Patrick Healy has a piece up at the New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s efforts to ingratiate herself with the military. It’s filled with gems like this:
Donald L. Kerrick, a retired general and former deputy national security adviser to President Clinton, acknowledged that some people inside and outside the military were skeptical of Mrs. Clinton’s intentions and wary that she would shift federal dollars to domestic programs like health care.
Well, isn’t that a shot across all our bows? Let’s continue with the theme:
Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, the libertarian research group, said Mrs. Clinton’s political shift to opposing the war in Iraq — combined with some voters’ skepticism about the Clintons and the military — posed a challenge for her, especially when she needs to prove that a woman is tough enough to be commander in chief.
“By surrounding herself with military brass, it reinforces an image of her as strong and hawkish,” Mr. Carpenter said. “But is that an authentic image? Would she really give dollars to the Pentagon instead of to cherished domestic programs?”
Are you beginning to pick up on a theme here? Apparently, the only way to have good relations with the military and be tough enough to be commander in chief is to throw money at the Pentagon and not at cherished domestic programs or health care. Of course, no mention is made of what should be funded at the Pentagon. Do we want to raise a few more divisions? Do we want to improve our Veteran’s hospitals? Do we want to build an orbiting ray-gun that can destroy underground laboratories? It doesn’t seem to matter as long as we throw money at the Pentagon.
We have a lot of work to do in this country to provide a hospitable political climate for questioning the direction of the military-industrial-congressional complex. The people want us to focus on domestic issues and mind our own business in foreign affairs (warning: pdf).
I have no problem with Hillary Clinton serving on the Armed Services committee and learning as much as she can about our military. It’s great and invaluable experience for a future commander in chief. There is no reason for a Democrat to have strained relations with the military. But, we have to get it straight that you don’t measure a candidate’s affinity for and understanding of the military solely by whether they want to increase or maintain the overall military budget.
At least part of the reason that Hillary Clinton is acting so hawkish is that papers like the New York Times frame the national debate over foreign policy in this way. She, correctly, believes that she will suffer if she allows herself to be painted as anti-military, and we can see what standard the press uses to gauge that.
This problem would largely go away if the press didn’t discuss these issues in such a superficial and right-wing way.
It’s completely possible to improve the readiness of our troops, improve their benefits and health care, improve their equipment and training, and at the same time slash the military budget 50%. To do that, all you have to do is reduce their deployments and roll back our overseas basing.
The war in Iraq is lost and it will have consequences. It should open up a debate over whether we need military bases in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Kenya, Djibouti, Iraq, Okinawa, Paraguay, Ecuador, and elsewhere. Imagine the savings of closing even half of those bases.
As the war in Iraq has shown, the best way to support the military is not to send them all over the place to garrison the better part of the earth. The best way to support them is to train and equip them, give them small, achievable, and definable goals that truly serve the national interest, and to pursue peace. And when our troops are injured or retire, we honor their service and take care of them.
We have a lot of work to do.