Last week I noted the launch of a new Republican talking point: that the policies of the Reagan and Bush I Administrations led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (pause) Yes, this is actually what
Republican leaders are now saying. First, it was Tony Snow and Ken Mehlman. And last week Dick Cheney joined the fray, also targeting Reagan in the 9/11 blame game.
Well, if Republicans want to associate the Democratic strategy for Iraq with the foreign policy of Ronald Wilson Reagan, who most voters believe saved the United States from the Evil Soviet Empire, I say bring it on...
While campaigning for Republican candidates this week, Dick Cheney continued to catapult the propaganda. At a fundraiser in Arizona,
Cheney said:
In Beirut, terrorists, of course, killed 241 of our servicemen with a suicide truck bomber. In Somalia we lost 19 Americans in Mogadishu. In both cases, the United States responded to those attacks by withdrawing our forces. But by doing so, we simply invited more danger, because the terrorists concluded that if they killed enough Americans, they could change American policy -- because they had. And so they continued to wage attacks against America and American interests.
We had the bombing at the World Trade Center in New York in 1993; the murders at the Saudi National Guard training facility in Riyadh in 1995; the attack on Khobar Towers in 1996; or the simultaneous attack on two of our embassies in East Africa in 1998; and, of course, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Ultimately, all of this culminated in the attacks right here at home on 9/11, which killed 3,000 of our fellow citizens.
Blame Reagan, sayeth Cheney. Republicans have apparently decided that the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut was the original sin that reaped the fall of the Twin Towers. And clearly they want to draw a parallel between that foreign-policy maneuver and the strategy that Democrats are offering to get us out of Iraq.
This is a comparison that Democrats should embrace. It's a very simple argument that's easy to explain: the Democrats are the party carrying the mantle of Reagan's vaunted foreign policy. Actually, it's even easier than that. It only requires two words, a bit of political terminology still lingering in the electoral collective psyche:
Reagan Democrats.
Although not entirely irrelevant, it hardly matters what this phrase originally meant. And the point is not to get bogged down in detailed comparisons. If politics is television with the sound turned off (as the Bush-Lieberman kiss so aptly demonstrated), then politics is also a newspaper with headlines only.
Reagan Democrats.
This isn't and shouldn't be a deep intellectual argument. It's not about cutting and running, it's about cutting our losses. This is what Reagan understood (and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out): not every battle is winnable militarily. Sometimes it's necessary to redeploy and regroup. Reagan, good. Bush, bad.
Jack Murtha is the type of Democrat who should define our party right now. Reagan Democrats. Jim Webb, who served as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, is another. Murtha is already working his jujitsu on the GOP Reagan dis. He had this to say about their Beirut talking point:
I was in Beirut the day after the bombing -- the marines were bombed. I realized Hezbollah was responsible for that. We'd like to get rid of that terrorist organization. President Reagan -- now, here's one of our strongest presidents -- recognized we couldn't solve that problem, so he redeployed his troops.
That's what I'm saying. We cannot win this militarily, and our troops are caught in a civil war. We have no accountability. We're caught in a quagmire, and we get political rhetoric rather than solutions to the problem.
Reagan's foreign policy was flexible enough to allow for a change of course when direct military intervention was counter-productive. And he won the Cold War through pragmatism and not losing sight of the big picture. Bush, Cheney, and the neocons lack the adaptability and critical-thinking skills of their Republican predecessors. Democrats offer a return to the sane, conservative foreign policy that guided us through the Cold War and kept the Middle East from boiling over. (These assertions about Reagan are not intended to spark debate. Accurate or not, this perspective on Reagan's foreign policy is already firmly implanted as truth within the electorate. This is about using the Reagan mythos to our advantage.)
Reagan Democrats is a wedge, handed to us by the White House and RNC, ready to be shoved between traditional conservatives and the neocons. I suggest we use it.