Sowing Dragon&#8217;s Teeth
<p>David Lucas&#8217;s <a href='http://knoxnews.com/kns/perspectives/article/0,1406,KNS_2797_3946335,00.html'>op-ed</a><br />
in the Knoxville News-Sentinel combines with <a href='http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050721-115734-4777r.htm'>this story</a> about active-duty military personnel criticizing Edward<br />
Kennedy and Dick Durbin&#8217;s &#8220;gulag&#8221; rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay to suggest something interesting about the long-term political impact of the Iraq War.</p>
<p>Historically, one of the major byproducts of American wars is politicians.  While it&#8217;s rare for a career military man to carve out a successful political career as Dwight Eisenhower did, there&#8217;s a strong pattern of non-career junior officers serving in combat returning to civilian life to become successful politicians.  John Kerry, though he failed to win the presidency, has had a successful enough political career to count as one of the most recent examples.</p>
<p>I expect the Iraq war will produce a bumper crop of future politicians from its junior officer corps &mdash; men like David Lucas who are already making public names for themselves.  So it&#8217;s worth asking what these people believe, and how the lessons they&#8217;re learning in Iraq will affect the attitude they bring to careers in civilian politics.</p>
<p>Recent surveys showing that 80% of the serving military officer corps voted Republican in 2004 combine with exceptionally high in-theater re-enlistment rates and op-eds like Lucas&#8217;s to paint a picture of a military that believes very strongly in the rightness of the Iraq war &mdash; a belief which appears to be strong not just among careerists but among short-timers who expect to return to civilian life as well.  A related piece of evidence is negative but almost equally strong; the anti-war wing of U.S. politics has failed to discover or produce any returning veterans of Iraq who are both able to denounce the war effectively in public and willing to do so.</p>
<p>We already know, because they&#8217;re telling us themselves in mil-blogs, that the military serving in Iraq has developed a bitter contempt for the mainstream media.  Biased, shoddy, and selective reporting with a heavy sensationalist and anti-war slant has had consequences; it has played well among bicoastal liberals in the U.S. but angered and alienated the troops on the ground.  They <em>know</em> that reality there is greatly different from what&#8217;s being reported, and increasingly they&#8217;re willing to say so.</p>
<p>The Washington Times story shows that anti-war posturing by leading Democrats is angering and alienating the serving military as well.  An increasing number seem to think they are seeing what is in effect a conspiracy between the mainstream media and the Democrats to make a just war unwinnable in order to score domestic political points.  In the longer run, this is a disaster in the making for Democrats.  It means that this war&#8217;s crop of successful politicians and influence leaders probably going to trend Republican and conservative to an unprecedented degree.</p>
<p>This is not a prospect that fills me with glee.  Given their military background, the political children of the Iraq war seem more<br />
likely to reinforce the authoritarian/cultural-conservative side of the Republican split personality than the small-government/libertarian one.  In the worst case, military resentment of the Democrats could fracture the strong unwritten tradition that keeps the serving military out of civilian politics.  That could be very bad.</p>
<p>I think that worst case is still quite unlikely.  But if it happens,  the Democrats and the mainstream media will have nobody but themselves to blame.  Their irresponsible and destructive political games have sown dragon&#8217;s teeth; let&#8217;s hope we don&#8217;t all come to regret the harvest.</p>
