NEW DEM DAILY: Good Night, Vietnam

Nathan Newman nathanne at nathannewman.org
Tue Apr 1 12:59:45 PST 2003

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And why should I take a posting from New Dem Daily seriously, when their candidate Lieberman has far less chance of getting the nomination than antiwar Howard Dean.

-- Nathan Newman

----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>

[hey Nathan, what about that "muscular internationalism"?]

============================================= THE NEW DEM DAILY, 01-APR-03 Political commentary & analysis from the DLC ============================================= [ New Democrats Online: http://www.ndol.org ]

Good Night, Vietnam

The onset of the war in Iraq has created a dilemma for those Democrats who opposed last year's resolution authorizing military force, and this year's decision to use force when the United Nations could not come up with an alternative means of disarming Saddam Hussein.

Former Gov. Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric has made him the unlikely darling of liberal activists in Iowa and elsewhere, has been visibly struggling to criticize the war without appearing to undermine the troops. He vowed not to "personally" attack the president on the war, but has instead continued to attack his Democratic rivals who voted to authorize force.

But one antiwar Democrat has refused to change his rhetoric at all, and is supplying a fascinating exhibition of the Left's "Vietnam Syndrome": the tendency to interpret any military conflict through the nostalgic lens of the political struggle against the war in Vietnam.

Like rock musicians, antiwar protesters tend to keep going back to the 1960s and early 1970s for role models and inspiration. But few are as fearlessly faithful to the Vietnam War era of protests as presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who made a speech on the first day of the war in Iraq that consciously echoed George McGovern's "Come Home America" acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic Convention.

"Come home, America," said Kucinich to the National Newspaper Association on March 20. "Come home and fix your broken streets and mend your broken dreams.... Come home and establish a living wage.... Come home and provide single payer, guaranteed health care for the forty-one million Americans who suffer illness without relief.... Come home and provide guaranteed social security for generations to come without privatization and without extending the retirement age, which would be devastating for minorities.... Come home and make non-violence an organizing principle within our society through the creation of a Department of Peace, America!"

The Kucinich campaign is sort of the Unclaimed Freight Outlet of Democratic politics, retailing every failed or outdated lefty idea with a fierce and touching passion.

But Kucinich also reflects a persistent if small faction in the party that helps reinforce Republican claims that Democrats simply cannot be trusted with military leadership or with vigorous defense of our national interests. These come-home- America liberals are in many respects still fighting against the Vietnam War, and tend to react to any prospective use of military force by hauling out the same old signs and slogans. As a Pew Research Group poll recently showed, they are isolated from the rest of the U.S. electorate in their opposition to the war. If allowed to define the Democratic Party's approach to national security issues, they would undoubtedly drag the party back into the electoral hole it inhabited for much of the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s and 1980s.

Antiwar Democrats are entitled to their opinions. In fact, we share most of their concerns about the Bush Administration diplomacy that has made the drive to disarm Iraq such a lonely endeavor for the United States and the United Kingdom, without letting those concerns obscure the national interest in toppling Saddam. But antiwar Democrats do not have the right to claim, as Dean often does, that opposing the war is a matter of fidelity to Democratic tradition, or that antiwar Democrats represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

The truth is that there's an enduring tradition of Democratic support for the principled use of force that predated and survived the tragedy of the Vietnam War. It was built by Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, who practiced and preached a muscular internationalism, often exercised over the protests of isolationist Republicans. This is the tradition that President Bill Clinton sought to revive, and that led him to lead NATO to military action in Kosovo, again over the protests of neo- isolationist Republicans. It supports active diplomacy, collective security and multilateral institutions, not in order to surrender our country's right to act on its principles, but because good allies and strong institutions of international law make us stronger as well. And it's the tradition that was reflected in a Congressional use-of-force resolution that demanded the Administration take its case against Saddam to the United Nations while preserving America's right to enforce international law against Iraq alone if necessary.

Some aging baby boomers may continue to view every military conflict as a reprise of the big war of their youth, and some politicians may opportunistically offer them a sort of battleground reenactment of the protests they fondly remember. But for the rest of us, the Vietnam War is long over, and it's time to reassert Democratic internationalism for a new era.