Sanford
I have neglected to draw attention to Michael’s excellent profile of Gov. Mark Sanford, but Reihan’s discussion of the profile here reminds me to recommend it and say a few words. As a longtime critic of McCain, I was not exactly enthused when I found that Sanford had endorsed McCain in 2000, and I am aware of some of the legitimate complaints against him on the right, but a few things have caused me to take a very favorable view of the South Carolina governor. This is almost certainly bad news for Gov. Sanford if he has any higher ambitions, as the politicians I find interesting and compelling tend to be the ones who have no chance of winning on a national level. One of the things that interested me was the discovery in Michael’s profile that Sanford, then a member of the House, had voted against the Iraq Liberation Act and the war in Kosovo. I promise you that there are not very many people who were right on both issues, and Sanford is one of them. More important, he came to these conclusions for the right moral and constitutional reasons:
In Congress, he opposed Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo. And he was one of only two Republicans to vote against the 1998 resolution to make regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. He says that it was a “protest vote” in which he tried to reassert the legislature’s war-declaring powers. When asked about the invasion of Iraq, he extends his critique beyond the constitutional niceties. “I don’t believe in preemptive war,” he says flatly. “For us to hold the moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive.”
As I have mentioned before, Sanford distinguished himself by penning an anti-bailout op-ed, which makes him one of the few well-known governors to have taken an early stand on this question and had the right answer. Finally, Sanford’s much-maligned, and perhaps rather impolitic, remark about Zimbabwe as an example of the wealth-destroying power of inflation tells me that he is one of only a very few elected Republicans who has a clue on monetary and economic policy. The mostly symbolic fight over 1% of the stimulus money coming to South Carolina seems like a losing battle, and I don’t quite understand why he is fighting it, but the other things are so much more important that it doesn’t concern me very much.
I would take issue with Reihan’s description of Sanford’s foreign policy views as “dovishness.” The hawk-dove terminology has never been very useful, poisoned at it is by its origins in another unnecessary, illegal war, because it gives the impression that if one is not supportive of aggressive and unnecessary wars that one is “dovish” and therefore some kind of pacifist. There is something very wrong when we are defining opposition to starting wars in this way. As far as electoral politics go, Reihan is probably right that anything that could be portrayed as “dovish” will not get Sanford very far with Republican voters in the event that he pursued a bid in the next election, but it reminds me that we need to develop a better vocabulary for describing these debates.
That said, all indications regarding the Afghanistan debate is that most of the skepticism about escalation is coming from the left or center-left, and the people backing even larger deployments are the same people who always back larger deployments regardless of circumstances. Assuming Obama pursues his limited withdrawal plans in Iraq and increases troop levels in Afghanistan, the natural reaction in the GOP will be to pillory the administration for “abandoning” Iraq and “mismanaging” the other war. It will become almost a mirror-image of Democratic leadership critiques of Bush, c. 2003-04, and the main difference will be that the wars will have switched roles. Unlike most Republicans on Iraq, who refused to change their mind on the war there regardless of what happened, Democrats are probably going to be much more inclined to cut losses in Afghanistan if things do not improve on both sides of the border, which will create an opening for a “hawk” on the right to claim that he will salvage the situation. Barring some remarkable shift in public mood because of ongoing economic woes and a recognition that the empire is unsustainable and an enormous drain of resources, a generally non-interventionist candidate on the right will probably have even less room to maneuver and fewer votes to pick up than was the case in ’08.
As another of the at-the-time unfashionable few who opposed the engagements in Kosovo and in Iraq, to say nothing of Somalia, and who continues to have the gravest misgivings about Afghanistan, I was also pleased and surprised to read that Sanford had maintained an admirably consistent policy with respect to foreign military action. I might add that, in the case of Iraq, he was swimming upstream in terms of his party so he gets an extra gold star for that. i had previously assumed that his motions toward declining a portion of the stimulus package funds were mere political posturing. Perhaps he deserves a little more credit.
i agree completely with your prognostications regarding the script for the Iraq withdrawal and the increasing commitment in the Afghan war. Which is very depressing.
I look forward to your read on the Russian threat (is there any other word?) to station bombers in Venezuela and Cuba. On the one hand, it looks to me like the emptiest grandstanding. On the other hand, it seems almost unbelievably reckless.
On the Russian matter, it is empty grandstanding, and grandstanding that they cannot afford at this point. It is also a continuation of the Kremlin’s perhaps unhealthy habit of mimicking in Latin America the stupid sorts of things our government has done in their near-abroad. If we have sent military advisors to Georgia and have brought their next-door neighbors into NATO, they will send planes and ships to various Latin American states whose governments don’t like us and which we don’t like. They don’t propose to bring these states into the SCO, much less a military alliance, so the parallels are not exact, but it is unnecessary bluster that makes it harder to make our Russia policy more sane. File it under “definitely not helping.” Presumably if we go ahead with some sort of missile defense in Europe, they will build some kind of installation in one of these quasi-client states, and all the same people who kept insisting that the missile defense had nothing to do with Russia will freak out and declare a second Missile Crisis and proof that the “Soviets” are on the march, blah, blah, blah. Between the Kremlin’s apparent need to show off and the stupid reaction it will inevitably provoke, we could have a serious problem brewing. One more reason to be thankful that McCain is not President.
Except I didn’t hear Sanford cheer the potential downscaling/closing of Fort Jackson, the Army’s basic training factory in the middle of prime Columbia real-estate. It’s nice to cast protest votes, and even nicer to issue proclamations about defensive wars when you’re sitting in a state house, but he lined up with everyone else to defend Fort Jackson against potential slimming down like every other local politician.
This is not to suggest anyone else would have done anything differently. But it help’s, when writing hagiography about politicians, to point out that when push comes to shove, he’s not especially sterling. And its salient to point out that the first wave of budget cuts that happened in the state were not due to the economic downturn, but mostly due to the swiss cheese of exemptions that SC’s tax code has, especially the virtually non-existent property taxes. It’s also salient to point out that on just about any metric, SC is either first in all the areas it shouldn’t be, or dead last in all the one’s it should be first. Either Sanford is responsible for the state of affairs (which isn’t true in my opinion), or has done little in his eight years to change it (which I think is).
I would sooner have someone who defends a local base, as unnecessary as it might actually be, to someone who signs off on campaigns that necessitate the creation of a dozen more on the other side of the planet. Of course it would be ideal to have someone who consistently opposes unnecessary military spending, but I am sympathetic to politicians who defend their local bases when we still have an empire of them scattered around the globe. I can’t think of any good reason why American towns and cities should be economically battered by the loss of income base closures represent while we fritter away billions on, say, Camp Bondsteel and other truly useless installations around the world. But then I’m biased–my hometown is heavily dependent on Kirtland AFB and Sandia Labs, and a huge part of the city would probably have to relocate if one or both of these went away.
On the separate Russian bomber question, it seems that the proposal is just an idea that is being floated hypothetically. That’s good news, and it alleviates most of the concerns I had in my previous comment.
If we must keep the bird metaphors in war policy, I suggest “owlish” as a middle term between hawkish and dovish. It has the (happily self-serving) connotation of wisdom, though it also possesses an ambiguous connotation of nighttime sneak attacks.
I’m surprised you’re defending the Zimbabwe remarks. The base of the criticism is that there’s currently miniscule inflation in the United States–barely above zero, as opposed to the multimillion percent inflation that Zimbabwe has suffered. And that’s in spite of the fact that monetary policy in the United States is currently designed to be inflationary–the fed could quickly raise interest rates if inflation increases.
There’s some kind of explanation needed. From where I sit, it’s hard to see even a grain of truth in the comparison (it’s not as if this is just hyperbole).
The point he was making is that you can’t pursue an inflationary policy as a way of creating wealth. He understands the destructive effects of inflation, which are most dramatically demonstrated by the basket-case misrule in Zimbabwe. Yes, our monetary policy is designed to be inflationary, which is why it is a terrible sort of policy.