All Necessary Force
All Necessary Force Eventually, the United States and its NATO allies will send ground troops into Yugoslavia. Ground forces will be needed to accomplish what the air war is not now...
...Those Republicans opposed to the war have done most of their grumbling off-camera...
...And it is here that a just complaint can and should be lodged against Governor Bush and Mrs...
...presidents have formally pledged to use military force to prevent this from happening...
...A man did not have to be John Brown to honorably and meaningfully oppose slavery in the 19th century...
...After all, it’s going to be hard to outflank the Democrats on the side of timidity and weakness, although some McGovern Republicans are trying mightily...
...The abortion controversy “has been very polarizing...
...A couple of GOP presidential candidates have even decided that we should place vital U.S...
...The leaders of Great Britain and France favor ground troops...
...So each has performed an act of occasional conformity with the governing orthodoxy...
...I’m a realistic enough person to know that America is not ready to ban abortions,” Governor Bush announces, because “America’s hearts are not right...
...For debate over abortion—calm, intelligent, sustained, and unembarrassed advocacy—is precisely what both candidates seem least able to provide and most intent to avoid...
...And in the current era, where abortion is concerned, it is the better part of wisdom, and much the more effective approach, to be William Lloyd Garrison or Abraham Lincoln...
...It’s also politically shortsighted...
...The issue, instead, is abortion...
...Take Sir Humphrey Edwin...
...If anyone is looking for a Vietnam analogy, that is it...
...The American public supports wars where American leaders make clear they are intent on winning and on using the means necessary to win...
...expanding opportunities for adoption as an abortion alternative...
...This neat trick was called “occasional conformity...
...Two U.S...
...Then, that afternoon and every other Sunday of the year, Sir Humphrey would repair to Pinner Hall Conventicle, his regular nonconformist chapel, and satisfy himself that he’d somehow done right by his convictions...
...Public support for ground troops continues to rise in the United States and is already high in the major states of Europe...
...When the public begins to doubt this, support evaporates...
...Ground forces will be needed to accomplish what the air war is not now accomplishing—that is, to deal Slobodan Milosevic the decisive military defeat that is the only acceptable outcome of the war...
...If piecemeal debate over subsidiary issues like partial birth can help change those minds, as surely it can, then all to the good...
...We should “refuse to be drawn into dead-end debates...
...Dole...
...The great Daniel Defoe, a lifelong Protestant dissenter, took direct aim at Sir Humphrey in a widely circulated pamphlet of 1698...
...We suppose, as well, that such a theoretically pro-life but operationally pro-choice Republican might well win himself the presidency—by reassuring the country that no troubling idea about abortion will ever work its way past his lips...
...We suppose it is possible for a public figure to be only “personally opposed to abortion,” as Mario Cuomo used to say, and still remain somehow “sincerely” pro-life...
...How to handle firsttrimester abortions is a “hypothetical” conundrum, and George W. Bush quite plainly hopes you will not pose it to him again...
...He was Lord Mayor of London by day but a Puritan dissenter “in his private views,” as we now would say...
...We should “not just kind of endlessly debate something that really is not going anywhere...
...Clinton’s poll numbers are down because the public may justifiably be coming to doubt his resolve, even though it has not come to doubt the need to win the war...
...This posture is irresponsible and damaging to the national interest...
...The mayor had silenced his faith for “publick advancement and glittering gawdy honours of the age...
...NATO’s future and American credibility are at stake...
...When Edwin’s friends objected that there were more important things in life to worry about, and that multiple church attendance advanced the noble cause of peaceful compromise, Defoe satirically replied that dissenters had then best be sent to the gallows: “They that will go to church to be chosen Sheriffs and Mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged...
...The new officeholding qualifications, they thought, were no big deal at all...
...We are quite certain, however, that no such candidate can or will do much to retard America’s abortion-industry culture of death...
...Unfortunately, although it is only a matter of time before Clinton is forced to do the right thing, time is what we don’t have...
...What, then, was a dissenting politician to do...
...he had made his ideas “become pimps to secular interest...
...But Republicans need to stand for something more than predicting, hoping for, and exulting in Clinton’s failures...
...There is, from Left and Right, a standard rap against the “incrementalist” abortion strategy that Bush and Dole now both nominally endorse: the strategy of ending the ghastly, late-term “partial-birth” surgery...
...So one Sunday morning each year, he would swathe himself in his official finery, proceed to St...
...The longer Clinton waits, the more likely it is that the war will be lost before he makes up his mind...
...casualties...
...But, she quickly adds, “Of course, it’s not...
...Elizabeth Dole is a good bit more explicit on this score...
...Unlike before the Gulf War, when President Bush led and the Congress followed, it is our strange predicament that Congress must show some leadership in the hope that the president will follow...
...That’s why, we believe, surveys show an increased GOP advantage over Democrats in the area of foreign policy...
...Which brings us to George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole...
...General Wesley Clark believes ground troops are essential, and we are told he has the support of many senior military and Pentagon officials, though not yet that of Secretary of Defense William Cohen...
...Incremental measures must be increments toward a larger, identified goal...
...But in truth, whatever the politics, the challenge in Yugoslavia transcends electoral calculations...
...Millions upon millions of minds must first be changed before abortion’s fullscale grip on the country can finally be loosed...
...Republicans talk a lot about leadership...
...It has been “debated for 30 years...
...But the requirement it imposes on public figures is the same...
...Bush and Dole both call themselves pro-life, but both also wish very badly to be chosen Sheriff...
...This is the moment for serious people in the Republican party and the conservative movement to rise above such silliness...
...Paul’s, and—in order to retain eligibility for the mayoralty—ostentatiously receive the Anglican rites...
...imposing parental notification and consent requirements on abortions for minors...
...There are “strong positions on both sides...
...A Reaganite foreign policy, in addition to being best for the country, is a political winner...
...To a good many of the most influential Puritans—men of the wealthy gentry and merchant classes, the establishment Republicans of their day—this question was easy...
...They must make the case for American strength and leadership...
...It would also be good for Republicans...
...He wants to do . . . well, whatever it is he wants to do “instead of arguing over Roe v. Wade...
...The good news is that the Republicans seen most frequently on television discussing Kosovo have been McCain, Lugar, Hagel, Bob and Elizabeth Dole, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other supporters of a more vigorous prosecution of the war...
...Now’s the time to show some...
...And like Sir Humphrey before them, Bush and Dole—and many other Republican dignitaries besides—flinch from that requirement...
...Clinton will be blamed if the war is lost no matter what position Republicans take...
...Today in the United States, 300 years and an ocean away from the Lord Mayor and Daniel Defoe, the overriding moral issue that divides our politics is no longer adherence to a religion...
...Milosevic is engaged in barbaric ethnic cleansing in Kosovo...
...This particular criticism, it seems to us, is insincere itself—more a childish sneer than a serious argument...
...How long will the allies be able to resist peace overtures, however phony, emanating from Moscow and Belgrade...
...That is why McCain’s resolution should be brought to the floor as soon as possible, debated, voted on, and passed...
...Each has inaugurated a presidential campaign by kneeling down before the watchful priests of Big Media and accepting the basic pro-choice sacrament— disclaiming, that is, any interest in the abolition of America’s regime of abortion on demand...
...That is why the resolution proposed by John McCain and co-sponsored by Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, Thad Cochran, and a number of Democratic senators granting the president the authority to use “all necessary force” to win the war is so urgent...
...and so on...
...As far as the American public knows, therefore, Republicans are once again the party of Ronald Reagan...
...William Kristol and Robert Kagan, for the Editors “Occasional Conformity” on Abortion With the Stuart Restoration of 1660, the tide of English politics turned sharply against the Puritans, and it became illegal for any man who refused Holy Communion in the Church of England to hold public office...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...It’s not going to happen because the American people do not support it...
...More conscientious Puritans despised the practice...
...For the Republican party to put its head in the sand is unacceptable...
...The governor makes his discomfort clear by implication...
...This would be good for the country...
...Meanwhile, a Republican member of Congress travels to Belgrade to negotiate with the enemy, ? la Jim Wright, and a few right-wing talk show hosts ludicrously argue that the war in Kosovo is a Clinton Wag the Dog effort to distract attention from Johnny Chung...
...All of which is perfectly fine so far as it goes—as pure analysis...
...The rap against such a plan is that it represents “insincere” pro-lifery—that no politician genuinely convinced that abortion is appalling slaughter would take such a “leisurely” approach to the problem, but would instead want to go all the way, right away, heedless of public opinion...
...Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott can show leadership by making this happen...
...How long will the public support the war if it is clear that the president is paralyzed with indecision and has no clear plan for victory...
...Mrs...
...It is absolutely, undeniably true, after all, that “America’s hearts are not right” on the question...
...The last holdouts, in fact, are Bill Clinton and his senior foreign policy advisers...
...But the logic of this war will surely drive even them to the realization that without ground troops, the United States and NATO will lose, and that such a loss would have truly disastrous consequences...
...A number of Republican political strategists have been arguing in recent weeks (usually in private) that the best political strategy is to keep Republican fingerprints off this war, call it the “Clinton-Gore war,” wait for it to fail, and then blame the administration for the whole debacle...
...How long will NATO be able to justify an air campaign that is destroying Serbia but doing precious little to stop the slaughter and displacement of Kosovar Albanians...
...These are responsible politicians, determined to guide democratic discourse about the most pressing social-policy dispute of the day...
...Dole, for her part, says she “would support the idea of a constitutional amendment, if it were possible...
...and NATO interests in the hands of Yevgeny Primakov...
...But it is the debate over such measures, not the measures themselves, that will do most of this necessary work of persuasion...
...Even if the president decided right now to go in on the ground, it would be weeks before a ground force could be assembled and made ready to fight...
...On a matter of such signal importance, truly principled statesmen owe the public much, much more...
...It’s bad enough that once-Reaganite think tanks are putting out anti-war position papers predicting, on the basis of no serious argument, that a ground war would cost thousands upon thousands of U.S...
...Dole says debate over the fundamental right to life is “irrelevant and highly divisive” and threatens to obscure “sexual harassment,” “an overly burdensome tax code,” and suchlike more “urgent” concerns...
...How long can NATO carry on an air war, with inconclusive results and increasing Serb civilian casualties, before the alliance starts to fracture...
...Defoe likened Edwin’s habit of popping up sequentially in opposed churches to “playing Bo-peep with God Almighty...
...We should agree to respectfully disagree on the subject of abortion,” she urges the country...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 31
