The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

The University of Chicago’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1892

Chicago Maroon

Don’t blindly trust Republicans

I have been opposed to any war in Iraq for some time. I had hoped that, for now at least, I could stay above the fray here in the ivory tower. After reading John Lovejoy’s piece last Tuesday in the Maroon, I can no longer do so. Lovejoy, if I understand him correctly, contends that because Republicans have such a good track record in foreign policy, we should trust any Republican at all with any foreign policy, without question, as if on faith.

Granted, in general, Republican administrations have better track records with foreign policy than Democratic ones; as a whole, I would place more trust in a Republican administration. However, one thing that Americans have recently relearned from the stock market is that past performance is no guarantee of future results. I don’t believe that just because Eisenhower and Nixon have had exemplary records in foreign policy, we can trust Bush in the same area. In fact, in pre-election polls, Americans tended to trust Gore rather than Bush with foreign policy, in large part because Gore was seen as a wonkish elitist. Also, by and large, Americans decided that foreign policy was not the issue that they were going to choose a president by.

Then there is the question of whether this blind faith in Republican administrations is really justified at all. Even though they tend to have better track records than the Democrats, they by no means have perfect track records. For every Republican success, there can be found a Republican failure. Although Eisenhower ended the Korean War, he made the first tentative steps toward dragging the nation into Vietnam. Even though Nixon did bring us out of Vietnam (with or without honor), he only did so after the escalation of the war into Cambodia failed to bring victory.

Regan’s cowboy attitudes toward the running of the Cold War, which Lovejoy claims “destroyed the Soviet Union” (an insipid piece of Republican Party dogma if I’ve ever heard one), included fighting a proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan. This included, through the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI (which is now one of the few intelligence agencies in the world capable of a global reach), supplying arms to the Mujahadeen rebels. After the Soviet (and American) pullout, the Pakistanis used the ISI to forge a fundamentalist faction in Afghanistan for the purpose of fighting India called the Taliban. Things did not work out as intended, and instead the Taliban took Afghanistan by storm, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Looking deeper into the history of foreign policy, there are other major cases of extreme mismanagement. The obvious case is the interference in Latin America in the ’80s. Reagan claims to have known nothing of the matter, but his administration fought off the “Soviet insurgencies” by supporting brutal right wing juntas, led by such figures as Manuels Noriega, who Bush pere eventually had to arrest by means of an invasion, and Pinochet, whose atrocities are not even now fully documented.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, the Iran-Iraq war was raging, during which both sides used chemical weapons and ballistic missiles, often in deadly combination. Now, Bush fils is using that war as evidence that Saddam is capable of using weapons of mass destruction if given the chance. But he manages to leave out the fact that during the Reagan administration, the United States was the only nation willing to supply arms to the Iraqis, a mess that Bush pere had to rectify when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

The lesson is perfectly clear. While Reagan’s policies may have “won” us the Cold War, it was these same policies that have created the mess that is the post-Cold War world.

On the other hand, the Democrats were not always wrong about foreign policy. The Marshall Plan, which reconstructed Europe after World War II, was put into place by the Truman Administration. The Nixon/Kissinger policy of engaging with China only came to its fullest articulation during the Carter/Brzezinski era.

Lovejoy manages, perhaps from dogmatic slumber, to systemically forget the other side of the argument, while conflating his own side to the status of myth. Republican foreign policy may be better than the Democratic kind, but it is not perfect, and certainly not worthy of the sort of blind faith that he would have us place in it. What is apparent from Lovejoy’s article is that Republican administrations are at their foreign policy best when they bring us out of war. Given that now war is unavoidable (for it would seem that there is not enough concerted opposition to it to prevent it), we can at least hope that the Bush administration has enough wisdom to end the war when it comes time.

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