[lbo-talk] All hail Clinton's military!

Seth Kulick skulick at linc.cis.upenn.edu
Thu Apr 10 14:20:37 PDT 2003


from the Matthew Miller piece they cite: "The reality is that Bill Clinton's defense budgets roughly tracked the blueprint left by then-defense secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. But politics explains why Bill Clinton insisted the Pentagon maintain a Cold War budget even without a Cold War, to protect his party's right flank. For the same reason, Al Gore called for bigger defense budgets during the 2000 campaign than did George W. Bush - a fact that almost no one recalls..."

----- Forwarded message from New Democrats Online <admin at mail.ndol.org> -----

Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:42:41 -0500 From: New Democrats Online <admin at mail.ndol.org> Subject: NEW DEM DAILY: Victory Is The Work of Many Hands To: skulick at linc.cis.upenn.edu

============================================= THE NEW DEM DAILY, 10-APR-03 Political commentary & analysis from the DLC ============================================= [ New Democrats Online: http://www.ndol.org ]

Victory Is The Work of Many Hands

The fall of Baghdad may not mean the end of the war in Iraq, but it probably means the end of the second-guessing of U.S. military capabilities and war planning heard so often during the last three weeks.

You can hardly blame Vice President Dick Cheney for his derisive remarks yesterday about the "retired generals embedded in TV studios" who doubted the high-speed, high-tech plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom. But while he was at it, Cheney should have repudiated his own comments of less than three years ago about the weakness of the U.S. armed forces. "There is an enormous amount of evidence out there ... in terms of readiness and morale, the problems with recruiting, problems with retention, that the military is in trouble today," Cheney said on the 2000 campaign trail.

Well, it's basically that same military that entered Baghdad yesterday. As journalist Matt Miller noted, "The remarkable feats in Iraq are being performed by Bill Clinton's military.... It's true that President Bush has been throwing money at the Pentagon since Sept. 11, but defense planners will tell you that none of the impressive leaps in our military capability have taken place suddenly in the last eighteen months."

Indeed, back in 2000, even Cheney, reflecting on the First Gulf War's dependence on defense planning in the 1980s, said: "A commander in chief leads the military built by those who came before him."

In other words, every military victory is the work of many hands. And while the Bush Administration, like all Americans, can be rightly proud of the performance of the armed forces in Iraq, it's not an accomplishment that one Administration, much less one political party, can rightly claim as its own.

We congratulate those in both parties who worked for decades to build today's military, and those in Congress who voted last October to put it to use in a just cause.

Related Material:

"Clinton's Military Triumphs in Iraq!" By Matthew Miller, Tribune Media Services, April 9, 2003: <http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?custid=67&catid=1104>

"A Time for Resolve," New Dem Daily, October 3, 2002: <http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250924&kaid=131&subid=192>



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