https://truthout.org/articles/would-joe-biden-like-hillary-clinton-lose-to-donald-trump-over-the-iraq-war/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=4f578306-2660-4fb5-bbb2-d6f64d8628ecOP-ED
Would Joe Biden, Like Hillary Clinton, Lose to Donald Trump
Over the Iraq War?
Hillary
Clinton and former Vice President Joe Biden acknowledge the crowd at Riverfront
Sports athletic facility on August 15, 2016, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. MARK
MAKELA / GETTY IMAGES
March 14, 2020
Joe Biden’s support for the Iraq War and the key role he played as head of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in getting the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled
Senate not only has made him unpopular within the party’s progressive wing, but
has also raised serious questions regarding his electability. Biden’s decision
to limit hearings prior to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force to
just a day and half, stack the witness list with war supporters and block
testimony by prominent war opponents; his false statements about Iraq’s military
capabilities; and his defense of the invasion long after inspectors returned
after finding none of the proscribed weapons — as well as his recent denials — raise disturbing questions across the ideological
spectrum as to how he would conduct foreign policy as president.
Should Biden get the presidential nomination, it could cost the
Democrats the White House.
What happened to Hillary Clinton four years ago could be a
harbinger of what could happen to Biden this fall. Despite distancing herself
from her earlier pro-war position, Clinton’s support for the war authorization
not only led to her surprise defeat in the 2008 Democratic primaries to Barack Obama, who repeatedly challenged her
judgement in supporting President George W. Bush’s policies, it cost her the
2016 general election as well.
Throughout 2016, Donald Trump was able to attack Clinton from
the left over her support for the Iraq War, the Libyan intervention and other
unpopular projections of U.S. military force. Despite having actually supported the invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya himself, Trump was largely successful in depicting himself
as having opposed these controversial actions and in portraying Clinton as a
reckless militarist who, as president, would waste American lives and resources
on unnecessary, tragic and seemingly endless overseas entanglements.
Recognizing that more traditional Republican hawks would not
support a Democratic candidate regardless, Trump was able to take advantage of
the growing isolationist and anti-interventionist sentiments among
conservatives, libertarians and centrists to consolidate his base. In addition,
he was also able to reinforce the unease among progressive Democratic-leaning
voters over Clinton’s pro-interventionist positions, thereby suppressing
turnout and encouraging third-party support in some key swing states that made
the difference in his Electoral College victory.
Trump’s critique of Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy resonated
with millions of Americans, many of whom naively believed he would be less
inclined to embroil the country in such wars. White working-class communities
in states such as Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which had
suffered greatly from sending their children off to fight in these wars and saw
their communities and public infrastructure suffer in order to pay for it — tilted the balance in those
states, which had gone to the anti-Iraq war Obama when he was the Democratic
nominee. 2016 turnout among Black and millennial voters, who had also been hurt
disproportionately by the Iraq War and subsequent interventions in terms of
being sent to fight and cutbacks in domestic programs to pay for it, was much
lower than when Obama headed the Democratic ticket. And support for the antiwar
Green and Libertarian parties — which more than made up for Trump’s margin of
victory in those states — was much higher than in the previous election cycles.
An analysis of voting data demonstrates that areas of the country
which experienced the largest amount of casualties from the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq also experienced the most dramatic shift from Democrat to Republican
between the 2008 and 2012 elections and the 2016 election, when the Democrats
nominated a supporter of the Iraq War after twice nominating a war opponent.
The analysis concluded:
Even controlling in a statistical model for many other
alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful
relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support
for Trump. Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s
victory — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — had suffered even a modestly
lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent
Hillary Clinton to the White House.
Trump was able to take advantage of these communities’ losses
and anger at the politicians who sent their young people to die in unpopular
overseas wars by contrasting himself with both Clinton and his Republican
rivals, saying, “Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and
aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy
without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are
signs of strength.”
Trump scored surprisingly well, challenging both the
neoconservatives and more traditional hawks among his Republican rivals, and
later against Clinton through his “America First” rhetoric and criticisms of
costly and seemingly never-ending overseas wars, particularly the decision to
invade Iraq.
Claiming “our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and
destruction,” he attacked Clinton for her “reckless” foreign policy, which he
claimed “has blazed the path of destruction in its wake. After losing thousands
of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worst shape in the
Middle East than ever, ever before.” Trump gained support from voters across
the political spectrum in his major foreign policy speech in June 2016, in which — despite having actually supported
the invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya — he portrayed himself as
reluctant to use force and Clinton as a dangerous interventionist:
It all started with her bad judgment in supporting the war in
Iraq in the first place. Though I was not in government service, I was among
the earliest to criticize the rush to war. And yes, even before the war ever
started. But Hillary Clinton learned nothing from Iraq. Because when she got
into power, she couldn’t wait to rush us off to war in Libya. She lacks the
temperament and the judgment and the competence to lead our country. She should
not be president under any circumstances.
In another speech, he asserted that, “Sometimes it seemed like there wasn’t a
country in the Middle East that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to invade,
intervene in, or topple,” accusing her of being “trigger-happy” and “reckless,”
and noting that Clinton’s legacy in Iraq, Libya and Syria “has produced only
turmoil and suffering and death.” Critiquing Clinton’s distorted economic
priorities, he observed,
The price of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will total
approximately $6 trillion. We could have rebuilt our country over and over and
over again. Yet, after all this money was spent and lives lost, Clinton’s
policies as secretary of state have left the Middle East in more disarray than
ever before, not even close. Had we done nothing, we would have been in a far
better position.
Trump will be able to use this exact same line of argument
against Biden, should he become the Democratic nominee.
Shifts in
the Electorate
Just as the Clinton and Biden-wing of the Democratic Party has
been slow to recognize how far to the left-leaning, younger Democratic voters
had moved on economic and other domestic issues in recent years, they
underestimate the depth of millennials’
opposition to overseas wars. Their generation has been
profoundly impacted by the U.S. invasion, occupation and counter-insurgency war
in Iraq. Many of them had older siblings and friends who served in Iraq and
suffered physically and mentally from their service, and recognized how the war
had destabilized the region, led to a dramatic increase in terrorism, harmed
the U.S.’s reputation and drained the federal budget. They resent Clinton’s and
now Biden’s insistence that Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, tuition-free
public higher education, and other programs advocated by Bernie Sanders were
too expensive while they were nevertheless willing to support the trillions
spent on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as other dramatic
increases in military spending.
Particularly among working-class millennials, who either
reluctantly enlisted themselves or had friends who had done so in order to get
support for university tuition, there is a strong sense that Clinton’s and
Biden’s priorities were seriously misplaced and that they were more interested
in sending young people fight to wars overseas than enabling them to receive a
good education. Indeed, one of the reasons that millennials so overwhelming
have supported Sanders over Clinton in 2016 and Biden in the 2020 Democratic
primaries was that Sanders had recognized the Iraq War was illegal and
unnecessary, while Clinton and Biden had insisted that a weak and isolated
nation somehow constituted a threat to U.S. national security, and that the
United States has the right to illegally invade and occupy other countries
regardless of its human and material costs.
Young people are the least consistent voters in terms of
turnout. With a pro-interventionist Biden at the head of the ticket, he — like
Clinton — will likely suppress the mostly-progressive youth turnout and hurt
Democratic chances for the White House and other races as well.
In the eyes of some leftist and libertarian critics, the fact
that Biden and Clinton continued to defend their vote authorizing the invasion
despite the absence of any discernible threats to U.S. national security led to
accusations that they — like the Bush administration — deliberately manipulated
Americans’ post-9/11 fears by making false accusations of an Iraqi threat in
order to pursue and neoconservative agenda for oil and empire, particularly in
light of Biden’s call to invade Iraq prior to the 2001 terrorist attack.
Will History
Repeat Itself?
This is not the first time that the Democratic Party’s choice of
hawkish nominees in a time of growing antiwar sentiment has led them to lose
close elections they otherwise would have won. The classic case is 1968, when
the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, an outspoken supporter of the Vietnam War,
led many antiwar partisans of defeated challenger Eugene McCarthy to refuse to
support him. The result was the very narrow victory of the relatively unpopular
Richard Nixon.
In 2004, as it was becoming increasing apparent that the
invasion of Iraq the previous year was turning into a long, bloody,
counter-insurgency campaign, the Democrats nominated pro-Iraq War senator John
Kerry. As a supporter of the war resolution, he was unable to challenge George
W. Bush on the illegal, unnecessary and predictably disastrous decision to
invade that oil-rich county. As a result, Kerry could only focus on how Bush
was mismanaging the conflict and how he would have handled the invasion and
occupation better. Instead of being a clear-cut contest between a pro-war and
antiwar candidate at a time of an increasingly unpopular overseas conflict, it
became a choice between the decisive Republican commander-in-chief and the
allegedly “flip-flopping” Democratic challenger. As a result, not only was
Kerry unable to win over many pro-war swing voters, he alienated a large
segment of antiwar voters, thereby losing a very close election an antiwar
candidate would have almost certainly have won.
Will the Democrats indeed suffer a similar fate in 2020?
Already, Trump supporters are going after Biden for his support
for the war. A viral video of an Iraq veteran confronting Biden, shouting “Blood it
on your hands!” and “Trump is more anti-war than you are!” is being circulated
by Fox News and other Trump supporters. And Biden’s
recent bizarre claim that he voted for the Iraq War to prevent it adds little
to his credibility in response, particularly in light of his continued defense of the war despite the return of inspectors and the absence of the
weapons, weapons systems, and weapons programs he insisted Iraq still
possessed.
The best way to avoid another Democratic defeat as a result of
their support for a Republican war would be if Bernie Sanders or someone else
from the party’s anti-Iraq War majority wins the nomination.
If that doesn’t happen, Biden needs to put in a concerted effort
to convince skeptical Democratic and independent voters that, despite his role
in getting the Senate to approve Bush’s request to invade a foreign country
under false pretenses, he would never ask Congress to give him the same
authority. He would need to stop making false statements that he actually opposed the war and issue a frank
apology. This would require making a convincing argument that he is a changed
man, both in terms of his view of international legal conventions prohibiting
such wars or aggression, but also from his attitude that such invasions would
somehow bring peace and stability to conquered lands and would enhance U.S.
national security.
He would also need to choose a running mate with solid antiwar
credentials. He would need to support a Democratic Party platform with strong
anti-interventionist language. He would need to call for a dramatic reduction
in military spending. He would need to call for the withdrawal of all combat
troops from the Middle East. He would need to promise to withhold military and
arms transfers to countries in the region that have used such weapons in
violations of international humanitarian law, which would include Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Israel and Egypt, among others.
Failure to do this could lead to a repeat of 2016. And 2004. And
1968.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of
politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San
Francisco.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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