TNR’s Spencer Ackerman, writing for The American Prospect, has a new item that raises a point that seems obvious, but too often goes unstated: being hawk has nothing to do with being strong on defense. Ackerman uses Joe Lieberman as an example, but it’s a universal concept.
The sad truth, however, is that Lieberman’s equation of blanket hawkishness with credibility on security is likely only to harden if he’s defeated. For starters, Lieberman himself will doubtlessly peddle the myth that a Democratic flight from bellicosity is a flight from sanity, as he already did in Waterbury. Perhaps more importantly, Lieberman will be abetted by an extremely vocal neoconservative contingent, with allies (if uneasy ones) among Democratic moderates and in the Washington press corps. If there’s one myth that neocons have cultivated — and the media have bought into — since their post-Vietnam origins in the 1970s, it’s that the greater danger to U.S. security comes not from disastrous wars but from overzealous opposition to disastrous wars.
There are fewer more devoted adherents to that strain of American foreign-policy thinking than Lieberman himself. Call this perspective what you like — puerile, misguided, even paranoid — but don’t call it strong on defense.
“Blanket hawkishness” is surely right; Ackerman reviews Lieberman’s support for military action in literally every instance for 20 years, for reasons sometimes no more serious than hearing a president ask him to. This, in the minds of the political establishment, makes him “strong on defense.”
It doesn’t matter if military action was warranted, or wise, or effective in achieving some broader goal. If you want to drop bombs, you’re “strong.”
Or as Paul Krugman recently put it, “sensible.”
[Lieberman] has been wrong at every step of the march into the Iraq quagmire — all the while accusing anyone who disagreed with him of endangering national security. Again, on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered “sensible”? But I know the answer: on Planet Beltway. […]
They say: Pay no attention to the fact that I was wrong and the critics have been completely vindicated by events — I’m “sensible,” while those people are crazy extremists. And besides, criticizing any aspect of the war encourages the terrorists.
In other words, the “strong” and the “sensible” are the same people who are “wrong” and “misguided.”
It’s going to continue until the establishment begins to appreciate the fact that “strong on defense” has nothing to do with willingness to go to war. How long might that take?