David Bromwich, Professor of Literatue at Yale, offers these troubling thoughts about a possibly new, emerging dynamic with repect to America and its chosen wars:
Yet ever since Senator Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of “twenty years of treason” — the charge that, under presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the U.S. had lost a war against Communist agents at home we did not even realize we were fighting — it has become a folk truth of American politics that the Republican Party is the party that knows about wars: how to bring them on and how to end them.
Practically, this means that Democrats must be at pains to show themselves more willing to fight than they may feel is either prudent or just. As the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton attests, and as the first half year of Obama has confirmed, Democratic presidents feel obliged either to start or to widen wars in order to prove themselves worthy of every kind of trust. Obama indicated his grasp of the logic of the Democratic candidate in time of war as early as the primary campaign of 2007, when he assured the military and political establishments that withdrawal from Iraq would be compensated for by a larger war in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected never to give up one war without taking on another.
Any thoughts?
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