The coming politics of war & upheaval
By Patrick J. Buchanan
June 20, 2005
2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Who is the Gene McCarthy of this generation?
For those too young to recall, in late 1967, Gen. Westmoreland came
home to ask LBJ for 200,000 more troops for Vietnam, in addition to
the 500,000 already committed. LBJ told him no.
Vietnam was the issue of the day. And as no other Democrat dared
challenge Johnson in the primaries of 1968, Sen. McCarthy bravely went
into New Hampshire and declared against him.
He carried 41 percent to LBJ's 49 percent. Johnson's name, however,
was not on the New Hampshire ballot – he was a write-in candidate –
and perhaps half of McCarthy's vote came from Granite State hawks who
wanted the United States to unleash its power and win the war.
But in politics, perception is all. Gene McCarthy broke Johnson's
presidency and converted the anti-war movement into a mass political
movement. Four days after New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy leapt into the
race. Two weeks later, Johnson announced he would not run.
Nixon's victory in 1968, over a divided Democratic Party, became, with
1932, one of the two seminal elections of the 20th century.
Prediction: A Eugene McCarthy will appear soon to pressure and
challenge Hillary Clinton in 2008, if Hillary does not convert herself
into an anti-war candidate.
For politics abhors a vacuum. And with U.S. casualties now running at
the rate they did before the January elections and polls showing that
three in five Americans think the war a mistake and we should start
bringing the troops home, some Democrat is certain to try to give
voice to this majority and ride it into the White House.
Will a peace candidate be elected? Probably not. None ever has in
wartime. But it seems certain the Democratic Party will be as divided
on Iraq in 2008 as it was on Vietnam in 1968.
Why has no national anti-war Democrat emerged since Howard Dean's
campaign collapsed in Iowa – one who could be a serious candidate for
the nomination in 2008?
Because serious Democrats know that anti-war candidates are rarely
nominated and never win. Even the venerable Sam Nunn of Georgia was
finished after he opposed the Gulf War in 1991. This is likely a
reason why skeptics of the Iraq war – like Clinton, Kerry, Daschle and
Edwards – all voted for war.
They are all now locked in as war hawks on Iraq. The only defense they
can make for that vote today to their anti-war party is to argue that
Bush misled them and mismanaged the war.
But that raises counter-questions.
Why did these senators give Bush a blank check to go to war? Why did
they fail in their duty as custodians of the congressional war powers
by not demanding Bush prove Saddam had ties to 9-11 and an arsenal of
WMD he planned to use? Why did they not ask in advance how the Bush
administration planned to pacify and democratize Iraq? Why did they
not demand to known how long pacification would take and what the cost
might be in lives and treasure?
Why did they not say: Mr. President, you must make a better case for
war – before we authorize war?
The pro-war Democrats thus have a grave dilemma to confront.
As John Kerry demonstrated with his agonized performance in 2004 –
trying to rally anti-war Democrats while maintaining his war-hawk
credentials – a Democrat who voted for war, only to turn against it,
risks being ridiculed as a cut-and-run liberal. And that is usually
fatal.
There is a second reason no potential Democratic nominee has yet
demanded that Bush start bringing the troops home now. Democrats fear
the peacenik label. For they believe this label, pinned on them by
Nixon-Reagan-Bush Republicans, froze them out of the White House for
20 of the 24 years from 1968 to 1992. And they are right.
Yet the anti-war constituency has now grown to where it can sustain,
and will demand, a national candidate to carry its case to the
country.
What about a Republican anti-war candidate in 2008?
There may well be one, but how such a candidate can be nominated by a
party that will be forever associated with the Iraq war is impossible
to see. Like it or not, as the Mexican War is known as "Jimmy Polk's
War," the Iraq war is going to be known as "George Bush's War."
No matter how badly things have gone in Iraq by 2008, how can the GOP
nominate a candidate who has run against the cause that defined the
presidency of George W. Bush?
As the Bush poll numbers fall and the Iraq war returns
front-and-center to politics, the divisions in this country over
whether to stay the course; escalate, as the prospect of failure is
intolerable to the nation; or begin to withdraw and take the
consequences will reappear and deepen.
A politics of war, a politics of upheaval, lie just ahead.
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