David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: Party of Defeat

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population thinks the war is unnecessary and unjust, and its commander-in-chief is a liar, and its own government the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is not trusted? And what soldier can prevail on a field of battle if half his countrymen are telling him that he shouldn’t be there in the first place?

It was July 2003, only three months after American forces entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq war, signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.”[16]

While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was 16 words that had been included in a State of the Union address he delivered on the eve of the conflict.[17]

These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate Committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll.[18] On its surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war – in other words to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat.

In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had launched an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies. Senator John Edwards, then a candidate for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, had voted to authorize the war and was still claiming to support it. In an interview with the New York Times, he identified the significance of the Democrats’ attack: “The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility – his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world.” But even as Edwards said this, he joined the Democrats’ attack, publicly insinuating that the president was a liar who had deceived the American people on the gravest issue imaginable. “When the president’s own statements are called into question,” Edwards explained to the reporter, “it’s a very serious matter.”[19]

When the nation is at war, it is graver still. To destroy the credibility of the commander-in-chief, while his troops are in battle, is to cripple his ability to support them and to win the war they are fighting. For this reason, throughout the history of armed conflict, a united home front has been an indispensable element of victory. For the same reason, a principal aim of psychological warfare operations has been to target the credibility of the enemy’s leaders and the morality of the enemy cause.

General Ion Michai Pacepa was the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. In a commentary about the attacks on President Bush during the war in Iraq, Pacepa recalled: “Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels.”[20] No president can marshal his nation’s resources if his people distrust him or disbelieve their own cause. To attack a president’s credibility in the middle of a war, over a matter as ambiguous as a 16-word summary of an allied intelligence report, is an attempt to undermine the war itself.

During the Vietnam War, General Pacepa wrote, Soviet intelligence “spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but…as Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.”[21]
Nor did this Soviet campaign to discredit the United States stop with Vietnam. As Pacepa explains: “The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the United States from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the United States.”[22]
It is one of the ironies of the campaign against the war in Iraq that its opponents cite the political conflicts over Vietnam as a precedent for their extraordinary attacks on a war in progress. In doing so, they misconstrue the past and misunderstand its lessons. During Vietnam, the nation’s political leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, were united in their support of the war effort for more than 10 years. Their bipartisan unity only came to an end when both parties conceded that a victory was no longer politically possible. It was only in the presidential campaign of 1972, 11 years after the first American advisers were sent to Vietnam that Senator George McGovern ran against the war itself. By that time both parties were agreed on a policy of military withdrawal, and by that time truce negotiations with the Communists – initiated by a Republican administration – had already begun.

The conflict over war policy during the 1972 campaign was over the proper way to accomplish a withdrawal favored by both parties. It was over how to leave not whether to leave. The McGovern Democrats favored a policy of immediate and unconditional retreat. Their campaign slogan was “America Come Home.” The Nixon Republicans wanted to negotiate a truce whose terms would preserve the non-Communist regime in South Vietnam, and deny victory to the Communist aggressors. Their slogan was “Peace with Honor.”

The McGovernites did not believe American forces should have been in Vietnam in the first place. McGovern’s candidacy was a strategic campaign to block America’s Cold War policy of containing Communist expansion. Unlike the Democrats of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the McGovernites believed America was the problematic imperial power, not the Soviets. This position represented a sea change in the Democratic Party, whose leaders had actually launched the Cold War policy of containing Soviet Communism beginning with the Truman administration in 1947. Under John F. Kennedy, it was they who had initiated America’s military presence in Vietnam. Until the McGovern candidacy, the Democratic leadership, including its presidential candidate in 1968, Hubert Humphrey, had supported the Vietnam War. It was the first time since the Civil War that an opposition party had conducted a national campaign to challenge the justice of America’s war aims.

The campaigns against the wars in Iraq and Vietnam may seek the same end – the defeat of American power – but their differences are revealing. In regard to Iraq, the Democrats’ attacks on the justice of the American cause came not at the end of a 10-year stalemate, but within three months of the swiftest, most successful campaign in military history. The attacks were conducted not by movement activists but by leaders of the Democratic Party, and they came in the first months of a war that both parties had until then supported, and that had been endorsed by the previous Democratic administration, and that both parties had voted to authorize. The attacks on this war have no precedent in the American past.