From the Bar©

Two recent posts I thought should be repeated here. The original posts and posters I'm responding to can be found at Baen's Bar

Mike Spehar said:

No matter how meritorious, [Kerry's Vietnam record] is a rather slender reed upon which to build a Presidential campaign. Or at least that seemed to be the Democratic consensus between 1992 and 2000.

I agree. As others are explaining, using military service in a campaign has a long tradition in American presidential politics. But no, it's not enough to build an entire campaign upon. Kerry needs to be focusing on the many policy failures—foreign and domestic—of the Administration and his regrettably few solutions to them. Hopefully that's what his eighty-million dollar war-chest (intelligently unused throughout August) will go towards.

In this election, both sides are focusing too much on the military records of the candidate. I have been ignoring the 'Nam era posting on the bar for a while, because I long ago determined three things. 1) John Kerry did more to serve his country in Vietnam than George W. Bush—though he's exaggerating his record some, just like every veteran candidate since Eisenhower. 2) This is a point in Kerry's favor, but not a big one, and not really worth arguing about. 3) This is a point in Kerry's favor, but not a big one, and not really worth arguing about.

Now, I realize that, technically, that was only two things. But I thought the second was such a big, important point, so ignored by so many otherwise reasonable people, that it was worth repeating.

Daniel Ball talked about something more current:

Iraq was playing the Chess game, and eliminating someone the RIFs were treating as a major piece. It was also about shifting the front line back to the Middle East, _instead_ of the Continental U.S. If a potential terrorist is getting shot or blowing himself up in Baghdad or Fallujah, he isn't doing it in downtown Poughkeepsie, Butte Montana, Dallas Texas, or Los Angeles-and the Americans he might be going after can and will shoot back, unlike the residents of Chicago, Baltimore, or Boston. Virtually ANY nation in the Middle East would have sufficed, but we had a pretext to use Iraq, and a sentiment within the Uniformed Services that the job was started and left unfinished (also a popular sentiment to that effect in much of what folk like you tend to think of as "Flyover country", or "Hillbillyland").

Of course, it's possible that rather subtle, nuanced reasoning really was getting listened to at Bush's cabinet meetings. I'd be a bit surprised, but let's give the Administration the benefit of the doubt and see how well the logic holds up.

Creating a battleground between Americans and Islamofascists in the Middle East does not make American soil safer. First, Iraq does not simply sponge up the world's supply of terrorists and keep them safely contained. It actually functions to increase the anti-American radicals across the middle east. Second, 9/11-style attacks do not require a huge amount of resources or organization, only some extremely dedicated fanatics with the intelligence to subvert our security net. Sending more troops to Iraq does not increase the number of troopers patrolling the Oregon coastline. As he said, any number of countries in the middle would serve to
accomplish...nothing much.

But I'm interested in the fact that he claims "had a pretext to [invade] Iraq." I think we can agree on that. Even Secretary Powell has now admitted that WMDs are unlikely to ever be found in Iraq. The only thing we knew Saddam ever had was chemical weapons, which kill fewer people, pound for pound, than conventional weapons.

I also wonder where people get the impression people in the flyovers considered Iraq an "unfinished job." I grew up in Utah and live in West Virginia now, and my impression is that people here genuinely believed Iraq had the bomb. That is why the editorial pages of papers like the Charleston (WV) Gazette or the Salt Lake Tribune feel they were hoodwinked by the administration and say that, knowing what they do now, they would not have supported the war.

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