On behalf of what she calls the Republican Party, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan bids adieu to the past decade and to the Bush Doctrine, to what she calls “un-Republican” conduct, aka “bullying dreaminess.” But who defines what is “Republican conduct?” Calvin Coolidge? Dwight Eisenhower? Robert Taft? Or Theodore Roosevelt, the “bullying dreamer” himself?
But at the same time Taft Republicans are tossing the Bush Doctrine into the dustbin of history, President Obama has been picking it up, dusting it off, and foisting it upon his bewildered party, which can barely believe what’s gone on.
Since he took office, the one-time peace candidate, who vowed to end the war in Iraq, close Guantanamo Bay, and stop what his friends all called torture, has adopted the Bush protocols for the war against terror, kept Guantanamo open, kept or promoted key Bush personnel in these areas, vastly expanded the war in Afghanistan (using the surge model he mocked as a senator) and followed the Bush timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, implying some troops may remain for a while.
To top it all, he raised the Bush Doctrine to stunning new heights by starting a third war in Libya, a “war of choice” in a country that posed no threat to our safety, with democracy promotion and regime change as the ultimate end.
While doubtless appalled, the Left has largely kept quiet, while the lack of a president to defend has allowed the old GOP rift to assert itself, between the realists and the idealistic crusaders who, back then once again lacking a president, split over President Clinton’s humane interventions in Central Europe in his second term.
With the ambiguity around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — not easy successes, though surely not failures — no one agrees on the past. As the Washington Times put it, the current Republican candidates seem unsure how to address the Bush legacy: “While the Iraq war was unpopular, the surge there was so popular that President Obama used that strategy in Afghanistan. That’s left the Republican field trying to figure out how to distance itself from Mr. Obama on foreign policy.”
And, of course, vice versa. Having gotten most of his support on Afghanistan and Libya from neoconservatives — and adopted their rules for the war upon terror — how does Obama now run against them?
And the Libyan “war” has not only split the two parties, but split those who seem to agree. Neoconservatives support the war aims but say the operation has been bungled badly (the complaint of the liberal hawks about the Iraqi invasion), saying it came too late to be really effective and critiquing the method of “leading from behind.”
They say Obama, while he has done the right things, has failed to show leadership in the way he pursues them, and has lost vital chances for breakthroughs in freedom in Syria and Iran.
It has also divided the Tea Party, the driving force now in Republican politics, and caught ‘twixt the poles of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., son of the GOP’s lead isolationist, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., son of refugees from Fidel Castro’s Cuba and a full-throated fan of the freedom agenda who certainly knows whence he speaks.
It is true that the lackluster 2012 field now lacks a neocon but this is not true of the large stellar class elected in 2009 and 2010 and coming up fast.
Rubio’s maiden speech talked of a world that needs an “American century” and an America that needs to defend humane aspiration. Sounds like a proper idea of “Republican conduct.”
Sounds like a bullying dreamer to me.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
