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Beat Sweetener

Thank you Joe for this article. I realize that there are some Liberals who will never acknowledge anything good about the Defense Dept. on the rounds that they oppose war, but I for one hope that Obama’s relationship with the military and military families will continue to narrow the gulf between the military and Democrats. Up until now the GOP has had a relationship with the military which from my perspective has often been undeserved. Now I think more members of the military will begin to question that relationship when they compare it to this administration’s treatment of the rank and file and the priorities they institutionalize, thanks in large part to Gates.

Fine column. I like Secretary Gates for all the reasons you described, and I admire President Obama for having the good sense to recognize his “fit” for the job and keep him on – and empower him to get things done.

Very good article. I find this sentence a bit distressing however.
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He insists that he is not abandoning the fancy hardware and future gizmos that his predecessors and Congress loved. “The things we’ve cut,” he told me, “wouldn’t have been in the budget even if we had $50 billion more to spend.
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I am utterly convinced that our entire role as ‘world policman’ and the fact that we have taken on responsibilty for defending lands that are not ours and placing soldiers in places that are only marginally related to our Homeland Security, is dictated by the money we spend and the windfall that spending represents to well connected defense contractors. It’s nice that Mr. Gates has the courage to address the immediate problem of our budget actually reflecting our costs and our priorities, but the wider problem that of the cart pushing the horse as far as our military commitments does not appear in danger of being addressed anytime soon. Add to that the competetive disadvantage inherent in allowing other Countries to avoid the military spending that we seem so addicted to and it’s clear that our current path is still unsustainable in the long term.

Liberals who will never acknowledge anything good about the Defense Dept.
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I know lots of Liberals and I can’t think of one who fits that description. Please don’t allow caricatures and straw people interfere with the very important debate about the best path forward to a safer world.
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There’s too much at stake.

Liberals who will never acknowledge anything good about the Defense Dept.
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Well of course not, we’re too busy spitting on vets.
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Excellent article, Joe.
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This concerns me: The negotiating over the budget is likely to turn brutal, although Obama aides insist the President will veto the budget if Gates isn’t satisfied with the result.
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This will be a major challenge for the Dems, to see whether the party’s leaders can reign in the addiction of military spending earmarks. I have more faith in Peloci than in Reid, frankly.
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And, if the Dems can’t pass a budget that the President can sign, what hope is there for health care reform?

I agree that Sec. Gates seems to be one of the good guys in DC. He’s smart, and has his feet grounded in reality. Love it: a reality-based Defense Department!

Joe you CAN write a very informative, non-partisan article after all! Great job there buddy!.
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What this article screams out to me is, Gates needs to do some political posturing with the Republican Party, and set himself up to run against Obama in 2010. His Truman-esk, straight talking, “No Bull” persona would be a welcome relief come election time in 2010. Obama I think has met his match. Maybe that is why Obama has him in his Administration. Just like Hillary, what better way to put your opponets on wraps by tying them down into your administration.
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Wake up Michael Steele, you have a new Republican Leader to tout to the conservatives!!

Dee:
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I realize that there are some Liberals who will never acknowledge anything good about the Defense Dept. on the rounds that they oppose war…
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This sounds like the repetition of the stereotype manufactured by conservatives, and then adopted and spread by centrists in order to discredit liberals generally. It’s the genesis of the “Democrats are weak on National Security” meme.
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This image is in place because it serves the interests of those who would like to see the two parties continually “in balance” in terms of political power, with Republicans being the strong, war-oriented “Daddy-party”, and Democrats being the nurturing, welfare-oriented “Mommy-party”. If one party fit both of those roles…well, we’d have the potential for something like Democrats under Roosevelt leading the country through WWII and out of the Great Depression, leaving little existential justification for the Republicans. They had to amend the Constitution, so that a Democratic President couldn’t run for more terms after Roosevelt, didn’t they? For those committed to “balance” in a two party system (instead of working for a multi-party system like in a real democracy), the possibility of one party vanishing is rightly terrifying, and so the two parties must always stand in “opposition” over their roles in the polity, each being congenitally “bad” at something important. In this way do centrists control government, through the manipulation of the images of the two parties.
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There are no Ghandis in the Democratic Party, and real pacifists are extraordinarily rare. Liberals just aren’t bellicose idiots marching to holocaust for its own stupidly symbolic sake. Liberals are just smart enough to know that given natural forces at work in the psyches of human beings, empires aren’t sustainable constructions. The whole “some liberals hate the military” thing is even more wildly marginal than whatever the Code Pink ladies are wasting their time on these days.
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I really challenge you to support this notion of yours, Dee, by demonstrating that there is some kind of significant constituency or wing amongst liberals whose identities fit this anti-military, pacifist image you bring up. I’m open to being persuaded that there some evidence I haven’t seen yet, and that there’s some basis in 2009 reality for believing that “some liberals” misguidedly took MLK’s non-violent civil disobedience strategy and applied it to foreign policy overall.
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If you can’t produce such evidence, maybe you might want to rethink where and how you got that idea, and see if it might simply be an inaccurate stereotype that’s been in wide use by our centrist-dominated political media…

“Wake up Michael Steele, you have a new Republican Leader to tout to the conservatives!!”
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/snark???
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I really can’t tell. The very idea that a serious, non-ideological republican could win the nomination in today’s repuglican freakshow is laughable.
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That rusty might long for such a candidate is intriguing.

As a liberal AND a lifetime employee of the Defense Department, I would also disagree.

stuart:
Coming to Dee’s defense, I believe the meme that “Democrats are weak on Defense”, is the ideology of a strong military conflicts with the Democrats’ diplomacy tactics.
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Obama himself said this in the primary. “The reference to “some action” might be interpreted as an endorsement of the use of force, but in the rest of his response, Obama softened even that notion. “But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast,” he said. “Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community. Because as has already been stated, we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We’ve got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they’ve got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.”
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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI3Nzc5ZjYxZGQwNTlhYWRlNzM4ZDdiZmJhZDRjM2I=
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In Obama’s world, diplomacy trumps all military intervention. We see this right now on how he is being “tested” on the world stage with both Korea and Iran. Both Countries despite Obama’s out-reach to them have thumbed up their noses at him. They are making him seem very weak on defense and any military action. Obama’s own statements in the primarys that he would “hunt Bin Laden down” are also further proof that he is weak on defense or offense when it comes to military action.
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Dee is right stuart. You can’t have an appeasement diplomacy and a strong hawkish attitude with the military (aka Hillary), and have everyone believe you are not weak when it comes to the military or the defense of the United States.

I think this cartoon says it all.
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http://www.pritchettcartoons.com/gym.htm

That rusty might long for such a candidate is intriguing.
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No snark at all, I am very serious wvng.

It says it all rusty…about the simplistic way Republicans view the world.
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“Dropping bombs on foreigners proves we’re tough and makes us safer!”
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Reality, once again, is no friend to Republican propaganda.
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wow. talk about declining standards…
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the second line in Joe’s column contains a non-word…
Even reasonable members of Congress have been known to empretzel themselves shamelessly…
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has Time laid off all its proof-readers?

Rusty, from an old thread, I wasn’t suggesting you watch Sicko. I was suggesting you take 2 hours and watch TR Reid’s Sick Around the World.

pluk – Joe excels at neologisms. very effective word.

It made sense to me. It’s a cross between a Bushism and Lewis Carroll.

Joe – very good article. I hope Gates is fully worth of the praise you give him.
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I’m curious about this sentence: “Every time we tried to do something for the troops in the field in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we had to go outside the regular Pentagon bureaucracy to get it done,” Gates recalled. Was Gates part of the “we” at that time? Or is he just reading himself back into the department and expressing how he feels about the lack of support from the bureauocracy for the troops.

“What this article screams out to me is, Gates needs to do some political posturing with the Republican Party, and set himself up to run against Obama in 2010.”
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If I were the wagering type, I’d put my money on Gates running as an independent or a Dem before running as a Republican (though I just don’t see him running at all). The type of Republican that Gates represents is a critically endangered species.

rusty,
The Presidents remarks very clearly refer to the difference between the USA going it alone vs having support (including troops) from our allies. You might recall a little situation called the Iraq war. The operational differences between the Bush I approach to Iraq I and Bush II’s approach to Iraq II were quite stark and that would appear to be precisely what Obama was addressing in that little passage you found.
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Again, your preconceptions are able to completely obliterate the actual meaning of the sentences you read. Scary when you think about it…..

I can’t imagine Gates running as a republican. He has to know that serving under Obama has made him toxic to what remains of the republican party. Colin Powell took a stand against the lunacy and look where it got him.

And also Rusty, contrary to life in your comic-book world, in the real world it’s entirely possibble for military operations to fail resulting in the tragic loss of thousands of good people to no good purpose. I’m not sure what actions you imagine will be effective in dealing with North Korea or Iran but simply thinking that throwing more ordinance at the problem will be a sign of strength rather than a collosal blunder is one of the reasons I don’t want you or people who think like you within 100 miles of the chain of command.

“appeasement diplomacy”
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Did we give the North Koreans the Sudetenland? I missed it.

PD: You’re never going to convince people who think that just because we have the ability to destroy a country means that we should do it. Refusing to negotiate doesn’t work and neither does bombing them into oblivion.

Speaking of North Korea, here’s Thomas E. Ricks:
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I said I was gonna ignore North Korea, and I still intend to. But I was struck by this comment by proven provider John McCreary in his NightWatch:
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During the past 40 years North Korean leaders have been blustery but fundamentally risk averse. They have done nothing that would risk the total destruction of their state — which means Pyongyang for all practical and symbolic purposes — until now…. The actions in the past two days represent risk accepting behavior, defiance bordering on recklessness. This behavior began shortly after Kim Chong-il’s stroke in August 2008. If Kim is ordering these actions, he has had a personality change, which can occur if dementia follows a stroke, according to medical authorities.”

North Korea does worry me. Desperate and crazy is not a good combo.

LOVED THIS ARTICLE – ADMIRE WHAT GATES IS WORKING TO DO ON BEHALF OF ALL OF US AND YOUR TELLING OF THE TALE – INTERESTING TO READ HOW SOME OF THE RESPONDERS ARE “EMPRETZELING” THEMSELVES OVER ALL OF THIS. JOEL: GREAT WORD, HAD TO GOOGLE IT TO SEE IF IT REALLY EXISTED…ABSOLUTELY ACCURATE IN A NUMBER OF CIRCUMSTANCES. SEE FOR EXAMPLE SESSIONS VS SOTOMAYOR. LOVE IT!

Has Time magazine mentioned that the clueless, anti-military, socialist thinks his Secretary of Defense is named “William Gates”?

Joe,
 
This was my favorite line:
 

Obama aides insist the President will veto the budget if Gates isn’t satisfied with the result.

 
I would love to see Congress try to mess with the two toughest men in Washington.

“Obama’s own statements in the primarys that he would “hunt Bin Laden down” are also further proof that he is weak on defense or offense when it comes to military action”
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Ummm, huh? What the heck are you talking about? Only in Rightwing Bizzaro World…

Re: appeasement diplomacy- No we didn’t engage in appeasement with them, we just gave them millions in oil bonuses and other things, which they took and immediately secretly disregarded the agreement. Oh wait.

stuart: Mommy/Daddy Party discussion aside, it still baffles me that the Dems get labeled as being “weak” on defense, when it was Wilson and Roosevelt who fought and won WWs I & II!
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Stuart, as one of those dem-voting “Liberals who will never acknowledge anything good about the Defense Dept,” I appreciate your rejoinder though I’m aware you’re no pacifist.
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A few pts: I live in a multiparty “democracy” and since 1955 (with the exception of 10 months) the same party has been in power, so be careful what you wish for. Japan is unique, of course–as a dietmember once quipped, it’s the only dictatorship on earth supported by the citizenry. But I agree viable 3rd+ parties are almost always enhancements of democracy. I like coalition rule and parliamentary systems in general. I love watching J or British parliamentary debate, the rhetorical brutality that cuts through the ceremonial bubble surrounding our own vaunted leaders.
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As for liberals or Americans who vote democratic not supporting the military, are you denying that part of your party feels this way? Perhaps I’m misreading you, but it appears as if you’re validating Dee’s view that anyone who eschews empire, military force etc. is damaging to the party’s image/ability to project strength. I agree that we hold almost no sway in congress, no leverage with the party leadership, including Obama, but to deny our existence outright? Surely you’re exaggerating. Cuz I’m from a family of them, and I spent most of my life around academics who see Gandhi and MLK as models to emulate, who view the Pentagon as an evil entity (under any CIC’s reign). But every 2-4 years, with Naderite exceptions, we lumber to the polls, noses held, to vote for dems.
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We may be a small, silent “wing” but we do exist. Given your address, I’m sure you encounter us everyday.

“what are they gonna do, fire me?” Sweet! i love our foreign policy team! Gates, Hillary, Jones. I mean, somehow, i feel that because the president is so confident and so good at his job by having them working together and sharing the work, they have even more power than if they didn’t. Which is rather surprising. We’ll look back in about a decade and two, and we’ll say this team was the most influential and qualified and effective in a very long time.

Oregon JC:
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be careful what you wish for
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That’s always the danger with progressive policies, isn’t it? Isn’t that the inherent risk of applied liberalism? Isn’t that why it is always important to listen to intelligent conservative arguments?
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As for liberals or Americans who vote democratic not supporting the military, are you denying that part of your party feels this way?
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Yes, I categorically deny that there is a significant population of liberals who vote Democratic that are actually anti-military or outright pacifists. To say otherwise would be like asserting that there’s a liberal wing of the Democratic Party that votes Foucault. It’s ludicrous. Nobody could possibly declare with at straight face that there is some sort of a Quaker wing of the party whose goal is total, unilateral disarmament along the lines of post-war Japan –nobody except a truly dedicated rightist, of course.
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Perhaps I’m misreading you, but it appears as if you’re validating Dee’s view that anyone who eschews empire, military force etc. is damaging to the party’s image/ability to project strength.
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No, you are misreading me. When I said “Liberals just aren’t bellicose idiots marching to holocaust for its own stupidly symbolic sake. Liberals are just smart enough to know that given natural forces at work in the psyches of human beings, empires aren’t sustainable constructions.” I was attempting to address the differences between rightist “American Century” fantasizing and liberal realism. I can’t imagine that you are proposing that there is even a minority population of voting Democrats who totally eschew military force, Oregon JC. Are you really? Is there a “not even in self-defense” wing of liberalism of which I am unaware?
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What we do as liberals is make the distinction between militarists, corrupt military-industrial opportunists, know-nothing jingoists, arch-statists, neo-monarchists, imperialists and ourselves. We are strong, because we know the meaning of strength, and that it lies in far more than our military capabilities.
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I spent most of my life around academics who see Gandhi and MLK as models to emulate, who view the Pentagon as an evil entity (under any CIC’s reign).
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This is a tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny bunch of academics and theorists. It’s like saying that most American Marxists held their noses and voted for Bill Clinton. It’s statistically, electorally meaningless. There are members of the Republican Party who are also members of the Aryan Nation. If we were being intellectually honest, decent people we would be unable to make the claim that this is a significant element of conservatism or Republicanism. That there are literally theocrats who control a huge wing of the Republican party is another story.
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Viewing the Pentagon as an “evil entity” gets into being anti-statist, anti-corporatist, anti-establishment or anti-imperialist, but a population of those who truly hate the idea of any Defense Department led by any politician –those who go well beyond the founders’ excellent cautions against the risks of a standing federal army– simply isn’t in evidence, Oregon JC, unless we count the two hundred or so boys and girls who fly the black flag of anarchism every May Day in Tompkins’ Square Park in my East Village.
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We may be a small, silent “wing” but we do exist. Given your address, I’m sure you encounter us everyday.
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I’m sure that there may have existed a brief time during the 1970′s when John Lennon’s sort of political experimentation was in vogue here in the City, but I think that that sort of thing died with him. You have to understand: we generally liked how Rudy Giuliani turned the place around. We were exposed to an attack eight years ago that left us especially thankful for those who serve in uniform. We’re New Yorkers –even as artists, activists and academics, we’re not especially talented at pacifism.
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There are plenty of people who are generally contemptuous of the reflexive jingoism of small-town Americans, there are plenty of us who are informed enough to be painfully aware of when we do things like phosphorus-bomb Fallujah, there are plenty of people who have a more complete view of American history, there are plenty of people who can plainly see that the road to fascism lies through the stupid worship of the institutional military.
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We are not reflexively anti-military, though, despite the veteran-spitting mythology told around rightist campfires. We’re not all Wiccans here in Manhattan, either. We’re just diverse.
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I appreciate your having given me an opportunity to clarify, Oregon JC. Thanks so much for responding; your disagreements are usually very thoughtful.

Stuart, I’ll have to read this more fully later. Between classes, but I’ll attempt to mediate between the views we’ve expressed here. For different reasons, we may be misreading each other. I like that “usually” you throw in at then there.

Interesting discussion here…
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I’ll just add that I think there are a significant number of people who see MLK and Gandhi as models to emulate yet recognize the need for a Defense department. But recognizing that need isn’t inconsistent with essentially disliking this “necessary evil.”
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BTW, I’m not describing myself here, just other people I’ve known.

OK, firstly, maybe “be careful what you wish for” applied in more ways than one. Seriously, I appreciate the long & (as-always) thoughtful response. As I mentioned recently, misreadings here probably arose due to a lack of precision with some of my terms and/or hasty posting. Rose may offer an effective opening qualification above—I basically agree. Though I dream of ideal worlds, I’m not that naïve and accept necessary evils, everyday it seems (i.e. work).
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But I’d add that there are many kinds of pacifists, and the more pragmatic version (perhaps dove is the better term) would not reject a right to self-defense. Regardless, we can agree: there’s not a significant # of hardcore pacifists within the democratic party. “Anti-military,” however, I would take issue with. Again, perhaps it’s about precision. Anti-flag, anti-troops, spitting on GIs, no. Anti-MIC, anti-Pentagon progressives who have not supported an American war since Korea—this I’d deem a sizeable chunk of the dem-voting population. Surely, you’d agree that Obama received millions of votes from citizens who disagree (then and/or now) with his Iraq timetable and his double-down approach in Af-Pak (out of nearly 70 million votes, this seems reasonable). Hardcore pacifists, perhaps not, but what wars do you see such progressives supporting (aside from self defense)? Do you think they’d want (barring media war chanting and Tonkin like b-s) to expel more blood in defense of our ostensible allies? Or is the truth that we’re moving towards the example of Europe or Japan, that a growing number of Americans see in war nothing short of futility.
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In any event, whether these people are members of the dem. party or independents, I simply can’t say. Nor could you, I might add—but how very sure you sound. I’m a member of the party, my father is, my sister is—anti-war progressives all of us. Untold number of my friends and colleagues, including numerous fellow expats here, they are too. Most of these progressive idealists, occasional protest votes notw/standing, end up siding with dems in the end. Nader got 2 million less votes in 2008 than in 2000. Where did those votes go, those progressives who’d lost hope in a 3rd party (i.e. real change)? To Obama, to Paul, to none of the above perhaps? What of the 100s of 1000s of Iraq war protestors—can we quantify how many of them were dems, indies, against that particular war or all wars—“no” x 4, but to deny their voices, their existence outright seems absurd to me. I recall Gallup at one point estimating that 5% of Americans participated in those futile (there’s that word again) protests. Stuart, that’s 15 million Americans—again, are they hardcore pacifists, perhaps not, but do they mistrust the Pentagon (regardless of the party in power) and see annual defense budgets of $600 billion as batsh!t crazy, I daresay yes.
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And, OK, maybe, as with Wiccans, we don’t surround you in NYC, but b/c you’ve not encountered many of us in your experience, b/c our beloved media all but ignores deviants like me, does not mean we don’t exist. In a two-party system with remarkably similar foreign/military policies (plus it’s all-star propaganda arm: MSM), I must say that I find it discouraging to see fellow dems discounting our relevance, that we’re simply inconsequential. It’s an issue of marginalization IMO Stuart. Like gays, like women, blacks or minorities once upon a time (and still today to an extent), b/c we’re not granted a voice, b/c we’re discursively banished from the MSM debate, that doesn’t mean we don’t exist. And, god, if that sounds victim-like, forgive me—it’s not my intent.
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I can appreciate the nuance you offer and agree that most people lie between the poles, between pacifists like me and the jingoists. But denying that folks like me exist in sizeable numbers, or assuming how we vote, that seems to be overreaching. And I’d hope you’re not putting me in the same extreme category as the neocons, a la Obama’s rhetorical sleight of hand last week, saying that hardcore civil libertarians and the likes of Dick Cheney are equally extreme/to be ignored.
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Finally, and I know you weren’t making this point, but since when does an ideology have to be popular to be just? Popularity gives us prop 8, popularity gave us segregation and slavery for far too f@cking long. B/C a plurality of Americans is OK with a military of some kind or war, preemptive or otherwise, that means what, exactly? I’ve attempted, vainly I’m sure, to negotiate what separates us, rhetorically at the least. I’ve also tried to avoid straying into a discussion of war itself. Thanks for reading.

I enjoy reading the long, well-reasoned, thoughtful posts. I always learn something that makes me contemplate the validity of my own reasonings. However, I try to keep my posts shorter in an effort to dislodge rusty from his selection as comment of the day on the main politics page. They’ve left it there for over a f#@king week. Surely one of us had said SOMETHING that deserves to be stuck there. It’s not like he wrote the 23rd Psalm or anything.

Just so that you know, Oregon JC, I’ve read your comment thoroughly, and am under workload & time constraints today, so I may not be able to respond appropriately.
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Thanks very much for your excellent response, though.