The Promise of Substance
I just saw excerpts from Kerry’s and Bush’s current speeches. It was mostly standard political grandstanding on military funding. However, Kerry’s rhetoric was familiar: “The United States of America should never go to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to”. It sounds a lot like Bush in 2000 (or, for that matter, the bulk of GOP foreign policy in the 90s). One traditional stereotype of Democrats and Republicans is that one of the latter wants only to invest in building up military capability and the latter wants only to apply it where it is needed. Now that we have an interventionist Republican president, are we headed back to a world with a hawk party and a dove party? Or is the division between the parties going to focus the multilateralism of military action? Did we ‘need to’ send troop to Serbia or patrol the no-fly zone in Iraq? Has the entire tenor of discussions about ‘nation building’ been inverted by the fact that we now want to get involved in improving other nations as much for our sake as for theirs?
I was once afraid that the Democrats push to be agreeable to the administration was going to deprive this election of meaningful debates about the issues of the day. I am less worried about that now. The place of our military in the world is a pressing issue for many reasons, and our country can only benefit from a real discussion of it. The same cannot be said for Bush’s birthday cards to Ken Lay, whether Kerry was throwing medals or ribbons, the minutiae of Edwards’s cases or Cheney’s duck hunting escapades.