History has pointed to Democrats as the reason we got into wars, and they have been so influential that some have even said they were the reason we failed in them, but MSNBC, in an attack on Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, argued otherwise.
MSNBC's Revisionist History
Written by someone named Alexander Nazarian and titled “J.D. Vance's Revisionist History About Who Started America's Failed Wars,” the paper is actually about MSNBC's revisionist history about America's failed wars and Vance's speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC).
Nazarian also cited Napoleonic theory of history to repeat the “consensus myth” that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) must be dealt with.
“To listen to Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, you would think that Democrats, and President Joe Biden in particular, are responsible for the thousands of combat deaths and post-war suicides of American service members who served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Nazarian wrote in his opening remarks.
If you listen to MSNBC, you'd think Vance had a lot to say about Afghanistan and Iraq, but in fact he barely mentioned those wars.
What did Vance really say?
In fact, what Nazarian went on to write was pretty much a summary of Vance's related comments: “'When I was a high school senior, Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq,' said Vance, who enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq before attending Ohio State University and Yale Law School,” according to an MSNBC reporter. “Vance then added, 'From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnant wages, the people who govern this country have failed time and time again.'”
To be precise, the above was the only time Vance mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan in his speech, and the only time he mentioned “war” was when he said, “jobs are being sent overseas, kids are being sent to war,” and, “we only send our kids to war when necessary.”
Moreover, Vance never explicitly mentioned the Democrats in the aforementioned conflict. Surprisingly, he only mentioned them once in his entire speech, saying that “the Democrats are flooding the country with illegal immigrants.” (And since this is effectively a foreign military force brought in to help the Democrats get power, it's another war they started.) And that's it.
So Nazarian's comments say more about him than they do about Vance. Is he being self-conscious as a Democrat? Is this a “protest too much” situation? Or is he just trying to get publicity?
History of Vence
In fact, it's not surprising that Vance doesn't hold Democrats specifically responsible for the “forever wars” — he never seems to have done so — but rather, as a “Rust Belt defender” who grew up in Appalachia, his antipathy is directed at the Democratic and Republican establishments in general.
Indeed, “growing up in the Rust Belt, Vance got to see firsthand how sweeping globalization and shifting economic conditions have left many working-class communities behind,” The Christian Post writes today. The site goes on to say that middle-class Americans sense a “big disconnect” between their struggles and the federal government's priorities. “Billions of dollars in foreign aid and military intervention overseas are hard to reconcile with local job losses, aging infrastructure and the opioid crisis,” the Post continues. “Resentment is starting to build.”
Love him or hate him, this is where Vance came from. It was the subject of his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, which brought him fame long before he entered politics. He is not anti-Democrat, he is a people's fighter, which is why he said in his speech that he will “never forget where I come from.” It's also why, in addition to referencing Biden, with whom he and President Trump were at odds, he took responsibility for the comments Nazarian quoted him making about “the people who run this country” (in general).
Who are the real parties in the war?
But what about our “failed wars”? The far-left website The Baffler touched on this in a 2014 article, “Democrats Are the Real War Party.” After pointing out that then-President Barack Obama had no qualms about waging “drone wars” in several Muslim countries, the outlet wrote that indeed, “every major American war of the 20th century was fought by a Democratic administration: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War (the last two famously failed wars). Harry Truman, a Democrat, remains the only world leader to have used nuclear bombs on his own people” (though, to be fair, this action was in keeping with World War II norms).
In fact, “most 20th-century Republicans were (at least openly) isolationists,” the Baffler concludes, adding that “the narrative that Republicans have historically been the party of war and Democrats are peace-loving doves is an absurd myth.”
It is for this very reason that the following exchange took place in May between John Lennon's son and author Ryan James Gardusky:
Absolutely. Moreover, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 were bipartisan efforts.
Weapons of mass destruction
So the Democratic Party's Enlightened Pacifist argument is weapons of mass destruction, or weapons of mass deception, which leads to Nazarian's WMD argument: “It was[George W. Bush]under the control of hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney, who created the fictitious story about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction,” he writes, which is itself a fiction.
Consider this: In 1999, Madeleine Albright, Democratic Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, said herself that “Hussein had access to weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, she noted that Hussein had used them before, “to gas his own people.”
Later, in 2002, former Democratic Vice President Al Gore said in a speech, “We know that he (Hussein) has secret stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons maintained throughout the country.”
In fact, the left-leaning website Snopes lists Democrats who have spoken out about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and U.S. intelligence agencies have alleged that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, an assessment backed by Britain's MI6.
US forces failed to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003. “We all thought Iraq had them,” Albright later said (my paraphrase). Two exculpatory theories have emerged as to why they don't exist: that Hussein moved them out of the country just before the US invasion, and that he overstated his own capabilities in an attempt to deter an invasion.
That said, as I wrote a generation ago, our military adventure in the Middle East was indeed a folly, but it should be remembered accurately, and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were not a Bush “concocted” hoax.
This is no myth either: President Trump is the first president in over 40 years not to drag the US into a new war, and J.D. Vance shares this rational anti-militarist, i.e. pro-American, foreign policy.
