Peggy Noonan argues that the war in Iraq did lasting damage to the Republican Party in The Wall Street Journal.
It undermined respect for Republican economic stewardship. War is
costly. No one quite knows or will probably ever know the exact financial cost
of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is interesting in itself. Some estimates put it
at $1 trillion, some $2 trillion. Mr. Curry cites a Congressional Budget Office
report saying the Iraq operation had cost $767 billion as of January 2012.
Whatever the number, it added to deficits and debt, and along with the Bush
administration's domestic spending helped erode the Republican Party's
reputation for sobriety in fiscal affairs.
It quashed debate within the Republican Party. Political parties
are political; politics is about a fight. The fight takes place at the polls and
in debate. But the high stakes and high drama of the wars—and the sense within
the Bush White House that it was fighting for our very life after 9/11—stoked an
atmosphere in which doubters and critics were dismissed as weak, unpatriotic,
disloyal. The GOP—from top, the Washington establishment, to bottom, the
base—was left festering, confused and, as the years passed, lashing out. A
conservative movement that had prided itself, in the 1970s and 1980s, on its
intellectualism—"Of a sudden, the Republican Party is the party of ideas,"
marveled New York's Democratic senator Pat Moynihan in 1979—seemed no longer
capable of an honest argument. Free of internal criticism, national candidates
looked daffy and reflexively aggressive—John McCain sang "Bomb, Bomb Iran"—and
left the party looking that way, too.
Friday, March 22, 2013
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