March 28, 2014
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“Southerners are a military people. We were back then,
still are today,” says a North Carolina Civil War enthusiast in 1998’s
Confederates in the Attic.
That's why the Republican
Party is piling on President Obama as he seeks a diplomatic peace in
Ukraine. The United States is acting like a nation in decline in its
dealings with Russia rather than projecting strength, say former U.N.
Ambassador John Bolton, while Sen. John McCain has criticized Obama’s
diplomatic efforts on so many occasions in a way that suggests if we
don’t start bombing Russia in the next 72-hours, the senator from
Arizona will chew through a lamp post.
On
Tuesday, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even a
“trained ape” has better foreign policy skills than President Obama.
Mind you, Rumsfeld also said in 2002, “That even a trained ape knows
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Just kidding, but that's the guy
we're dealing with here.
The
Republican Party is the party of the South. The Republican congressional
delegation is disproportionately southern, and unsurprisingly a
majority of the party’s leaders talk with a southern accent. If you want
to know why there has never been a war the Republican Party didn’t want
another person’s kid to fight, it’s the Republican Party’s slavish
devotion to the monolithic South. In Better off Without 'Em: A Northern
Manifesto for Southern Secession, Chuck Thompson writes, “The
southerner’s enthrallment with war and bloodshed, his veneration of
defeat and disaster, his zeal for religious crusade, and easy compliance
with the corporate profit motive, has repeatedly dragged the nation
into unnecessary wars.”
The GOP and
the South can’t stand the fact that Obama seeks diplomacy, or
occasionally walks back from his own self-imposed “red lines.” They view
his hesitancy to use military force as weakness, while at the same time
forgetting the blood and treasure this country has forfeited in its
previous rush to war; an invasion and occupation that cost 186,000
Iraqis and 5,000 Americans their lives. While also not forgetting that
misadventure came with a $3 trillion pricetag and an immeasurable moral
cost.
Interestingly, a
2003 Pew Research Poll
showed that Southerners were by far the most supportive of the Iraq
invasion, with 77 percent believing it was the right choice, as opposed
to barely half of Americans in general. In fact, Southern whites
expressed the strongest support for military action in Iraq with 83
percent saying it was the right decision.
Going
back further, C. Vann Woodward noted in The Burden of Southern History,
“Not only had the strongest support for the Vietnam War come from the
South, but so also had the President and the Secretary of State who led
the crusade.”
The Republican Party’s new attack line is to blame
the world’s woes on a weakened America. With the slow but steadily
growing success of the Affordable Care Act, it appears the GOP is
readying to roll out its old timey “Democrats are weak on national
security” tagline for 2014 instead of attacks on the President’s
signature legislation.
Obama, according to likely 2016
GOP presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz, endeavors "to alienate and
abandon our friends, and to coddle and appease our enemies." Former
Vice-President Dick Cheney said it’s Obama's weakness that encouraged
Putin to trample into Ukraine and seize Crimea, while simultaneously
forgetting he was the Vice-President when Russia invaded Georgia in
2008. You know, when President Bush did nothing.
This
neo-con language is designed specifically for the GOP’s Southern base.
University of Georgia history professor James Cobb observes, “The long
standing determination of so many southerners to show their
‘Americanness’ through ostentatious professions of patriotism and an
aggressive ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude has typically translated
into historically high levels of military participation and enthusiasm
for military action.”
Certainly the loudest pro-war
voices in the Republican Party are those who chose to avoid military
service through the good fortune of deferment or family fortune. The
chickenhawk phenomenon cuts across all regions of the U.S., but its
pathology is most prevalent in the South, along with a handful of other
pro-military industrial complex districts like Southern California’s
Orange County and the Sunbelt states. Chickenhawk advocacy finds a
reliable home in think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute
and the Heritage Foundation, while also consistently splashed across the
opinion pages of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and the
Washington Post. Mike Lofgren, who spent 28 years as a Republican in
Congress and is author of The Party Is Over, writes, “If you ever
wondered how the United States came to be embroiled simultaneously in
two major wars and a half dozen covert ones in the past decade, the
cheerleading of Washington’s laptop commandos, with their
disproportionate influence in major media, has been a major factor.”
These
“laptop commandos” give the GOP base its foreign policy cues. Today’s
Republican Party is effectively nothing more than a pro-Southern,
pro-corporate sound machine. Other than tax cuts for the rich, the party
does not possess a single coherent policy, domestic or foreign. When it
comes to dealing with Russia, the GOP offers nothing that can be
confused for an actual solution. Mitt Romney is doing the talk show
circuit purely to remind Americans it was he who said Russia is our
number-one geo-political foe. Not only was he wrong then and is wrong
now—Russia poses no immediate threat to U.S. security—he offers nothing
in terms of how he’d manage the Ukraine crisis differently than Obama.
Republicans
criticized Obama for not having the nerve to carry out his threat
against Syria, but when the President threw the decision to a
congressional vote, House Republicans balked. They balked because a
majority of American voters, faced with a lingering economic crisis at
home, are uninterested in fighting another country’s crisis abroad. But
history has proven that the nation’s mood on issues changes quickly, and
it’s fair to conclude that the nation’s appetite for war might easily
be renewed, so long as the Republican Party plays its military
adventurism whistle—a tune heard mostly clearly by Southern voters.
“How
depressing that we already know that the next Republican warmonger to
sweep into power will do so on the same tarnished epaulets of military
fanaticism enabled by the outsized influence of the southern polity on
electoral America,” writes Chuck Thompson. As the Civil War enthusiast
said, “Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are
today."
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