The Political Clock Is Ticking

Yes, that’s partisan politics-as-usual tiptoeing back into Washington. But it’s still mostly in domestic affairs--spending, tax and health issues--and rarely in matters relating to the war on terrorism or the fighting in Afghanistan.

That reticence, while patriotic, may be unfortunate. Questions about the conduct of wars in the United States usually heat up about five to 15 months after fighting begins. At this stage, if there’s little military success, the party not in the White House usually profits from the public’s skepticism of the war’s conduct and makes gains in midterm elections. That happened during the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War II and the Civil War.

Could this happen in 2002? Yes, if the public gets the sense that the Bush administration has been inept in home-front security, that Osama bin Laden is still thumbing his nose at us or that U.S. bombs and missiles in Afghanistan are falling too close to the Asian and Middle Eastern fault line of a possible World War III. The Democratic gubernatorial pick-ups in last Tuesday’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia--the only major statewide races held--suggest that a Democratic tide is already running on domestic and economic issues.

Neither of these elections, nor any national opinion polls, even hint of a growing voter skepticism of President Bush’s war policies to match that already evident on newspaper front pages and in some media broadcasts. Still, some of the questions being raised by the media deserve to be raised--constructively--by the opposition party. That’s not the way American politics works, though. The opposition sits back and waits rather than risk saying too much.

The exception, which is worth remembering, was in 1990. A lot of Democrats were skeptical of or opposed to President George Bush’s plan to militarily recapture Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. To defuse the doubt, Bush moved U.S. troops to bases in Saudi Arabia, organized an international coalition and developed a battle plan--all before the Persian Gulf War started in early 1991. It worked, even if the coalition forces stopped before toppling Hussein.

This year, however--and it’s probably inevitable, given that terrorists attacked Manhattan and Washington--the U.S. military response came quickly, before all the strategic, diplomatic and conceptual ducks were in a row. The consequences to date, unfortunately, have been lots of dropped bombs but few big-time hits, a slow response to the anthrax crisis, a furor in the Muslim world that has prompted talk of the U.S. losing the public-relations war and an obvious edginess on the parts of erstwhile allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Worst of all, the U.S. failure to track down shadowy terrorist chieftain Bin Laden has forced the Pentagon to start emphasizing the havoc it has rained down on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, as if our aerial capacity was ever in doubt. On these issues, the opposition, not surprisingly, is largely quiet or in hiding.

By contrast, political differences are entirely acceptable to the public when it comes to the economic-stimulus package. Democrats want more unemployment, low-income and health-care assistance, while Republicans prefer tax cuts for business and upper-income Americans. Politics are even OK in the matter of airport security: Democrats want to federalize airport screeners, while Republicans prefer to subcontract the job to private companies.

Carping about war policy, especially after only a few weeks, is something else. From the American Revolution in 1775 through the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the attack on Pearl Harbor right down to Sept. 11, Americans have responded to major confrontations with what historians call a rage militaire --a patriotic, pro-fighting surge. Politicians who get in its way can expect to hear grumbles or worse.

This usually only lasts a few months. Within a period of five to 15 months, depending on the election calendar, voters have cooled and are ready to haul out a tough yardstick, asking Washington: What have you won, who have you caught?

After the South fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans didn’t have good results to show--Northern defeats from Bull Run to Chattanooga--when the 1862 midterm elections rolled around, and the Democrats made major gains in Congress and state governorships. Much the same was true for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime fortunes during the 11 months that followed Pearl Harbor, and Republican critics wracked up big congressional gains in the November 1942 midterm elections.

More recently, public support for the Korean War, which began in June 1950, started to turn in October, when Chinese volunteers began joining the North Koreans. President Harry S. Truman’s Democratic Party was embarrassed in that year’s November midterms. The same thing happened to the Democrats in the November 1966 midterms following President Lyndon B. Johnson’s less-than-deft commitment of 500,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam in the summer of 1965.

Even the Persian Gulf War failed to help President Bush because of timing. Hussein seized Kuwait in August 1990, but as the U.S. slowly mobilized for war, voters turned to economic issues and gave Bush and the GOP unexpected losses in the November 1990 midterms. His job-approval numbers then soared to 90% in March 1991 after the quick military victory in the Gulf, but by 1992 weakness in the economy had taken over again and Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton.

Today, Republicans have a related problem, just underscored in their Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial losses. Losing both of these paired, odd-year races has been uncommon and important over the last 50 years--the Democrats lost both in 1969 and again in 1993--and each time it suggested that something significant was stirring in the electorate. This year, it’s probably that voters trust the Democrats more on domestic and economic issues, and that it will take a lot bigger GOP success in Afghanistan than any now apparent to override that feeling.

An obstacle to achieving that wartime success, moreover, lies in the administration’s own dubious strategic overview. Within the Pentagon and the White House, there’s too much concern over the wrong Vietnam analogy--not giving into pressure and avoiding another bug-out. In fact, the United States worked off its Vietnam syndrome during the late 1970s and 1980s, with its anger over the Panama Canal treaties, the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya--and then the razzle-dazzle technology of the Gulf War. The better Vietnam analogy of the year 2001 is to the cockiness of the United States back in 1965, after earlier years of successful gunboat diplomacy, when another Texan bit off more in Indochina than he and his strategists could chew.

That may be the case again, for several reasons. First, the United States could take too long searching for Bin Laden--and drop too many misguided bombs. Then, what’s now a limited military engagement could widen, through radical and Islamic mobilization, into a civil war of sorts between the fundamentalist and radical Muslim “streets” and villages and a “palace Muslim establishment centered on oil kingdoms (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates) and military or authoritarian regimes (Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey) allied to the United States. That seems to be what Bin Laden wants.

Besides, the outbreak of terrorism itself deserves a more sophisticated analysis than Wyatt Earp-type posturing about “huntin’ down” evildoers. Since the origins of “terrorism” in 1790s revolutionary France, its three peaks--in the 1790s, in the years between 1880 and 1920 and then in the 1960s and 1970s--all overlapped with seething opposition to aristocratic, royal and capitalist establishments (and conspicuous consumption), on the one hand, and a ripeness for war, on the other. Historically, terrorism has been an introduction, not a finale. Washington’s task is to thwart any such evolution, not assist it.

This is the challenge to constructive politics. If the war on terrorism fails to catch Bin Laden and widens into the conflagration he desires, Americans may wish that we had debated the options in November 2001 rather than waiting to express the usual disgruntlement in the midterm elections of 2002.