Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
David Broder is an idiot.
First of all, how can he possibly not be suggesting “that the president incite a war to get reelected”? I can’t square his sentiments here. Maybe that’s the point of David Broder.
Second, if war can spur on the economy, any other public spending could just as easily. Why go to all the effort of slaughtering thousands of Iranian civilians, sending our own young men and women to their deaths, and upsetting the global oil supply when we could just as easily mail out $2,000 dollar checks to every American adult? I’m not sure what a war with Iran would cost – but let’s say it cost $3 trillion dollars. Well, we could mail that $2,000 dollar check out once a year for five years without killing anybody in the process for that much money.
Of course, for reasons I cannot explain, war is always more popular than any other sort of public spending. And that may be the only logic to Broder’s exceedingly horrible proposal. Beyond that, it is simply the arrogance of a man with no risk, no chance of himself paying the price for this hideous, immoral, incoherent hawkish nonsense, no chance he’ll take a bullet for his stupidity. Other men would, but not Broder.
Furthermore, as Larison rightly points out, far from making Obama one of the “most successful presidents in history” a war with Iran would neither help Obama with Republicans (who would support his foreign policy while decrying his domestic secular-socialist agenda) or with his own base. Nor would it deter the Iranian nuclear program
For more on war spending and such, see Paul Krugman – who also gets a hat tip for this Broder madness.
We need to be bombing the manufacturing bases of the countries that we import the most things from.
We’ll get jobs back in no time.Report
@Jaybird, That’d be like a gift to those countries though, because then they’d have the opportunity to employ people replacing those factories with greener ones.Report
@Christopher Carr, if we’re in agreement that there’s no downside for either country, I think that it’s something that has become a moral obligation on our part.
We can protect America and protect the earth in one fell swoop and surely our descendants will thank us for, finally!, being proactive in the face of a crisis rather than at its tail end.Report
@Jaybird, Amen to that. But why stop there? If war is the gift that keeps on giving we should keep on with it until we have the war of all against all. Think of all the job opportunities.Report
@Christopher Carr, We could just bomb ourselves and pay off the campaign with all the jobs from post-war reconstruction. That way we’d also be denying the other countries our war productivity, seeing as they haven’t been very grateful in the past.Report
@trizzlor, so you want all of the benefit to go to the white males in charge of everything in the US?
Man, that’s racist.Report
for reasons I cannot explain, war is always more popular than any other sort of public spending.
I’m inclined to think that, since the Southern Strategy capitalized on anti-government resentment over desegregation, “populism” has come to hold that government action is unserious and counterproductive, unless the government is targeting out groups by bombing them or building prisons.Report
War proves that we are a great nation. What do you have against greatness?Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.Report
I think the worst part of this is I’m not even outraged at Broder, heck I’m not even surprised.
I mean it is horrible and I can only hope that no one listens to him but I am so used to hearing this style of poo that it just doesn’t register anymore.Report
This is example #3928374 of how if you are a beltway insider/ serious person you can say something as dumb as bag full of hammers and have it be printed in a major paper.Report
The man is as crazy as a monkey on a tricycle. Crazier even.Report
Beyond that, it is simply the arrogance of a man with no risk, no chance of himself paying the price for this hideous, immoral, incoherent hawkish nonsense, no chance he’ll take a bullet for his stupidity.
B-b-but, “chickenhawk” is a childish slander. i know this because Dick Cheney and Richard Perle said so.Report
I thought all war spendings were off-budget items, basically making them free. Is that not correct?Report
@mark boggs,
But free goods can’t stimulate the economy!Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
But the real “win” of all this is that it stimulates the economy without costing us a thing. See? Take it off the budget and it’s free, but the money still gets spent. Brilliant!!Report
“Nor would it deter the Iranian nuclear program”
Really? Heard much from the Iraqi WMD program recently?Report
@Koz, You mean the nonexistent one that we went into Iraq to deter under false pretenses? Yeah, no actually. Do you have even the tiniest comprehension of the different sort of war we’d be in with Iran than the one we faced in Iraq? Any inkling of the sort of enemy we’d be up against? While also still embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, with North Korea waiting on the sidelines? I mean, it’s one thing to be hawkish and naive, but a war with Iran would be the height of stupidity.Report
Erik, do you have any comprehension what it takes to maintain a nuclear weapons program?
Beyond that, it helps to have a coherent train of thought. Nowhere am I suggesting we should go to war with Iran, and there’s lots of reasons to say we shouldn’t.
But to say that a war wouldn’t disrupt Iran’s nuclear program is manifest ignorance, unless you happen to know something the rest of the world doesn’t.Report
@Koz, Gawd-frakkin’s d*mn – are you stupid, or simply still lying?Report
@Barry, Be nice Barry, Koz is the resident GOP party man.Report
Yeah, and scoreboard.Report
Why is war more popular than other kinds of public spending? If I may venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the narratives underlying our spending practices. Depending on who you talk to, domestic spending is characterized as a benevolent service we provide the less fortunate, as sinister plot to redistribute wealth through government thievery, or as something in between. We find several prominent narratives at play here. With “defense” spending, though, there’s really just one dominant underlying narrative, and it depicts spending as a good, patriotic, and necessary service that we, the sole superpower of the world, must provide for our safety. Yes, there are critics of war, but they are for the most part not the ones writing the checks. Before becoming president, Obama was safe criticizing the Iraq War, but only because he also fashioned himself as a reliable warrior president in the public imagination. He campaigned on increasing American military presence in the world, even though he considered Iraq a bad allocation of resources. A Republican can win as a critic of domestic spending, and a Democrat can win as a supporter of domestic spending, but neither can win as a critic of defense spending itself. Criticizing defense spending criticizes an image of the U.S. that’s well established and shared among the establishment and the population.Report
@Kyle Cupp, I’d say it has more to do with political market failure and the lack of a willingness to try to correct it.
Many people and politicians who want far lower levels of military spending are afraid to get behind this cause because, despite it’s sanity, it is a major political loser. Like being “soft on drugs”, or “soft on crime”, being labeled “soft on terror” is something from which a politician could never recover; as long as politicians want to be reelected and people remain uncritical and only passively involved in politics, the wars on drugs, crime, and terror will continue.Report
@Christopher Carr,
Yes, but the description of being “soft” that you mention is part of the narratives of which I speak. We conceptualize our response to crime, drugs, and terror in the figurative and narrative language of war, and this language of war is largely accepted because our national identity is largely created by such language.Report
@Kyle Cupp, I see now that we’re arguing the same point. But I do think there’s something we’re both missing.Report