Republicans have long been masters of playing the macho war card to intimidate Democrats, and Democrats more often than not have caved on these issues -- from early in the Cold War through the War on Terror and beyond.
The war card was played by passionately asserting that the Democrats had "lost China," as Richard Nixon and others alleged, were "soft on Communism" in the run-up to our disastrous involvement in Vietnam, and generally "soft" on tin-horn dictators like Saddam Hussein, or any radical Islamic group dating from the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1979.
If any American leader proposes a sensible course of action regarding a world hot spot -- today those include Afghanistan, Korea, Somalia and Iran -- the reaction of the cowboy segment of the Republican Party is always knee-jerk predictable. It was evident this week in the bombastic statements of leading GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney and Arizona Senator John McCain (who can always be counted on in these instances).
Mr. Romney, reacting to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's statement that the U.S. role in Afghanistan would fall to the level of our current military role in Iraq sometime in 2013, spouted that Mr. Panetta was being "misguided and naive" for announcing we might leave a year earlier than previously announced, 2014.
Senator McCain chimed in with similar comments. Notice, however, that neither man said the war should continue on and
As if this were a big secret the Taliban couldn't learn from our Afghan or Pakistani "allies." As if leaving were not long overdue; as if the situation on the ground would be any better by 2525.
These Republicans are trying to paint the president who oversaw the dismantling of al-Qaida as an effective terror group and the dramatic end of Osama bin Laden as "weak on defense." All of that based on what they see as their expert assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.
Mr. McCain is flat-out wrong in his assessment, as he has been about past military entanglements, and Mr. Romney -- that great war veteran from Bain Capital -- comes across as, if not completely ludicrous, just another cynical pol playing the war card, aiming at voters who aren't paying attention.
It could more easily be argued that deploying as many as 100,000 troops in Afghanistan years after we helped defeat the Taliban and drive them into their Pakistan hideouts was directly opposed to the interests of the United States, and that this Vietnamesque policy unnecessarily made our troops targets in somebody else's fight.
And in the long run this weakened the United States by stretching the military too thinly and helping to drive up the federal debt. But none of that matters to those voters who can always be persuaded by tough-talk comments like those offered this week by Mr. Romney and Sen. McCain.
Despite the evidence of the costly failures this attitude has consistently produced since World War II.
The greater point might be whether a Democrat like President Obama can stand up to this pompostic "patriotism" and follow a more rational path in foreign affairs -- and in whittling down the bloated military budget.
So far, the president's decision to allow a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan puts him almost in a class with Lyndon Johnson, who was afraid to ignore the flag-wavers and reject sending thousands of troops to Vietnam with an equally impossible assignment.
It is possible, however, that the president has learned something since that earlier decision. Time will tell.
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