Republicans don’t. Democrats do.

I am struck by how Republicans have begun to criticize Obama over Afghanistan. Clint Eastwood seems to think that Obama started the war. As with bin Laden’s capture, Romney and Republicans try to find any way they can to criticize Obama for a war Republicans fumbled and Obama has finally brought to a close. And though Romney has not, like many in his party, promised war in Iran, it is implied if we are to take his statements on the issue seriously—and a war with Iran could turn out to be even longer and bloodier than the last two we have only just now begin to close the door or.

And yet, somehow, still, Republicans have the reputation for being on the side of the soldier, when nothing could be further from the truth.

The public image is reversed, but the public image is wrong. As General Wesley Clark so aptly put it in 2004, “Republicans like weapons systems; Democrats like the soldiers.”

Republicans use soldiers as tools regardless of their safety. Republicans started two massive land wars in Asia, the longest wars in U.S. history, bound to be meat grinders for the soldiery. One was made necessary by a security blunder by a Republican administration and was not only mismanaged by that administration, but was all but forgotten about by them. Bin Laden at Tora Bora. Allowing the Taliban to resurge while Bush started a wholly unnecessary war in Iraq. Soldiers were sent in without body armor or armor for their vehicles. Oil fields were protected while armories full of weapons later used against the troops were left open to looters. Conservatives’ plans for Iran show similar disregard for how many of the military will be struck down as a result. A third land war in Asia within just 15 years? I would agree that a draft would be a bad but perhaps necessary way to bring the real cost into focus for these people, except that these people have always found ways to shelter their own, draft or no; Bush was an excellent example of this.

Republicans love to use the military as backdrops to make them look strong. It seemed that every other public speech given by Bush had a wall of soldiers in the background. Bush made huge PR runs on aircraft carriers (Mission Accomplished!) and on military bases (where soldiers who were not loyal Republicans were pre-screened and locked out of the Thanksgiving dinner Bush used as a PR event; non-Bush-supporters were kept in the barracks and given MREs instead). Meanwhile, military coffins and funerals were banned from sight, out of fear that Americans would care too much for the fallen, and Bush did not even deign to sign letters to families whose loved ones had given the ultimate sacrifice.

But worst, Republicans’ greatest abuse of the soldiery is to use them as a human shield. Reagan used the valor and sacrifice of the troops he sent needlessly and uselessly into Lebanon as a shield when a reporter questioned his reasons for sending them, castigating the reporter for daring to question the honor of the troops, when the reporter was only questioning Reagan’s judgment in putting them in harm’s way. Bush used this coward’s retreat often; any attack on him was morphed into an attack on the troops; a new rule was established that you cannot criticize the president while troops are in the field, a rule conservatives abandoned the moment Obama came into office.

Meanwhile, Republicans cut benefits for the troops, mercilessly extended their tours of duty, and left their families with less and less support, spending money primarily for enticements to get more people to sign up, but then ignoring their needs once recruitment is no longer an issue. While lavish fortunes were spent on mercenaries and fortunes are sunk into often unneeded Defense contracts, relatively trifling amounts that could make big differences for soldiers are struck down by Republicans. The IAVA gives methodologically sound ratings to Congress based upon votes that affect veterans, rating in which Republicans consistently score dead last.

Democrats, on the other hand, have acted with care and caution where it has concerned the troops. Clinton’s war in the Balkans and Obama’s actions in Libya were examples of modern war by Democrats: good causes (stability and human life, not oil) in actions defined by the surgical use of force with minimal or even no loss of life among the soldiery. What funerals there were were not hidden; due homage was paid. Obama has been less than satisfactory in Afghanistan, true; but had he been in charge from the start, do you really think the war would have lasted 11 years? The only bloody military actions Democrats have presided over since Vietnam have been ones left them by presidents named “Bush.”

In the meantime, after the last Bush left, al Qaeda has all but been decimated, with bin Laden at the bottom of the ocean with a bullet in his head. For which, conservatives have only complaint, studiously avoiding any praise for Obama where they would have ordered apotheosis had a Republican been in office.

Democrats do not shy from giving speeches in front of troops, but it is not the common standard that it was for Bush and Republicans that came before. They spend more time actually doing stuff for the troops as opposed to only using them as a convenient backdrop.

Democrats do not use the troops as a human shield. You did not hear Clinton and will not hear Obama saying that an attack on the president is actually an attack on the troops.

But mostly, Democrats care about the soldiers in a contrast with conservatives which could not be deeper or more sharp. Where Republicans cut benefits for the troops, Democrats restore and even shower the troops with help.

Republicans not only disapprove, they despise this.

That’s right. I do not exaggerate. Allow me to give a definitive example.

Less than a year ago, conservatives ripped Obama for praising the troops. They created the false impression that Obama had never said anything good about the soldiers, but then suddenly started praising them for political gain; a false claim, of course.

But the worst part was that they accused Obama of actually abusing the troops, making them into “victims dependent on social-welfare and medical services.” Yep, that’s right. By giving the troops education and job assistance, by giving them good medical care upon their arrival home and paying attention to the emotional scars which have increased the suicide rate, Obama is actually, in the conservative’s view, disrespecting the troops.

Better to do it the conservative way: give them a handshake, salute them, mouth a few cheap platitudes—and then leave them to fend for themselves in a shattered economy in which your are dismantling health care.

That, apparently, is how you “support the troops.” Use them, grind them down, pose with them for a photo shoot, and then abandon them so they can learn self-reliance.

What astonishes me is that the men and women in uniform still trend conservative. Well, maybe not so much, considering the conservative cultural and religious influences built into the military infrastructure; how Fox News and radio shows like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are featured in military media.

No doubt the message below will be ruthlessly ripped by the conservatives. The troops are for swiftboating, not for supporting godless liberals.

Tucker Carlson’s agitprop outfit just came out with a rather stunning slant in a piece where they criticize Obama for… praising the troops. Now, how, you may ask, could they criticize Obama for that? Easy: make it seem like Obama actually hates the troops, usually reviles them, thus making his current lavish praise seem “unfamiliar” and “unprecedented,” in effect suggesting that he’s doing it purely for shallow and dishonest political reasons.

Their evidence in this regard, of course, is non-existent–the article is heavy with implied claims that Obama has somehow ignored or even hated the troops until now, thus creating the larger impression that his current praise can be explained away as posturing, thus explaining how he could heap such praise and yet still not contradict the right-wing fiction that he hates the troops.

The only support they provided for the claim that Obama abused the troops was that he had provided the soldiers and their families with a large number of programs to help them out, making sure they got good medical and psychological care, assuring that the families were looked after sufficiently, seeing to the education of their children–stuff like that. In other words: supporting the troops.

How, exactly, did conservatives paint Obama as abusive to the troops with this? They claimed he had painted them as “victims dependent on social-welfare and medical services offered by the Democratic coalition.”

You see, when you do things like recognize soldier trauma and high suicide rates and needs for things like education for their children, you are actually hurting the troops, insulting them by making them into victims and robbing them of their pride and self-reliance. Instead, you should let them suffer without support, and not reward them substantively for their service, so when they come through it all, they’ll be more proud. Apparently, only lip service is required from the rest of us. That is the Republican definition of “supporting the troops.”

Liberals don’t hate the troops; quite the opposite, they have, from individuals up to national politicians, always been concerned about the health and welfare of the men and women in the armed forces, and mindful of their needs. I am sure that most rank-and-file conservatives respect the troops in general, but the conservative establishment sees them as more of a resource to be used. This attitude is more aptly expressed in how they weild the troops as a tool, a means to an end. The best example of this is when they use the troops as human shields to avoid political criticism; when conservatives screw up, they deflect any disparagement of their actions as “attacking the troops.”

It is simply a long-standing lie that liberals hate or disrespect the troops. The lie has been propagated since the Vietnam War, when liberals protested the war and the political administrations, and conservatives wanted to deflect those criticisms. So they created the cowardly lie that any criticism of the war was somehow criticizing the troops, and not the leaders.

On a general level, the lie fits in with the conservative myth that right-wingers are “pro-military” and liberals are anti-military. The distinction is sometimes blurred in the eyes of the public because conservatives are hawkish and want more military spending, whereas liberals oppose egregious or harmful use of the troops and the military, and often disapprove of the corporate-military complex. Because these are not simple divisions, they are easily mischaracterized, and thus we get the current mythos.

The conservative “pro-military” stance, however, is not so inclusive of the troops; it is more about wanting to send troops to war, and reward wealthy patrons who are military contractors, like Halliburton. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to run wars where troops are kept out of harm’s way, and try to run a leaner yet fully-capable military.

As General Wesley Clark so aptly put it in 2004, “Republicans like weapons systems; Democrats like the soldiers.”

Remember how liberal protesters spat on Vietnam vets on the airport tarmacs as the vets returned from Vietnam? That’s an image ingrained upon the America psyche–and is pure fiction. There was not one soldier who got spat on by a liberal protester on any airport tarmac–it never happened. We know that because liberal protesters were never allowed on military bases to protest, and soldiers returning on civilian airlines were not in uniform nor were their arrivals publicly announced–nor were protesters allowed to congregate on civilian tarmacs in any case. The entire thing is a fiction produced by right-wingers who wanted to vilify liberals as soldier-haters, a lie perpetuated by–of all things–Hollywood, in movies like Rambo, whose title character famously said, “I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap!” People saw that made-up right-wing fantasy and other such characterizations and simply accepted the idea.

The fact was, liberals during Vietnam were mostly the same as liberals during the Iraq War: they protested the political administration or elements of the military hierarchy which propagated the war–but not the troops themselves.

Am I claiming that there were never any liberals anywhere who hated soldiers in general? Of course not, there must have been–just as there are extremists on the right today who see soldiers as jack-booted thugs. You’ll find crazies at the extreme of any movement or group. Conservatives are simply extraordinarily talented at taking such extremes, exaggerating them and padding them with lies, and then painting the entire opposition with that brush.

The fact is, many of the liberal protesters were soldiers themselves, vets who returned from the war and saw the liberal protesters as forwarding their cause–to stop the war and bring the soldiers home. Troops who would never had associated with the liberal movement in general had that movement been populated with people who spat on returning soldiers.

Conservatives more crassly use troops as a resource, as cannon fodder, easily starting ground wars and even mercilessly extending tours of duty, whilst promoting G.I. benefits only as a way to entice recruitment, but otherwise not giving a crap about their actual welfare. Soldiers are raw material to be used militarily, politically, even sometimes socially. They are to be proselytized and reshaped to a conservative ideal, to be used and then discarded. Not, of course, by all conservatives, not by a long shot–but that is how they are treated by the conservative establishment.

In the past few decades, maybe longer, whenever we saw a bill to raise the troops’ pay or benefits or help them in some way other than signing bonuses, it was the Democrats pushing for it and the Republicans balking, while Republicans were mostly responsible for cutting pay and benefits, and for abuses like we saw done with stop-loss and failure to outfit the soldiers with body or vehicular armor.

Republicans committed the lion’s share of our forces to not one, but two decade-long land wars in Asia, where more than 4500 soldiers were killed. Democrats started actions in Bosnia and Libya, where mostly air power was used on a short-term basis to positive effect, with a minimum risk to the troops.

I think Republicans burn at seeing Obama lavish praise on the troops because they know Bush didn’t do it as much. Bush not only tried to hide military funerals, he didn’t even sign condolence letters; Obama reversed that trend of neglect. Bush slashed soldier’s benefits and cut their families adrift; Obama passed dozens of programs to bring back support to the troops and their families–and right-wingers hate him for it.

What does that tell you?

I will leave you with a post from nearly a year ago when I laid out much the same case:

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During the Bush years, Republicans made their usual big deal about supporting the troops. When it comes to actual support though, the right wing really only supports the military contractors, who are, after all, among those paying the bills. Despite their talk about cutting spending, they won’t touch Defense, despite there being a lot to cut; Lockheed Martin alone receives an average of something like $260 from each taxpaying American family.

When it comes to the soldiery, the support from the right is not quite so strong. Oh, yes, the words come out. Support the troops and all that. But actions speak louder than words, and during the Bush years, much of the action was abusive. Lengthening tours of duty, employing stop-loss, scaling down pay increases, cutting benefits, failing to outfit them properly–basically chintzing the soldiers on nickels and dimes while pouring billions into the pockets of firms like Halliburton. When a veteran’s organization ranked senators on how they voted on veteran’s issues, the disparity was striking: Democrats occupied the top of the list, while Republicans uniformly failed to support the troops themselves where it counted.

There is one aspect in which Bush and the Republicans liked the troops: as a prop to help them politically. How many times did you see Bush–the AWOL draft-dodger–give speeches before uniformed audiences, helpfully arranged behind him for effect; how many times did we see him reviewing the troops, a purely PR-related activity?

Whenever Bush’s decisions were questioned, the reply very often was to use the troops as a human shield. Anyone who criticized Bush was accused of attacking the troops–an act of hatefully vile cowardice which I personally despise.

When a selflessly patriotic man gave up a lucrative personal career and volunteered to serve, and then was killed in “friendly fire,” the details of his death were covered up while the Bush administration shamelessly used him as a poster boy for their PR campaign after their disgrace at Abu Ghraib.

But people believe that liberals are the ones who abuse the troops. After all, wasn’t it liberals who spat on soldiers on the airport tarmac as they returned from service in Vietnam? Well, no. It’s an urban legend, another lie generated to discredit liberals. In fact, during the Vietnam War, liberals supported the soldiery just like they do today; it was the administration they despised. Again we see the tactic of using soldiers as a human shield, to very great effect–so many people even today believe the image of liberal hippie protesters spitting on deplaning soldiers, despite the fact that it would have been physically impossible for that to even happen.

Whenever a bill to support the actual soldiers came through, it was almost always a Democratic effort, and was usually opposed by Republicans, who, after throwing billions at contractors, could not see themselves clear to tossing a few million to actually support the troops. Take this GI Bill for example. The only time Republicans assented to spending more on the troops was in order to bring more people in the door–enticements for signing on or staying on. When it came to helping the troops without an ulterior motive, simply because it’s the right thing to do, Republicans suddenly had other things to do, leaving the Democrats to pick up that particular ball.

That continues today. From the White House:

President Barack Obama on Monday announced a governmentwide series of 50 programs and proposals to increase support for U.S. military families.

The 50 initiatives — including more counseling to prevent suicides, increased education grants and expanded child-care assistance — resulted from efforts by first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, to address concerns of military families.

Seriously, do you ever recall Bush doing anything even remotely like this during his eight years in office?

Me neither.

None of the reports indicate that this will have to pass through Congress. Let’s hope not, because you know who would most likely decide that it’s not worth doing, or should be pared down somewhat.

One thing that has kind of mystified me is why so many, including liberals, seem to be equating the Libyan intervention with the Iraq War. “We’re now at war with five countries,” I hear. Well, if you want to take the greatest liberty in stretching the definition, I suppose so–if being involved in bombing is equal to being at war, then perhaps so. But what we’re doing in Libya is about as far from what we’re doing in Iraq as one can imagine.

This also serves to make a more recent distinction between recent Democratic and Republican wars: Clinton and Obama have limited their wars strategically, intervening where it is both potentially stabilizing as well as humanitarian, but doing so in a relatively risk-free and hands-off manner, using mostly bombing and other forms of support. The last two Republicans, Bush junior and senior, engaged in rather dramatic, major land wars in Asia.

The initial Gulf War was a “good” war, in that it was carried out well and was to good purpose–the flaw was that it was unnecessary, had Bush 41 only paid a bit more attention to whom he was dealing with. The war in Afghanistan again was a “good” war, in that it was something we all agreed was necessary–but again, had Bush 43 only paid a bit more attention, 9/11 would have been foiled and the war would not have been necessary. However, unlike his father, Bush 43 tanked his “good” war, dropping the ball and turning what should have been a conflict of less than a year, maybe two, into a decade-long quagmire. As for Iraq, well, the whole thing was a catastrophic blunder from start to finish.

In contrast, Clinton’s Kosovo intervention was extraordinarily restrained; even when NATO wanted to send ground forces in, Clinton held back, and eventually, the air campaign succeeded. While it is still unclear if Obama’s from-the-air, NATO-led intervention in Libya will also be successful, they share other key similarities, in that they are being carried out more for humanitarian purposes rather than to correct tactical blunders or to serve America’s self-interests.

One other shared feature of these conflicts is their defiance of the War Powers Act. While that act remains controversial, it is law, and it makes me uncomfortable when it is more or less ignored like it is. Clinton dodged it by claiming that funding by Congress implicitly approved it by providing funding; Obama is dodging it by claiming it’s not a direct conflict, but instead we are just playing a support role to NATO.

There are extenuating circumstances, however. In both cases, the wars are “good” wars–carried out not for profit or self-interest, but to prevent oppression. In both cases, the wars are limited, costing relatively little (Libya is costing America no more than $10 million a day, whereas the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at their peaks, cost a collective billion dollars per day. In both cases, the wars use only air power, meaning only a minimal risk to our own forces.

One more difference, however, is significant: in both conflicts, while a Democratic president in power tries to use severely restrained, low-cost and low-risk military force to humanitarian ends, a Republican-led force in Congress wants to end the war for purely internal political game-playing reasons stemming from spite and pre-election-year posturing.

This, to me, is the main thing that keeps me from being pissed at Obama–the fact that support from Congress would never be in question were it not for petty game-playing by Republicans. Were it Bush doing this, for example, they would give absolute support for the action. This, to me personally, constitutes effective approval, if not legal approval, and is why I have few problems with what Obama is doing. If Obama is playing games with the War Powers Act, then he is doing it because the Republicans are doing it first–and Obama, at least, is doing it for the right reasons, something which cannot be said about the Republicans.

What bothers me is the precedent–that a future president, for less noble reasons, may start a major land war expensive in both lives and funding, using the same dodge. The problem is, as we saw with Bush 43, even the War Powers Act doesn’t work well when it is enforced, and is only as strong as Congress would be without the act in any case.

During the Bush years, Republicans made their usual big deal about supporting the troops. When it comes to actual support though, the right wing really only supports the military contractors, who are, after all, among those paying the bills. Despite their talk about cutting spending, they won’t touch Defense, despite there being a lot to cut; Lockheed Martin alone receives an average of something like $260 from each taxpaying American family.

When it comes to the soldiery, the support from the right is not quite so strong. Oh, yes, the words come out. Support the troops and all that. But actions speak louder than words, and during the Bush years, much of the action was abusive. Lengthening tours of duty, employing stop-loss, scaling down pay increases, cutting benefits, failing to outfit them properly–basically chintzing the soldiers on nickels and dimes while pouring billions into the pockets of firms like Halliburton. When a veteran’s organization ranked senators on how they voted on veteran’s issues, the disparity was striking: Democrats occupied the top of the list, while Republicans uniformly failed to support the troops themselves where it counted.

There is one aspect in which Bush and the Republicans liked the troops: as a prop to help them politically. How many times did you see Bush–the AWOL draft-dodger–give speeches before uniformed audiences, helpfully arranged behind him for effect; how many times did we see him reviewing the troops, a purely PR-related activity?

Whenever Bush’s decisions were questioned, the reply very often was to use the troops as a human shield. Anyone who criticized Bush was accused of attacking the troops–an act of hatefully vile cowardice which I personally despise.

When a selflessly patriotic man gave up a lucrative personal career and volunteered to serve, and then was killed in “friendly fire,” the details of his death were covered up while the Bush administration shamelessly used him as a poster boy for their PR campaign after their disgrace at Abu Ghraib.

But people believe that liberals are the ones who abuse the troops. After all, wasn’t it liberals who spat on soldiers on the airport tarmac as they returned from service in Vietnam? Well, no. It’s an urban legend, another lie generated to discredit liberals. In fact, during the Vietnam War, liberals supported the soldiery just like they do today; it was the administration they despised. Again we see the tactic of using soldiers as a human shield, to very great effect–so many people even today believe the image of liberal hippie protesters spitting on deplaning soldiers, despite the fact that it would have been physically impossible for that to even happen.

Whenever a bill to support the actual soldiers came through, it was almost always a Democratic effort, and was usually opposed by Republicans, who, after throwing billions at contractors, could not see themselves clear to tossing a few million to actually support the troops. Take this GI Bill for example. The only time Republicans assented to spending more on the troops was in order to bring more people in the door–enticements for signing on or staying on. When it came to helping the troops without an ulterior motive, simply because it’s the right thing to do, Republicans suddenly had other things to do, leaving the Democrats to pick up that particular ball.

That continues today. From the White House:

President Barack Obama on Monday announced a governmentwide series of 50 programs and proposals to increase support for U.S. military families.

The 50 initiatives — including more counseling to prevent suicides, increased education grants and expanded child-care assistance — resulted from efforts by first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, to address concerns of military families.

Seriously, do you ever recall Bush doing anything even remotely like this during his eight years in office?

Me neither.

None of the reports indicate that this will have to pass through Congress. Let’s hope not, because you know who would most likely decide that it’s not worth doing, or should be pared down somewhat.

This is lovely:

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out.

The elder Bush did something in a slightly similar vein: in December 1992, a month after losing the election to Bill Clinton, he ordered U.S. troops into Somalia. Called “Operation Restore Hope,” it was more likely a partisan political play. Bush had, for example, completely ignored the conflicts in the Balkans, as well as many other humanitarian and political crises around the globe during his four years in office. That he should happen to suddenly become interested in solving such issues by inserting U.S. troops into a hopeless quagmire just six weeks before leaving office is more than just coincidence. Clinton was left with a no-win scenario: either leave the country in a huge mess or stay and get stuck in the quagmire. In either case, Republicans would be perfectly positioned to attack him on his “failed” foreign policy, which, of course, is exactly what they did.

What Bush Jr. did this time is somewhat different, but no less reprehensible, and echoed the actions of his father in an important respect. While the senior Bush likely intentionally created a mess for a political opponent to clean up, Bush Jr. most likely just didn’t want to deal with his failures–but the effect was the same. Both Clinton and Obama were left in quagmires at the start of their presidencies, quagmires that a president named “Bush” got us into.

What makes the Bush Jr. quagmire all the more deplorable is that it was not entered six weeks before the handover of power, but more than seven years before. That Obama is now having to resuscitate the conflict and essentially start all over again is the main tragedy. By using 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, his real military goal, Bush allowed Afghanistan to deteriorate for all that time.

Bush’s abject failure cost the lives of thousands of troops and trillions of dollars, as well as the respect and sympathy of most of the world. It destabilized the region, provoked Iran into nuclear belligerence, and created a situation that was inherently so fragile that our leaving would likely lead to devastation.

What should have happened is that we should have gone into Afghanistan and only there; we should have ousted the Taliban and nothing else. It was not and is not our place to decide the type of government there would be, but rather only that they did not harbor terrorists or otherwise threaten us. And then leave.

Had he done that, we could have left the region years ago. Yes, Saddam Hussein would still have been in power–and ironically, fewer Iraqis would have been tortured and killed, and Iraq would be in better shape than it is today. That is not praise for Hussein, it is a condemnation of the supreme clusterfrack that Bush committed there.

Instead, Obama now begins his term in office having to deal with a military which is severely strained and depleted (unlike the military Bush got from Clinton, which he claimed was depleted but was not), and take a seven-year-old conflict and somehow find a way to make it manageable enough for us to leave. One can only guess that Obama will not wind up leaving it or any other conflict as a quagmire for his successor to clean up. Clinton didn’t. Both Bushes did. Let’s hope that’s not a pattern that will continue.