The Logic of Constant Intervention

Our former associate editor Matt Welch drops some depressing foreign policy prognostication from his current gig at the Los Angeles Times. Worth reading and thinking about in full, but here are some choice excerpts. Matt meets a vet who tells him:

Wartime is not the time to debate the conduct of war. Once we're there, we're in it together, and we need to fight united until we win.

Set aside for the moment whether he's right. The important thing, for the future conduct of U.S. foreign policy, is that his sentiment remains widely held, in numbers large enough to help ensure that no matter what you may hear on the campaign trail between now and November 2008, the U.S. troop deployment in Iraq will likely be an issue in the 2012 election and beyond.

[I]n a galaxy far, far away (otherwise known as the 1990s), President Clinton felt that he had to assure an isolationist Republican Congress—repeat after me, an isolationist Republican Congress—that the 20,000 U.S. peacekeeping troops he promised Bosnia as part of the Dayton Accords would only stay deployed for a single calendar year. They ended up staying nine times as long, and that ranks among the shortest of unpromised U.S. deployments since the country became a global power.

At the time, Clinton was able to persuade enough Republicans not necessarily on the merits of backing Balkan peace with potential U.S. blood but rather on the argument that, well, the commander in chief had made a promise……

………..

Every presidential nominee of the major party not currently occupying the White House runs on a scaled-back, more "humble" foreign policy; every new president quickly becomes a robust interventionist. People commonly misportrayed as wild-eyed pacifists—Howard Dean, George Soros—in fact supported just about every war before Iraq and will almost certainly support future Democratic wars. As the woman said, what's the point of having this superb military if we can't use it?
………………

So Gen. Petraeus will get his six more months of surge, even though Democrats claim it's failing and the public has long since given up hope. We'll all reconvene next spring, by which time the goalposts should be moved sufficiently enough that I can plan on writing the exact same column on the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11 as well.

Matt's April 2006 "farewell to warblogging."