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Bipartisan War MachineGB819: July 21, 2018 |
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Those of us who became politically conscious during the George W Bush Junior administration may have at first thought that to be Republican was to support perpetual war and to be Democrat was to oppose it. Bush was very obvious in supporting military aggression from the United States.
The truth is that George HW Bush Senior fought a major fight with Patrick Buchanan within the Republican Party and Buchanan’s mentality was basically that the united States should not be involved in these interactions overseas. There are other Republicans like him, such as Ron Paul and to a lesser extent Rand Paul. While Donald Trump certainly is not of the mindset of Buchanan or Ron Paul and did airstrike Syria, it can be said that he is less aggressive than Bush based on his current record.
Then, Democrats are full of politicians who supported Bush in his foreign policies – notably Hillary Clinton. Obama appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (a move that was unpopular by anti-intervention people) and increased Troops in Afghanistan. The administration is responsible for the death of Moamar Gaddafi and destruction of Libya and the attempted destruction of Syria. If it was not for Bush’s invasion and Obama’s attempts to give weapons to so called “rebels” in Syria to overthrow the Government, it is logical to believe that ISIS/ISIL would never have formed out of Al Qaeda. While Obama did stop short of adding ground troops to a new country (he added them to Afghanistan), he looks restrained only in comparison to Bush, who was even worse. He was more savvy, more deceptive as a personality. Hillary Clinton is outright as bad as Bush, but Obama still only looks cautious when compared to Bush and Clinton. The Bush/Romney/McCain Republicans very deceptively portrayed Obama as essentially a Dennis Kucinich or Jesse Ventura figure, when Obama still essentially maintained US aggression, just with more finagling.
In Russia, when Trump aimed for diplomacy with Putin some of the loudest critics were Democrats. This also reveals that Democrats are not a consistent voice for the movement against American aggression and only tried to tap into the movement during the Bush Jr. administration without really supporting it. Howard Dean was a Governor as opposed to a Senator, so his opposition to the Iraq war in terms of votes meant nothing. Howard Dean then became one of the biggest voices for aggression in Syria and Libya. John Kerry, the candidate who defeated Dean, voted for the Iraq War although he did later regret it, the damage had been done. In my assessment, in the Obama administration that followed, Kerry was less aggressive in the second term than Clinton was in the first, but the damage had already been done by Clinton.
The idea that Democrats are a consistent voice for like minded views which aim to avoid these unnecessary invasions is simply not true. In fact, on that criteria, Trump (while no Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich or Jesse Ventura) was less bad than Hillary Clinton in their campaign for the Presidency. The truth is that there is an establishment which demands subservient behavior to both Democrats and Republicans and that only those individuals who resist this establishment will oppose the military aggression.
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