A striking fact about the November election is that both major party candidates embraced what John Lukacs referred to as “the militarization of the image of the presidency.” Kerry’s use of martial imagery and his “sentimentalization of the military” paralleled that of Bush, though he used it to a different, dovish end. For Kerry and his allies, Bush’s recklessness and his failure to defer to the greater wisdom of the uniformed military represented a repudiation of the authentic military virtues. Bush, in contrast, identified support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with support for the troops. Strength as “commander-in-chief” is once again seen as the signal virtue in a chief executive.
As Lukacs points out, this represents a break.
In the past, even presidents who had once been generals employed civilian manners. They chose not to emphasize their military achievements during their presidential tenure – in accord with the American tradition of the primacy of civilian over military rule.
Lukacs ends his brief polemic with a warning:
When the Roman republic gave way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus chose to name himself not “rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief. Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet . . .
It’s easy to dismiss this as alarmist nonsense, and I certainly don’t maintain that the US is heading for a military dictatorship. Far from it. But I am concerned by the fact that the Cassandras, a kind of early warning system for democracy, are few and far between.
Peter Beinart forcefully and persuasively argues that the left ought to embrace a militarized approach to the Terror War, matching conservatives in the never-ending quest for guts and glory. While I’m very sympathetic-I remain emphatically hawkish, and if anything I think we need a larger military-my sense is that we need a credible voice for restraint. American global leadership is the sine qua non of a liberal peace, but the standing army it demands has corrosive effects. Far left critics, in the vein of Chomsky and Zinn, are discredited by their distrust of US intentions, and the same is true of critics on the far right, like Buchanan. We no longer have a Sen. Bob Taft, a man who opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and US military interventions abroad while retaining a belief in the essential decency of he American people. The defenders of internment today represent an obscene caricature of how we’ve gone wrong.
THE TWIN THREATS: These dark thoughts-Merry Christmas, incidentally!- occur to me in light of Andrew’s link to Publius on “The Conservative Case for Outrage.” I wholeheartedly agree that outrage is the only appropriate response to the torture of prisoners, but not because it inflames the Arab street. Outrage is appropriate because any sustained military campaign-particularly a shadowy war against shadowy villains-poses a threat to constitutional democracy. The threat can be contained, and the US has been more successful than most countries, Britain and France included. And yet it’s never easy. Because I’m sympathetic to Heather MacDonald’s call for the aggressive use of data-mining and other surveillance technologies, it’s all the more vital that abuses be rooted out and prosecuted mercilessly. Abu Ghraib, and allegations of torture elsewhere in the secret archipelago of prison camps, pose a threat to this country less immediate but no less real than that posed by the Islamist killers.
THE UN-IMMACULATE AMERICANS: On the pressing question of whether Abu Ghraib represents a devastating setback in the Terror War, and whether being seen as an immaculate force for good in the Arab world is key to American victory, I’m tentatively with the dissenters. Reuel Gerecht made the case in the Weekly Standard back in May. Arab cynicism about American intentions runs very deep. Our self-perception bears no relation to how we’re seen in that part of the world, or almost anywhere else. The true test is whether we can hold elections. Elections will, with any luck, create a dynamic of their own that will end in majoritarian democracy, and, as Gerecht argues, deeply illiberal and anti-American democracy at that. It will, however, kill off Bin Ladenism, and that’s worth firing on all cylinders, ramping up counterinsurgency efforts, and betting the farm.
— Reihan
TOM MENASHI, ROSS EDWARDS, AND HILLARY RODHAM SALAM?: “C’mon, admit it. The three guys filling in for Andrew are Tom Daschle, John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton!” More feedback on the Letters Page.
The Dish 