Support for Using Force May Have Limits

In a single day, the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon transcended decades of debates between the parties over the proper use of U.S. military force, uniting liberals who resisted deployments from Vietnam through the Persian Gulf War and conservatives who opposed interventions in Haiti and the Balkans.

But the underlying divisions between--and, just as important, within--the parties over the proper use of force could reopen in the months ahead as the Bush administration’s battle plan for confronting global terrorism emerges, analysts in both parties agree.

“Right now, nobody wants to stand out in front and make a big issue of this, but behind the scenes you can see some fissures,” says Kim Holmes, director of foreign policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The administration is already under pressure from leading conservatives to expand its targets beyond Osama bin Laden and his sponsors in Afghanistan--while some leftist voices are rallying against a sweeping military response that risks significant civilian casualties abroad. Many analysts say those contradictory pressures could produce cracks in the unity if the campaign expands beyond Bin Laden.

While the consensus for using force today is strong, “the elements in our political system [that are skeptical of using force] are still there,” says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “You may see their reemergence. That’s why the president and his team . . . have a very significant task ahead of them.”

Even inside the administration, some senior officials believe the political reaction will turn on whether any military mission can be tied to the attacks of Sept. 11. As one official put it, there’s likely to be enormous public support for retaliation against organizations or states directly linked to the attacks; resistance is more likely to return if the administration deploys military force against states, potentially Iraq or Syria, that have supported terrorist activities in the past but may or may not be tied to this attack.

Such military action is exactly what a broad coalition of conservative leaders urged President Bush to pursue in an open letter last week, calling for “a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” and even “appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refuse to cut their ties with the anti-Israel terrorist group Hezbollah.

But the wider the range of targets, the more likely the resurgence of domestic resistance, analysts in both parties say. Evidence implicating any nation in the attack would probably change the political equation immediately. But without such evidence, attacks on countries beyond Afghanistan could reopen more traditional divisions between the parties, with both Democrats and moderate Republicans resisting, note Holmes and other observers.

“If you have significant military action against states harboring terrorists, and you start seeing some of the Europeans and Arab states up in arms about that, you might get an echo effect about that back in the United States,” Holmes says.

Adds former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center: “The point in the future at which you could get a split on the use of force would be Iraq.”

At the moment, the prospect of military action is provoking objections from only a handful of grass-roots liberal activists and a few conservatives, like former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, who are ideologically hostile to expansive U.S. intervention abroad.

In a Gallup/CNN/USA Today survey released Monday, 89% of adults said they supported a military retaliation. By comparison, most Americans opposed the use of force in the Persian Gulf War and in Kosovo virtually until the moment the shooting began. Even as early as September 1965, a quarter of Americans told pollsters it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.

To many analysts, the key difference between those cases and this one is obvious: This began with an attack on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. By bringing the attacks to the United States, the terrorists erased the threshold question that had driven much of the resistance to military action in earlier conflicts. In Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, many liberals argued that the conflicts did not threaten America’s self-interest sufficiently to justify risking U.S. lives; conservatives raised similar objections to Clinton’s interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

But after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, no one doubts that international terrorism constitutes a genuine threat to U.S. security.

In building this consensus for force, Bush may also be benefiting from an evolution in both parties’ thinking about military action.

The change has been most dramatic on the Democratic side. For years after Vietnam, many Democrats consistently resisted the use of U.S. force abroad as either counterproductive, morally tainted or too costly for the ends at stake. As late as 1991, more than two-thirds of congressional Democrats voted against the resolution authorizing President George Bush to use force to evict Iraq from Kuwait.

“The stance the party assumed after the Vietnam War . . . was that almost any use of American force was illegitimate and almost immoral,” says Will Marshall, executive director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.

But in the 1990s, Clinton slowly built a consensus in his party for military intervention to fight human rights abuses in places such as Bosnia. That “liberal interventionism” carried the party back to its pre-Vietnam tradition of backing an aggressive global role for America--albeit for a post-Vietnam cause of promoting human rights.

Though the rationale was new, many say the effect was to coax the Democrats away from the reflexive hostility to force that characterized the party after Vietnam; in that sense, the Clinton interventions in the 1990s may have functioned like a bridge between the broad Democratic resistance to the Persian Gulf War and the party’s near-unanimous support for military retaliation now.

While the center-left embraced intervention on behalf of human rights in the 1990s, conservatives recoiled. Majorities of House and Senate Republicans voted against the U.S. missions in both Bosnia and Kosovo. In part that reflected a lack of confidence in Clinton. But it also expressed a widespread conservative sense that these missions did not rise to the level of genuine national interests.

In both the House and some conservative intellectual circles, that skepticism stoked a broader opposition to U.S. involvement abroad reminiscent of the isolationist views that were common in the GOP until World War II. Resistance to that tendency forced internationalist Republicans like McCain and President George W. Bush to develop a case for continuing involvement abroad.

With differing nuances, these “realist” Republicans have produced a synthesis that supports U.S. engagement, but in a way that de-emphasizes human rights concerns and focuses more on “enduring national interests,” as Bush put it in the 2000 campaign. Now that the terrorists have so clearly threatened such interests, that approach has strikingly unified the GOP and marginalized the influence of neo-isolationists like Buchanan.

Indeed, says Marshall, the terrorist threat may be sufficient to cement a domestic alliance between the Republican “realists” and Democratic “internationalists” more stable than many now expect. “If this war is conducted in an intelligent way,” he predicts, “it is going to be a sustainable coalition.”