Of all of Bush’s misstatements from the 2000 presidential election, one of the most obviously-false attacks was on military readiness. Indeed, then-Gov. Bush blamed Clinton and Gore directly for “hollowing out” the military. “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.'” BC00 campaign aides later acknowledged it was a bogus charge, but that didn’t stop Bush from repeating it. A lot.
Nearly eight years later, Fred Thompson has apparently decided he wants to borrow the same argument.
The U.S. must rebuild its military to fight global terrorism because leaders “took a holiday” in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, undeclared presidential candidate Fred Thompson told war veterans Tuesday.
“Some people in this country think if we can pull out of Iraq, our problems will be over,” Thompson told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “You and I know better than that.”
“Now we’re stretched too thin, and our equipment is wearing out,” said Thompson.
When I first heard that Thompson had told the VFW convention that the military readiness has been weakened, I thought he might be taking a subtle shot at Bush. No such luck; he’s blaming Clinton’s policies from the last decade for today’s military problems. How very odd.
Indeed, here’s the exact quote: “Our country was not prepared for our current situation. We took a holiday from history in the 90’s. We cut our military, our procurement and our research and development. Now our military is stretched too thin. We are wearing out our equipment. Our intelligence capabilities are inadequate.”
Most Republican presidential candidates are struggling a bit right now to figure out how, exactly, to keep Bush at arm’s distance. They don’t want to rebuke him (and offend the GOP’s far-right base), but they don’t want to embrace him (and become tarnished by Bush’s failures and unpopularity).
Thompson, however, apparently is trying the novel approach of actually trying to be Bush.
As for the “substance” — I use the word loosely — of Thompson’s claim, as long as the actor-lobbyist-senator is going to criticize Clinton’s military policies, we might as well set the record straight.
Far from taking “a holiday from history,” Clinton fought two wars — and won them both.
Most Americans probably don’t remember the precise outcomes of—much less the circumstances leading up to—those small Balkan conflicts. But I can’t forget them. I covered the end of the war in Bosnia as a reporter and was a speechwriter in the Clinton White House during Kosovo. In both cases it was clear, at least to me and my Balkan-obsessed friends, that Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic was engineering ethnic slaughter for his own political ends; that both conflicts, happening in the same country that sparked World War I, could spill over into neighboring states; and that Europe, by itself, was incapable of ending the violence.
America, in my opinion, had no option but to get involved militarily. But much of the national security establishment wasn’t so sure, because the prospects for success seemed so grim. Religious and ethnic enmities in Yugoslavia were, if anything, worse than those in Iraq (at least until recently). At home, Clinton faced a far tougher political environment than Bush later would on the eve of the Iraq War: a hostile Congress controlled by the opposite party; a military that deeply distrusted him; and a pre-9/11 voting public that did not feel that the security of the nation was threatened in any direct way. The administration compounded these problems with a series of mistakes—from its initial half-hearted effort to sell the Europeans on a military strategy for Bosnia to underestimating Milosevic’s resolve to hold on to Kosovo.
And yet both conflicts ended with impressive military victories. In Bosnia in the summer of 1995, Croat and Muslim ground troops, armed (and, in the case of the Croats, trained) with tacit U.S. government support, routed the Serbs in southern Croatia and eastern Bosnia, while U.S.-led NATO air and naval forces pounded Bosnian Serb military positions with smart bombs and Tomahawk missiles. That one-two punch forced Milosevic to sue for peace at the Dayton Accords. Then, in March 1999, after 300,000 Kosovar Albanians had been driven from their homes by Serb troops fighting Kosovo Liberation Army guerillas, NATO launched another air war, this time hitting Kosovo and Serbia proper. Seventy-eight days later, Milosevic pulled his forces out of Kosovo.
We achieved these victories—whether by luck, skill, planning, or some combination—without the loss of a single American soldier’s life in combat. Most important of all, we won the peace, deploying multinational occupation forces sizable and robust enough to keep a tense but reasonably democratic order—an order that holds to this day. As for Milosevic: he was forced from power the next year by a nonviolent democratic mass movement and sent to The Hague, where he died in 2006.
To put this achievement in perspective: no Democratic president since FDR has launched and won a war. Clinton won two.
I’d just add, by the way, that when Bush sent troops into Afghanistan to rout the Taliban, he did so with the military Clinton left for him.