Add in another modest set of recent figures and perhaps you have
a hint of a shift in the sentiments of a military that has, in the last
decades, been increasingly supportive of the Republican Party and an
imperial foreign policy. Recently, the Federal Election Commission
released its July quarterly figures on contributions to presidential
candidates -- and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas modestly made the news
because the libertarian candidate managed to pull in more money than
that military icon (and war supporter) Senator John McCain for the
quarter and so slipped into third place in the Republican presidential
dollars sweepstakes. Since Paul garners but 2 to 3 percent of the vote
in recent presidential opinion polls (up from 1 percent earlier in the
year), this was certainly striking in itself -- an effect perhaps of
his exposure in the ongoing presidential TV debates where he manages,
on Iraq among other subjects, to sound like neither a Republican
Tweedledum, nor Tweedledee.
A New York Times analysis piece by Jeff Zeleny, for instance, commented:
The
only Republican in the race who opposes the war, Representative Ron
Paul of Texas, has drawn a relative bounty of donations in response and
now has more money to spend than the onetime presumed front-runner for
the nomination.
But hidden in Paul's poll figures was
another story -- possibly far more consequential -- that's been noticed
only by a few blogs and websites that actually bothered to sort out and
add up the numbers. (The first to do so was evidently The Spin Factor;
the latest and fullest accounting is at Isilion, a blog for Paul.) The
candidate who (along with Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson in the
Democratic column) simply wants the United States out of Iraq, no ifs,
ands, or buts -- no "combat brigades" vs. advisors -- got a higher
tally of contributions from people who have "military employers" than
any other candidate in the race, Republican or Democrat. Overall, Paul
beat out McCain in military contributions $24,965 to $17,475.
Now
admittedly, members of the military are giving, at best, modest sums to
presidential candidates; so, as with the Military.com on-line vote,
these numbers are anything but overwhelming. Nonetheless, they are
deserving of more attention than just online comments at Andrew
Sullivan's blog and the Iraq Slogger website, as well as an instant
mainstream dismissal from Fox commentator Michael Barone. ("My guess is
that [Paul] used some libertarian-type mailing lists that happen to
have a lot of people in the military on them," he said.) It would be
more reasonable to assume that contributions to Paul (who has
championed the needs of veterans) were actually limited not just by
military restraint about getting involved in a political campaign, but
by anxiety over being identified with a man whose position on Iraq, in
the New York Times' phrase, is: "Just leave."
Until we get
some better military polling figures, these two straws in the wind --
the Military.com poll and Paul's campaign contributions, along with
anecdotal evidence of various sorts -- may be the best we can hope for.
But let's also keep history in mind -- at least the history of our
country's last disastrous war of this sort. Don't forget that, Col.
Robert D. Heinl, author of the "definitive history of the Marine
Corps," wrote in 1971 when a withdrawal from Vietnam of US troops --
but not advisors or air power -- was well underway, that the armed
forces were already in a state that had "only been exceeded in this
century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse
of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917."
Present
US forces are, of course, all-volunteer, not draftees (or not exactly
anyway, given recent tour extensions in Iraq and other kinds of forced
call-ups), but why should they want to be endlessly redeployed to a
lost war in a lost land? By the time the Bush Administration is done,
the Paul campaign may be swimming in military money.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the
co-founder of Metropolitan Books' the American Empire Project and
author most recently of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
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Released: 24 July 2007
Word Count: 831
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While US commanders in Iraq are deep into planning post-surge surges well into next spring, a couple of straws in the military wind indicate that support for them, not just in civilian America but in military America, may be on the wane.
