are veterans. They rely on the
non-political surveys of the social and cultural attitudes of the military.
They scan absentee-ballot returns in search of discernible patterns of
military voting. Mostly, they talk to soldiers in the field and develop,
over the course of their careers, anecdote-driven, rough senses of how
soldiers are likely to vote. But the consensus view seems to be that the
military as a whole votes Republican by a margin of slightly less than
2-to-1, with enlisted men and women Republican by 3-to-2, and Republicans
outnumbering Democrats among officers by 8-to-1. (Thankfully for Democratic
partisans, there are 15 times as many enlisted men as officers). Scholars
know even less about how the military has voted in the past. But they have
established a broad narrative of the demographics and shifting historical
cultures of the military that helps explain its evolution as a political
entity.

For the first half of the 20th century, the American military followed a
"surge-and-decline" model of military staffing; in times of crisis, young
men would be summoned through the draft, quickly trained, and sent to war,
and then would be sent home when the war was over. But after World War II,
the constant specter of a fight with the Soviet Union demanded a more
comprehensive battle force. Military planners decided to keep a large enough
corps of active officers to provide the shell of a military whose enlisted
ranks could then be filled by a draft in the case of war: The men, the
thinking went, would then at least have capable leaders.

In these early days, soldiers were kept nonpartisan by two institutions: the
officer corps and the draft. In the emergent military academies and staff
colleges that had been developed to continually train this new, permanent
officer class, students were taught the George C. Marshall credo of military
non-partisanship, and, historians say, it took hold. (Marshall, famously,
had argued that soldiers should not vote or support politicians or parties
because it would compromise their ability to do their jobs; though that
standard has lapsed in today's military, soldiers still retain a distaste
for officers they see as overtly political.) Then, too, the enlisted army
was, when it swelled in times of war, comprised of draftees, and
consequently was diverse enough to reflect the broadest political leanings
of its generation. Historians think that during World War II, when most
soldiers had grown up during the Roosevelt '30s, the military was more
Democratic than Republican. By the early '60s, the ranks reflected the
conservatism of the 1950s. Vietnam made the military even more conservative.
First, the all-volunteer military established by the 1973 abolition of the
draft gave the troops a different demographic cast. They were
disproportionately Southern, rural, poor, and morally traditional-the
cultural base which would drive Nixon's Southern Majority and, 30 years
later, Red America. Second, and perhaps more importantly, scholars say, men
who had fought in Vietnam came out of that era with the sharp sense that
they had been abandoned by American liberals, and to a lesser extent by the
nation as a whole. A profound cultural divide appeared to develop between
civilians and the military, two institutions with different sets of values.
The distinction served, social scientists say, to help sharpen the soldiers'
conservatism.

Through the 1970s, this cultural conservatism was kept from becoming overtly
partisan in part because the military was an interest group: Soldiers wanted
more pay and better, newer equipment, and so needed to negotiate both with
Republicans and with the Democrats who controlled Congress. The Republicans,
moreover, still had a strong fiscal conservative wing, which made them leery
of outsized defense spending, and the Democrats still had a strong defense
hawk wing, led by Washington Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, which made them
more amenable to big outlays.

But Ronald Reagan's presidency, accompanied by dovish realignments within
the Democratic party, shattered this construct. Reagan's program of massive
defense spending, along with his rhetorical massaging of the military's
damaged, wound-licking ego, "gave the military back the respect it felt had
been stripped from it by liberals after Vietnam," said David Segal of the
University of Maryland, a sociologist who studies the American military.
Soldiers became not only more Republican, but also more overtly political:
For the first time, in 1988, a retired four-star general publicly endorsed
George H. W. Bush for president, the sort of public demonstration of
partisanship that would have been unimaginable two decades before.

Bill Clinton's presidency galvanized the base even more strongly. "There was
a lot of anger towards the administration," said Wade Sanders, who served as
deputy assistant undersecretary of the Navy from '93 to '98. Sanders says
that even to military administration higher-ups like him, "it was clear that
with the exception of [defense secretary] Bill Perry, nobody we dealt with
understood the soldiers or were interested in making the services work
better--they had fear of us, but no respect." The pattern of base closings
initiated during the Clinton administration as part of the post-Cold War
draw-down ended up relocating much of the nation's fighting forces to the
South and the Southwest. This not only reinforced the military's southern
cast, but meant that the local congressmen who would fight most strongly for
the people on the military bases were Republicans.

It was during the mid-1990s, sparked by the rather overt and sometimes
borderline disloyal antagonism members of the officer corps showed for the
commander-in-chief, that clued-in academics and journalists began to worry
about the "civil-military divide." Their thesis was that the nation's
soldiers, since Vietnam, had been drifting in a profoundly right-wing
direction, and now found themselves out of step with the more liberal values
of the rest of the country. Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post reporter then
with The Wall Street Journal, wrote a remarkable journalistic account of
this divide in The Atlantic Monthly in '97, which found that soldiers tended
to find civilians undisciplined, immoral, unpatriotic, and selfish. This
divide, Ricks and others worried, was leading to a military that was
increasingly unwieldy, and might grow impossible for civilians to really
control.

Mind the gap

But when the first comprehensive academic study of the topic was published
in 1999, it found that the divide was not as dramatic as had been assumed--a
conclusion the study's lead author, Duke political scientist Peter Feaver,
had not expected. He and his co-authors extensively polled soldiers on
social issues and attitudes and found them "very much in line with what most
of the country believed." But soldiers did differ profoundly from a group
that the survey's authors classed as "cultural elites"--mostly liberal
city-dwellers, people like the Clintons--and the soldiers believed their
values, in some crucial ways, to be directly opposed to elite values.
Soldiers, the study found, fitted firmly within the conservative end of the
American mainstream.

continued...

[thedrifter]

One important moderating influence, sociologists think, has been the
presence of large numbers of uniformed African Americans and, later,
Hispanics and women. In 1973, when the brass tried to figure out how to
staff a volunteer force, they chose to focus their recruiting efforts in
large cities, where the most potential enlistees lived. By the mid-'80s, the
military was the one place in America "where blacks regularly commanded
whites," sociologist Charles Moskos wrote in 1984, and its reputation for
giving minorities a fair shake drew increasing numbers of blacks, Hispanics,
and women. Blacks now comprise almost a quarter of the military, women are
nearly 15 percent, and Hispanics are more than 9 percent. The blacks,
Hispanics, and women in the military are less liberal and Democratic than
blacks, Hispanics, and women in the general population, but they are also
less conservative and Republican than white men in the Armed Forces.

But the conservative base has remained the dominant political feature of the
military, as the 2000 election showed. Agitated after eight years of the
Clinton administration, enlisted men, officers, and veterans turned out
strongly for Bush. George W. Bush found himself endorsed by more than 80
retired senior military officers--the sort of public, partisan support that
would have been unthinkable 20 years earlier. There was a broad sense at all
levels of the services, says Donald Vandergriff, an army major and a
professor at Georgetown, that Bush "understood the military, valued it, that
he would be their guy."

Flag poll

But there were signs of trouble from the beginning. From his first weeks in
office, Rumsfeld initiated a series of semi-secret studies, as he prepared
to revamp the entire military, from the way it deployed soldiers to the
technologies it chose to purchase to the role of the reserves. By early May
'01, Gordon Sullivan, the former Army chief of staff, sent an email to
influential military personnel and thinkers in Washington sharply
criticizing Rumsfeld's project; the note was published in National Journal,
The Washington Post, and other publications, which took Sullivan's remarks
as proxy for the opinions of a senior officer corps prohibited by law from
speaking out themselves. "My sensing," Sullivan wrote, "is the Army will
suffer greatly because of flawed assumptions and theories." Other voices
quickly joined Sullivan's: "[Rumsfeld has] blown off the Hill, he's blown
off the senior leaders in the military, and he's blown off the media,"
Thomas Donnelly, then a defense expert at William Kristol's neoconservative
think-tank Project for the New American Century, told the Post.

But these rumblings were mostly confined to the senior level of the officer
corps, those people who were directly involved in the creation of military
policy. They were also particularly concentrated in the Army, the service
branch that Rumsfeld had targeted for most dramatic reform. And even those
gripes stopped, for the most part, after September 11, when Rumsfeld played
what for most in the military was a hero's role during the attack on the
Pentagon. He had been on the opposite side of the building when the hijacked
plane crashed into the south side, and ran to the spot of the crash to help
out those who had been hurt. The surge of patriotism and common purpose
after September 11 was particularly strong within the military, and it
quieted those officers who had been upset earlier.

Still, there was a persistent, if muted, sense among many in the senior
levels of the officer corps that Rumsfeld's transformation of the military
might be hasty and ill-considered. This opposition coalesced in the buildup
to the Iraq war, and became particularly pointed after Rumsfeld's deputy,
Paul Wolfowitz, pooh-poohed Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's
testimony before Congress that the occupation of Iraq would require
"hundreds of thousands of troops;" Shinseki, not Wolfowitz, turned out to be
right. There was great skepticism among many officers that Iraq was the
right "next target" in the war on terrorism, and an emerging doubt that
Rumsfeld and his lieutenants really knew what they were do-ing. But as the
troops deployed, a sense of mission took over, and much of the grumbling
stopped. Only in the aftermath of the conquest did there emerge a barely
contained fury.

The military's gripes with the administration didn't grow widespread until
after we'd conquered Iraq; the problems with planning, previously a matter
of policy debate for top-level officers, translated into unpleasant
realities for soldiers in the field. Many officers have become disenchanted
with the continuing chaos in Iraq, and with the lengthening of in-country
stays and the changing rotation schedules. "What I've seen throughout the
officer corps is a real pendulum swing over the last three or four months,
from being pro-Bush to anti-Bush," Vandergriff said. "The officers at the
middle levels, who are traditionally the most Republican, are frustrated ...
that there's no exit strategy," and worry that "this conflict could just
drag on and on." Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been friendly enough
with the Bush administration that he was sent last year as the president's
special emissary to the Israelis and Palestinians, last month called the
administration's policy a "brain fart." Says Richard Kohn, a professor of
history at the University of North Carolina and a scholar of the military:
"It is my belief that the Iraq war may be what forces the officer corps to
return to the old George C. Marshall model of non-partisanship."

Corps voters

Discontented enlisted men and women have a separate set of provocations,
which have been aired not only through the embedded media, but through
weblogs updated and emails sent by soldiers in-country. Chief among these
complaints is a widespread criticism that the military has fought this war
with too few troops. The war in Iraq is already brutal enough day-to-day:
Soldiers spend their days in hundred-plus degree heat, being shot at,
peering anxiously into the distance, trying to pick out anyone likely to
drive through a barricade with a car stuffed with explosives or whip a rifle
out from under his robes and start shooting. They are facing an enemy who is
not easily identifiable; when they are too aggressive, they are criticized
by the press, and when they are not aggressive enough, they are reprimanded
by their superiors, if they don't end up dead. In a chaotic situation like
this, soldiers in-country live for the date on which they can return
stateside. But many of them have seen that date pushed back, and then pushed
back again, and then pushed back again. For a soldier, accustomed to
regular, long-planned-for rotations, this makes the operation seem
overwhelmingly open-ended-and is crushing to morale. "They feel overused,
and under-appreciated, particularly in the enlisted ranks," Wilson said.
Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the
University of California-Santa Barbara, put it to me more bluntly: "What
we're seeing now is almost unprecedented, this widespread sense among people
in the military that they're being jacked around."

Smaller slights have taken their toll, too. Those troops who have stayed in
Iraq have been doing jobs that they have not been trained to do--most
notably, combat units are doing peacekeeping. Just weeks after Condoleezza
Rice promised that American troops would not be used to "escort Iraqi kids
to kindergarten," newspaper photographs showed that they were doing exactly
that. When Special Forces needed to be moved from Afghanistan to Iraq this
summer, they were replaced by reservists who had been trained to speak
Spanish and Russian. "There's a sense from everyone I talk to, even down at
the unit level, that whoever planned this war simply had no idea what we
were getting into," a retired Army captain told me.

continued......

[thedrifter]

Troops have been charged a dollar a minute to call home, newspapers have
reported, and soldiers have to buy calling cards from Iraqi kiosks. Tens of
thousands of troops have been sent to Iraq with flak jackets from the
Vietnam era which, unlike the modern Kevlar, can't stop rounds from the
Kalashnikov rifles typically fired by the Iraqi enemy. The Pentagon, looking
to trim costs last spring, floated a plan to eliminate the pay benefits
soldiers got for serving in so-called "hostile areas"; after a loud outcry
from the ranks, they killed the plan. Some injured reservists were billed
for food they were served while in the hospital. And veterans' groups are up
in arms over the concurrent receipt issue, a military regulation which
mandates that no retired soldier receiving his pension from the Department
of Defense can also qualify for disability. As veterans' groups have pointed
out, retired soldiers (who have more legitimate per capita disability claims
than any other group of federal workers) are the only group of employees in
the civil service who are barred from drawing simultaneous pensions and
disability payments. The regulation has been in place for half a century,
but veterans' groups had begun pushing aggressively for a regulation change
in the last years of the Clinton administration, and there was a widespread
expectation that Bush would reward the vets for having supported him so
robustly in the election. "There are six hundred thousand disabled veterans,
and they are furious," Joseph Galloway, Knight Ridder's esteemed military
reporter, told me.

Reservists may be the tipping point. The reserves have been summoned nine
times in the last 12 years, to meet American obligations around the world,
after having previously been summoned only six times since World War II.
Reservists who have been sent to Iraq recently have found themselves vastly
under-equipped. Things have gone so badly for the reservists that many
senior officers, like Helmly, expect a staffing crisis when the current
tours are up.

Values and weathervanes

The effect of all of this, says Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and
professor of political science at Boston University, is that "the soldier
vote and the pro-military vote are in play." In 2004, says Feaver, the
military sociologist at Duke, "there is the potential for these forces which
have always pushed towards the Republicans to be neutralized, or even
pushing towards the Democrats."

If these frustrations spill over into politics in the next election, they
could profoundly shift the structural underpinnings of the current nearly
50-50 American split. This country has 1.4 million active duty soldiers, and
1.2 million reserves. It also has 26.4 million veterans, nearly 13 percent
of the nation's adult population. Politicians and activists involved in
veterans affairs take it as a truism that a defining feature of veterans'
politics is their perception of how the active military is being treated,
and used. Subtle shifts in the way that massive population votes could
obviously have far-reaching impacts in national politics.

A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote
to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved
that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5
percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New
Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio,
expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each
have more than a million veteran voters.

But the military and veterans' communities don't simply deliver their own
votes. All over America, voters look to the military as a sort of
weathervane--an institution whose values civilians trust and want
politicians to support. This is particularly true of working-class white
swing voters, many of whom have a soldier in their family or know someone
who does. The attachment to the military is even more potent among certain
occupations-police, firefighters, engineers--whose ranks are heavily
represented in the reserves. The policemen, firemen, and engineers who stay
at home look across the room each day at the empty desks of their colleagues
fighting in the Iraqi theater. They check email each day for personal
dispatches from the front lines. They drop off food for the left-behind
families.

Then there are those who are not personally connected to the military, but
for whom honor of the military and the military's opinion acts as a moral
barometer, revealing which politicians have the right values and which
don't. The military is a deeply trusted and honored institution in American
life-far more important than the media, politicians, or teachers. To respect
the military doesn't simply require the sort of offhand pieties that liberal
politicians frequently toss at it, but a deeply felt sense of belonging, a
sense that the military embodies values which most of the country believes
in. Treatment of the military consequently acts as an indicator for tens of
millions of Americans who aren't enlisted of how seriously a party,
administration, or politician takes the nation's security, and how competent
he is to defend it. Political scientists call these people national security
voters. "[They] are not so minutely interested in issues like health care
for the military or how many reserves are in Iraq at one time," said Feaver.
"These people rely heavily on general impressions of whether a particular
politician or administration is good for the military or bad for the
military. What should really worry the Republicans is the potential for all
of these problems you hear about to add up to an impression for the national
security voter that the Republicans may not be so good for the military."

The current rough balance in national politics between Democrats and
Republicans is due in large part to a delicate calibration between a
Democratic advantage on domestic issues and a Republican edge on national
security. "Those two things determine the country's political structure;
when they cancel each other out, then other issues, like health care,
education, or social issues become important, but that pretty much only
happens when the economy and national security are not decisive," says John
Aldrich, a political scientist at Duke University. The Republicans have
maintained an advantage of between 15 and 20 points on national security for
the last 20 years, since Ronald Reagan's massive defense spending bills, an
advantage which right now equals the Democratic advantage on the economy.
The calibrations are so precise that minute shifts matter. The great
political triumph of Bill Clinton's presidency was to move the Democratic
advantage on the economy by between two and three points; this slight shift,
Aldrich and other political scientists say, boosted him to sweeping
reelection victory in 1996, and enabled his party to improve their
congressional advance in 1998, an historic achievement for the party of a
second-term president. What has some Republicans scared is the specter of a
similar shift, numerically small but profound, that dents the GOP's
advantage on national security and threatens their slim electoral majority.
This is the kind of vulnerability that could change the structure of
American politics.

Imperial anachronism

But the current discontent among troops will reverberate far beyond the next
election. "Failed wars are momentous occasions in any nation's history,"
observes William Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at
the Free Congress Foundation. And while the ultimate success or failure of
the current war has yet to be determined, Lind notes that "the consequences
of what is happening in Iraq are likely to be complex and profound." The
effects of military failure in Vietnam lasted for decades, as young officers
who served in the rice patties rose in the ranks, eventually translating
their searing experiences into new politics (a heightened distrust of
liberals) and new policy (the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force).
Similarly, those young officers currently coping with the lethal chaos of
the Sunni triangle will forever remember the false assumptions and outright
deceptions that put them in that position. And while it is impossible to
know exactly what their long-term reactions will be, two possibilities come
to mind. First, having strongly supported the GOP, only to watch some of its
leaders dismiss their concerns, many members of the uniformed
military-especially in the Army-may conclude that it is a mistake to bestow
their loyalties on to any one party. Second, having allowed Bush
administration officials to quash their advice and analysis, military
leaders may decide that next time around, they will be less deferential to
policymakers. In other words, the military may become both less partisan and
less respectful of civilian authority-or at least more willing to challenge
that authority when it seems warranted.


continued.......

[thedrifter]

Similar reverberations are likely to alter the Republican Party's conduct of
foreign policy. The GOP has never been a foreign-policy monolith. Its
thinkers span a broad spectrum, from patriotic isolationists like Pat
Buchanan, to go-it-alone interventionists like Rumsfeld and Cheney, to more
moderate figures like Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who value of institutions
like the United Nations. If there was a majority foreign-policy position
among conservative voters and activists before 9/11, it tended to be closest
to the Buchananite wing. Indeed, for the first few months of George W.
Bush's presidency, his foreign policy was cautious, minimalist, and incited
little opposition. But September 11 empowered the administration's
unilateral interventionist wing, and pushed isolationists and
multilateralists to the sidelines. The White House began to adopt policies
that matched the strategic disposition that such officials as Rumsfeld,
Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz had had all along: a belief in the necessity of
aggressive preventative action abroad, and a conviction that international
institutions held values which were at best inconsistent with, and at worst
antithetical to, American principles and interest. Ever since September 11,
Bush has taken most of his advice from "what is really a very, very narrow
range of Republican opinion," says James M. Lindsay, vice president of the
Council on Foreign Relations and a scholar of presidential foreign policy.
Republicans (and Democrats) in Congress went along with the shift-in part,
no doubt, from a sense that perhaps international politics had changed
irrevocably and that the way Americans pursued their goals needed to change,
too, but also because of the political pressures of the moment: It seemed
foolhardy and unpatriotic to criticize a war president with 90 percent
approval ratings. This state of affairs continued until the last few months,
when the Bush administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction,
a mounting death toll, and sticker shock over the bill in Iraq ripped open
the old divisions.

The unilateral interventionists still hold the reins of power within the
GOP, largely because their champions dominate the West Wing and the
Department of Defense. But their purchase on rank and file, Republicans
especially among the military and national security voters, is slipping.
That slippage will continue unless the Bush administration can secure enough
international funds and troops so that the U.S. military presence can be
scaled back without compromising the stability of Iraq. If these efforts
fail, and if that failure contributes to Bush losing in '04, the unilateral
interventionist wing will be disgraced. Power within the GOP will flow to
the isolationists and multilateralists, respectively hampering or helping
any Democrat who might win the presidency.

Six months ago, commentators of all ideological and strategic points of view
were debating the merits, and potential form, of an American empire. But
now, restive citizens are unhappy about the financial burdens of occupation,
and soldiers are complaining to family and friends that they're sitting
ducks and want out. The world-straddling, saber-rattling visions of the
unilateral interventionists, who a few short months ago had Damascus,
Tehran, and Pyongyang in their sights, now seem a little less like an
imminent reality, and a little more like a bad dream.
**********

Sidebar

The Compassion Gap

While I was in North Carolina, I spent two hours as a guest on the local
political call-in show. I came on right after Rush Limbaugh's nationally
syndicated program, and just before the local host interviewed Rush's
brother, David Limbaugh, who has apparently written a book about liberals'
war on Christianity. ("What the secularists don't want to admit," David
Limbaugh told the host, "is that the monks kept learning alive throughout
the Middle Ages.") The callers were all conservative, and no more than one
personal relationship removed from the military (their husband, son, or
co-worker had just left for Iraq, or they themselves had just come back. To
a caller, they were upset with the way the war had been conducted. "The
president keeps dragging these boys over there to be shot at; we don't know
when it's going to end," one widow, from Morehead City, whose husband had
been a veteran, told me. But she, and the other callers, had a
near-sputtering, subarticulate hatred towards the Democrats - from Wesley
Clark on left. "The Democrats are the ones who drew down the forces to begin
with," Tony, a young ex-marine from Havelock, N.C., told me. "They have no
respect for what we're trying to do."

Misusing the military is one thing; failing to respect it is a much more
grave offense. If Democrats are to take advantage of the Republicans'
vulnerability among national security voters in the 2004 Presidential
election, they're going to have to learn to speak the language of the
military, and communicate a passion for and empathy with the soldiers that
few Democrats so far have managed. Another scene I saw at the mobilization
ceremony in Jacksonville suggests the Democrats still have a long way to go.

The Wolverines had invited both North Carolina senators, Democrat John
Edwards and Republican Elizabeth Dole, to address them as they were sent off
to six months of training and 18 months of war, but both had prior
engagements. They sent letters instead, and the mobilization ceremony's MC,
a North Carolina National Guard lieutenant colonel named Tom Harris, read
both aloud, Edwards's first. It was five short sentences long.

"I write to wish you well as you assume a vital role in our nation's
continuing war against terrorism," Edwards wrote. North Carolina Guardsmen
represented the "best our nation has to offer." Edwards offered his "deepest
thanks to you and your loved ones for the courage you so readily display and
the sacrifices you so willingly make."

Dole's, by contrast, was wonderful, touching, and personal. She talked about
the "trials" the soldiers would go through, and how proud and worried the
families would be. She discussed the experiences of her husband, fighting
through the mountains of Italy in World War II She wrote empathetically
about the difficulties that families would face, and employers, and how
crucial their small sacrifice was to the larger, so important sacrifice the
men in the guard would be making. She mentioned the places the men in this
company came from by name, and reminded them how proud they had made those
towns. When Colonel Harris finished reading Dole's letter, the two women on
my left were crying, for the first time in the ceremony, and the older
gentleman in front of me began to applaud, quietly, to himself.

Any Democrat in the crowd or among the Wolverines would have cringed at the
contrast. These letters are an unglamorous staple of life in political
offices in Washington; 27-year old junior staffers, not Edwards or Dole
themselves, wrote them. But they reflected quite clearly what many, many
retired officers told me last month: The Republican majority in the military
community is due less to any specific policies than to a sense that they
"get" what the military is all about, while the Democrats don't. Elizabeth
Dole's letter, compassionate and personal, "got" the military. John
Edwards's perfunctory, bland sending off, which could have been a
fare-ye-well to recently assigned airport security guards, did not.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells is an editor of The Washington Monthly.


Sempers,

Roger
:marine: