QandO

August 17, 2004

Amis Go Home! But, not quite yet.
Posted by Dale Franks

Jon Podhoretz weighs in on the president'sannounced troop redeployments, and the Democrats' reaction to it.

Surrogates and spokesmen for the Kerry campaign went ballistic. "Alarming," declared Richard Holbrooke, the foreign-policy guru who will almost certainly be secretary of State if Kerry is elected. Wesley Clark, who was supreme commander of NATO before his disastrous run for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, thundered that the plan would "significantly undermine U.S. national security"...

The president has beaten Kerry at his own game. The hawk of hawks has found a way to tell America that he is bringing soldiers home, even as he vows to stand firm and tough on Iraq until the job is done. What's more, unlike Kerry, Bush has offered specifics, and by doing so has made it clear he is not acting precipitously.

That's why Wesley Clark complained that "this ill-conceived move and its timing seem politically motivated." Of course the announcement was "politically motivated." Let us stipulate for the record that everything the president and John Kerry say and do until Nov. 2 will be politically motivated. But the idea of moving troops around in the aftermath of the Cold War and the advent of the global war on terror is hardly new.

No, it isn't. In point of fact, as Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution pointed out a few months ago, this is a plan that Rumsfeld has been working on since 2001. And, despite the fact that O'Hanlon perceives some flaws in the plan, he notes that it isn't really politically motivated.

Fifteen years after the Cold War and almost three years into the war on terror, Mr. Rumsfeld's plan makes generally good sense. And despite the claims of critics and anxieties of allies, it has been brewing for too long to be viewed as reprisal against Germany, South Korea or any other country that challenged the Bush administration over the Iraq war. Its rationale is clearly strategic, not vindictive.

I imagine our German friends are quite perturbed about it, too.

I remember when I was stationed in Europe, and we began the first big drawdown of troops there. Prior to the drawdown, the Germans were all full of "Amis Go Home!" enthusiasm. Then, somebody apparently whipped out a calculator, and figured out how much money 200,000 Americans were putting into the German economy every year. Then, all the sudden, local German officials were simultaneously keen to have most of the Americans go home, and equally keen to ensure that the bases adjacent to their towns remained open.

Be careful what you wish for, Fritz.

TrackBack