Giving credit for American military strength to an unconventional choice

There’s an assumption that permeates American politics about partisanship and the military. Republicans, the idea goes, are allies of the military; the Democrats are foes. Republicans want to increase military spending; Democrats seek to decrease funding.

George W. Bush, while campaigning for the presidency, took advantage of this conventional wisdom in many public appearances, frequently telling audiences that due to cutbacks in military spending at the hands of the Clinton administration, multiple branches of our armed forces were unprepared in the event of an emergency.

“Little more than a decade ago, the Cold War thawed and, with the leadership of Presidents Reagan and Bush, that wall came down,” Bush said in his speech during the 2000 Republican convention. “But instead of seizing this moment, the Clinton/Gore administration has squandered it. We have seen a steady erosion of American power and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.'”

Bush’s claims were completely false, and worse, they were shameless demagoguery. Nevertheless, because it played into the GOP = military strength myth, Bush repeated it often and the media was never aggressive on calling him on it. (It’s worth noting that Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, served in a war that Bush and his running mate dodged, and that the Gore campaign’s proposal for military spending actually called for more funding for the armed services then Bush’s proposal. But I digress…)

Bush was inaugurated amid promises to “rebuild” American military strength. At first, however, the president seemed passively disinterested in pursuing significant changes/improvements to the armed forces. In his first budget, for example, Bush barely increased military spending over the levels spent by his predecessor.

As the New York Times reported during Bush’s budget battle in 2001, the president’s preoccupation with tax cuts for the wealthy forced the administration to limit “additional money for the Pentagon next year to a level far lower than the military had been led to believe would be available…. Some conservatives have openly accused Mr. Bush of betraying his commitment to a strong national defense, undermining what until now has been solid support for the president from his party’s right.”

That, of course, was before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which prompted Congress and the White House to agree to a new major military buildup.

However, dramatic changes to the U.S. military — its structure, organization, technology, personnel — take time. Bush has only been in office for two years. Yet, in those same two years, Bush has sent troops into battle in two major theaters, and if it’s not too early to consider Iraq a victory, the military was overwhelmingly successful in both instances.

This won’t make our neo-con, hawk friends happy, but there’s a point raised by these truths. Bush was clearly wrong when he said during the campaign that the U.S. armed forces had been hallowed out. Clinton/Gore, therefore, were not as bad for the military as the conventional wisdom would have you believe.

Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution, raised this point, much to the conservatives’ chagrin, as fighting was nearly completed in Afghanistan in 2002.

“Just over a year ago, George Bush and Dick Cheney were campaigning hard on the theme that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had run down the United States military,” O’Hanlon wrote. “Picking up a traditional Republican refrain, they claimed that defense cuts under President Clinton had gone too far, that the armed forces had been overused badly, that readiness was poor. But now President Bush stands on the verge of winning a war with the military that Bill Clinton bequeathed him…. The administration developed an effective war plan that defeated the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and it has a sound broader strategy in the struggle against terrorism. But it is still Bill Clinton’s military that has actually been winning this war.”

If O’Hanlon’s examination drove conservatives crazy, and it did, then I can’t wait to see their reaction to Matthew Miller’s new op-ed.

Miller, a senior fellow at Occidental College in Los Angeles and a nationally syndicated columnist, has applied O’Hanlon’s argument to the war in Iraq.

“With that indelible image of Saddam’s toppling statue forever banishing the doubts of the armchair generals, and with the amazing achievements of the United States armed forces coming into sharper relief, it’s time for all honest observers — and especially conservatives — to confront a simple fact: The remarkable feats in Iraq are being performed by Bill Clinton’s military,” Miller said. “This should be obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology or partisanship.”

Boy, this really isn’t going to make the right wing happy.

“It’s true that President Bush has been throwing money at the Pentagon since Sept. 11, but defense planners will tell you that none of the impressive leaps in our military capability have taken place suddenly in the last 18 months,” Miller wrote. “No, much as it must incense Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay, we are liberating Iraq with Bill Clinton’s military.”

He added, “I hope all honest Americans — and I know that includes you, Rush and Tom- – join me in toasting the unrivalled capabilities of the military that Bill Clinton handed off to his successor.”

Call it a hunch, I just don’t see this toast happening.