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Published: March 24, 2008 08:20 pm    print this story   email this story  

STUMPTALK: Big wars are much better than small wars

By Phillip J. Chesser / Chronicle contributor

I heard this conversation recently:

“Why has President George W. Bush become so unpopular?”

“Because his little war in Iraq kills too few American servicemen and women.”

“You’re nuts. Why would people like a President who gets a lot of Americans killed?”

“I don’t know, but look at the historical record. Abraham Lincoln, a hero for many, took the nation into its bloodiest war, which killed more than 600,000 Americans. Another favorite, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sent 400,000 men to their deaths in World War II. And of course one can’t forget President Woodrow Wilson, who ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war,’ but who then sent more than 100,000 to their untimely deaths in his war to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ Furthermore, people did not recoil at the carnage of these wars. In fact, they reveled in it, building temples to Lincoln and FDR in Washington, D.C. Lincoln’s temple is the biggest of course: the more dead the bigger the temple.

“With few exceptions American history shows that smaller wars (fewer than 50-60,000 dead) have an opposite effect. In 1952 after two years of war in Korea, President Harry Truman believed his re-election unlikely and decided not to run. The same happened to President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. After the Tet offensive he didn’t think he could win another election. The Democrats lost the presidency to Republicans Eisenhower in 1952 and Nixon in 1968. At the beginning of the first Gulf War, President Bush (41) had high poll approval numbers, but then lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. And in 2006 President Bush’s Congressional Republicans suffered the same fate as Truman, Johnson, and his father, as he would were he able run again. It’s very simple: little wars don’t help presidents but big ones do, and the bigger the better.

“As of this writing about 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq in the four and a half years since the war began, an especially low number when one considers the same length of time in other wars. In the absence of the war in Iraq, during this same period just about as many American servicemen and women would have died anyway in training accidents and leave-related automobile accidents.

“So President Bush is unpopular. If he wants to regain his popularity before his presidency ends, he needs to find bigger wars to fight. But if President Bush does not discover a big war opportunity, people who favor world-saving big wars should not lose hope, especially if Iraq war enthusiast John McCain becomes president. His foreign policy hero is the imperialist Theodore Roosevelt, who, like President Bush, was not troubled at all by the limitations that the U.S. Constitution places upon the power of the executive branch of the government.”

I’m also a little suspicious of Mr. Obama’s messianic visions for the world. Just because he opposed the war in Iraq does not mean he will not ask Americans to donate their sons and daughters to another Democratic Party approved utopian military adventure.

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