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/CONT/

What was unexpected was the ease and speed with which the US 
achieved the military phase of the invasion. Despite the fact that its 
prowess was never fully tested on account of the enemy having failed to 
put up an expected fight via asymmetrical urban warfare, the US military 
is nevertheless an undeniably excellent fighting machine, one that any 
nation would be proud to possess. That US forces suffered 
unprecedented light casualties, due also to emphasis on protecting and 
rescuing soldiers in distress, is professionally admirable. The morale 
of the troops has been as high as any commander can wish. Whether this 
high morale can be sustained when troops are used as an occupation 
police force in a hostile country is another question.  

Invoking September 11 as America's lesson that vast oceans no longer 
protect it from terrorism - the threat of the new era, the president 
said, "On that day, 19 months ago, we also began a relentless worldwide 
campaign against terrorists, those who hate freedom, in order to secure 
our homeland and to make the world a more peaceful place." He 
referred to "the battle of Afghanistan" and "the Iraqi
theater" and 
declared that "Iraq and Afghanistan are now free". With daily reports of 
guerrilla resistance and suicide bombers inflicting US casualties and US 
soldiers firing on civilians demonstrating against US occupation, such a 
sweeping declaration raises a credibility gap. It is also arguable that 
terrorists hate freedom, rather than foreign oppression.  

The US military has performed professionally and is deserving of 
recognition. The same cannot be said of the political rationale behind 
its deployment. Throughout history, the misuse of the military for dubious 
political causes has led to the downfall of governments and empires. It 
would not be surprising if the Democrats would separate pride in the 
military's professionalism from the political folly of its deployment to 
support the flawed grand strategy adopted by a Republican 
administration captured by neo-conservatism.  

About the state of the US economy, the president acknowledged that 
unemployment is now at 6 percent, which he claimed should serve as a 
clear signal to the US Congress a bold economic recovery package is 
needed so people can find work. "We need robust tax relief so our fellow 
citizens can find a job," the president said in his Santa Clara speech. 
The original $726 billion tax package over 10 years Bush sent to the 
Congress is now pared down to $550 billion and it may be cut further in 
the Senate by those who are worried that the growing budget deficit will 
lead to higher interest rates that will stall any hope of recovery. 
Administration economists say that the tax cut will create 1 million new 
jobs by the year 2004, when Bush will face a second term election. A 
million new jobs would still leave 7.8 million people unemployed.  

Historically, the Republican Party prided itself as not being a foreign 
war party. It was formed in 1856 by anti-slavery activists and individuals 
who believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of 
charge. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White 
House in 1860. The word democracy does not appear in the Republican 
Oath, a statement of Republican philosophy published by the 
Republican National Committee. As the party of prosperity, the GOP 
benefited from the boom of the 1920s. The Great Depression destroyed 
the Republican majority. After years of taking credit for prosperity, the 
GOP found itself branded as the party of depression after the economic 
collapse in 1929. By the late 1930s, Republicans in Congress sided 
with those who hoped to avoid involvement in any future European war. 
Most Republicans were isolationists who supported the neutrality laws 
and voted against increased defense appropriations. Their isolationism 
was supported by some prominent Democrats, including Joseph P 
Kennedy, ambassador to England, father of J F Kennedy. By the end of 
World War II, most Senate Republicans, led by Arthur H Vandenberg of 
Michigan, had repudiated isolationism out of realist pragmatism, but 
foreign war remained not a Republican theme.  

The surprising loss in the 1948 election to Harry S Truman, a Democrat, 
again showed how desperately Republicans, out of power for two 
decades, needed fresh issues. They soon found one in the hysterical 
charge that communists had infiltrated the Democrat-controlled federal 
government. In 1950, Senator Joseph R McCarthy of Wisconsin charged 
that the State Department under the Democrat administrations had 
been infested with communists, which among other things "lost" China 
to communism, as if China were America's to lose. Although McCarthy 
failed to prove his wild accusations, in the process of ruining many 
lives, Congressional investigations gave Republicans their best issue 
since the pre- Depression era.  

Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon 
Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China 
experts by McCarthyism. He wrote, "The irony of this gap - Asian 
experts - was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and 
China experts in the State Department - John Patton Davies Jr, John 
Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent - had been purged during the 
McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide 
sophisticated, nuanced insights, we - certainly I - badly misread China's 
objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional 
hegemony."  

There are clear signs that the Bush administration also badly misread 
Arab political culture and the root cause of terrorism, mostly as a result 
of experts on Arabism who did not tote the neo-con pro-Israel line having 
been purged from all US policy establishments. Bernard Lewis, who 
describes the separation of church and state as a Western disease, 
and Fouad Ajami are the neo-cons' favored Middle East experts who 
see the Arab World as ripe for liberation from itself into modernity by 
the West. The president is not being well served by the neo-cons around 
him, nor is the peerless US military being used to fight for a good and 
viable cause.  

A split between conservative and moderate Republicans flared into the 
open during the Korea War. The conservatives, led by Senator Robert A 
Taft of Ohio, continued to oppose the New Deal. Moderates questioned 
whether this ideological fixation could win the presidency, and they 
looked to World War II hero General Dwight D Eisenhower to carry their 
standard in 1952. The popular Eisenhower soundly defeated Adlai 
Stevenson, liberal governor of Illinois, one of the great figures 
in US politics, taking 39 states by promising to end the Korean War. 
Republicans also won control of Congress by a narrow margin. 
Ironically, the war hero won the election on a pledge to end war.  

Eisenhower's personal popularity did not carry over to the GOP as a 
party. Eisenhower continued Truman's foreign policy of containment of 
communist expansion, but not Truman's readiness to deploy US troops 
overseas. Domestically, he tried to hold the line on government 
expenditures, which satisfied neither GOP conservatives who wanted 
sharp cutbacks nor special interest groups that wanted more 
government contracts and subsidies. In 1956, he won a rematch against 
Stevenson, taking 58 percent of the popular vote. But the Democrats 
won control of both houses of Congress.  

The 1960 election was the closest of the century. Democratic senator 
John F Kennedy defeated vice president Richard M Nixon, who actually 
won the popular vote if Alabama had been counted properly. Ballot fraud 
in Illinois has since been been established as the reason Kennedy won 
the electoral vote. Nixon gracefully accepted the results of a fraudulent 
election, declining to file a contest, thus avoiding a constitutional 
crisis. Al Gore was less graceful in 2000 and the decision was left to 
a pro-Republican Supreme Court.  

A split between conservatives and liberals again weakened the GOP 
during the 1960s. Governor Nelson A Rockefeller of New York emerged 
as the spokesman for party liberals and Senator Barry M Goldwater of 
Arizona as leader of the conservatives. A narrowly based presidential 
campaign by Goldwater produced a stunning defeat for the GOP in 
1964. Goldwater took only six states and 38 percent of the popular vote. 
But his ideology won control of the Republican Party.  

Nixon led a unified Republican party to a narrow victory in the 1968 
race against a Democratic ticket weakened by a split on the race issue 
between liberal Democrat Hubert H Humphrey and racist George C 
Wallace, who split to run as an American Independent candidate. 
Taking only 43 percent of the popular vote, Nixon was the first new 
president since 1848 to take office with both houses of Congress 
controlled by the opposition party. Nixon won in part by promising to 
end the Vietnam War.  

Nixon won re-election by a lopsided margin in 1972 on the strength of 
his historic opening to China and his policy of detente with the USSR, 
but he was forced to resign in 1974 over the threat of impeachment in 
the wake of the Watergate affair, succeeded by Vice President Gerald R 
Ford. Republicans lost control of the White House in 1976, when Ford 
was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter.  

/CONT/

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