What It Means to Be a Democrat

Everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001, when the news came that a plane had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, followed minutes later by a crushing blow to its twin. I was in Paris, finishing lunch with the editors of the International Herald Tribune in my capacity as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization when we got the first sickening reports. I was preparing to depart on a mission to Africa. As the events of the day unfolded, I recall thinking that the situation seemed in a number of ways far worse than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I was just nineteen on December 7, 1941, when an announcer broke into the New York Philharmonic radio broadcast I was listening to for my college music appreciation class. There were many more casualties in that attack. But Hawaii wasn’t yet a state. Few Americans even knew where it was.

Watching the horrific events of 9/11 was an unimaginable shock to the American psyche. A A New York Times on September 12, 2001, described the previous morning as a time “in which history splits, and we define the world as ‘before’ and ‘after.’”

Many years later, we still inhabit that “after” world. It is a world with color-coded alert levels, complex security procedures in government and office buildings, bomb-sniffing dogs, and public announcements about unattended bags. Since 9/11, we’ve had the shoe bomber; the underwear bomber; the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting rampage; the failed car bombing in New York’s Times Square; and about three dozen other attempted terrorist attacks in the United States alone.

But even with these myriad threats, I believe we have overemphasized the danger we’re in. We live with too much fear and not enough common sense. The whole silliness of our response is exemplified by what has happened at our airports. Once sources of architectural pride, air terminals are now barricaded behind concrete. Inside, we are required to remove our shoes and belts, hand over our gels and liquids, and submit to body scans—with the ante being raised each time there’s a new scare. What upsets me the most is when I see an elderly woman trying her darnedest to comply with these ridiculous rules, as if she could possibly be harboring an explosive in her toothpaste.

Now that our initial distress over 9/11 has dissipated, I suggest that we stop this needless hassle, a palliative that costs $7 billion a year and rising. To my mind, in fact, the entire Homeland Security department—with its more than 200,000 employees and more than $42 billion budget—ought to be dissolved. The third largest Cabinet department, behind Defense and Veterans Affairs, it sprang from 9/11’s shock waves to put the agencies that deal with counterterrorism, including airport safety, under one roof. I believe we should leave the business of protecting the American public from terrorist attacks to the FBI, the CIA, and our police departments. (The FBI has a vibrant counterterrorism branch but somehow manages to stay independent.) But I suspect that of all the discretionary funds Congress could swing its scythe at, it will not fell the Homeland Security behemoth. Why? Its very existence makes us feel safer.

We are a nation in which fear and paranoia run deep. Since the Pilgrims made landfall in 1620, we have burned so-called witches at the stake, hauled Japanese-Americans to internment camps, and blacklisted people who we labeled Communists. It’s as though we are never without an enemy, whether from within or without, real or imagined.

The purpose of terrorism is to knock people off balance. We don’t need to do the perpetrators’ work by terrifying ourselves, by looking for a bogeyman in every closet. But we have done exactly that. As Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon character Pogo said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

In my lifetime, I believe Republicans have fomented popular fears to their best advantage. Only after Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, took his finger-pointing too far—accusing the Army of being infiltrated by Communists—did his influence wane. In the meantime, he fanned our anxieties to the point that Americans were imagining a Soviet spy or sympathizer behind every tree.

But that wasn’t the end of the GOP’s fear factor. In 1968, Richard Nixon’s “law and order” mantra played subtly on southern whites’ racial concerns. Ronald Reagan’s wedge issue? “Cadillac-driving welfare queens.” George H. W. Bush’s? Willie Horton. In 2002, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sounded the 9/11 Klaxon to persuade Congress that we needed to invade Iraq. Two years later their entire reelection strategy was based on scare tactics. “The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this,” President Bush said. “The terrorists win and America loses.” For the record, there is not one thing that makes me angrier than the insinuation that I—or my fellow Democrats—are less patriotic than our Republican brethren. I would put my life on the line for our country any time, just as I did in World War II.

I was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying on thirty-five bombing raids over Europe during the Second World War. I didn’t wait to be drafted. I enlisted in the Army Air Corps a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. The reason I wanted to become a combat pilot was because, even after taking a civilian pilot-training program, I hadn’t been able to shake my fear of flying. I was determined to conquer it.

But I have noticed that a lot of people who beat their chests have never been near a military plane or a battlefield; they’ve never heard a bullet pass an inch above their skulls. They’ve never seen a buddy in arms gasping his way to death. Sometime in the late 1960s, as I had the floor trying to make the case against our continuance in Vietnam, a fellow senator stood up and said, “I stand with our troops. As long as I hold this seat, I stand with the troops.”

I said, “You’re not standing with our troops. They’re in Vietnam. You’re in the Senate, with air-conditioning, mahogany paneling, and pages to run your errands for you. Neither of us is standing with our troops.” I added: “The best service we can render to the boys and youth we have sent into a mistaken war is to bring them home.” The visitors up in the gallery are not supposed to applaud, but they did and I was grateful to them. I can still hear that clapping.

I still don’t believe we should enact a draft in peacetime, but I think anytime Americans are involved in military operations, we ought to have a draft. It’s only fair that all of us go to some risk in time of war. We shouldn’t leave that to people who are too poor to make a living any other way. It’s a national disgrace that working-class kids join the military to get their shot at the American Dream by qualifying for the GI Bill, which helps pay for college, while the kids who have enjoyed the most from our society are the least likely to serve our nation. Second, if the children of our country’s leaders were serving in the military—if upper-middle-class kids were being drafted out of Harvard and Smith—we might never enter unwise wars like those we’re in now or were in for so many years in Vietnam.

In talking about the Republican provocation of fear, I do not question that there are serious threats to the United States today. That is beyond dispute. The 9/11 attack opened many eyes to the hatred on the part of zealous young Muslims against America and all that we stand for—a sentiment that Osama bin Laden was able to seize upon and organize against us. And even though bin Laden is now dead, the underlying hostility still exists. But I wonder about our exaggerated reaction to the physical danger. The Patriot Act invades our privacy at home, while abroad we continue to be engaged in an unfounded war against Afghanistan. And despite President Obama’s drawdown, we continue to have 46,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. None of these things will make us safer. They simply take away money we dearly need to address other national priorities.

The only thing that has been more self-destructive than the money we’ve wasted on the Homeland Security department’s massive bureaucracy has been our overspending on defense. Our military budget is loaded with needless but frighteningly expensive overkill. It gobbles up tax money that is urgently needed in other parts of our national life. We skimp on education, health care, renewable energy, and clean water and air. (Sometimes our diplomacy is as witless as our defense spending. A clear example of diplomatic folly is our sixty-year boycott of Cuba and refusal to recognize her diplomatically. Although Cuba is a small island with almost no military, we have refused to carry on any relations with the Cubans. This has been the case since Fidel Castro overthrew the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Batista had been in bed with the Mafia gangsters who ran the nightlife of gambling and sex in Havana.)

Each year our war machine claims the largest discretionary portion of the federal budget. I was heartened by President Obama’s acknowledgment of this reality in his June 2011 TV address to the nation, when he said: “Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource—our people.” I couldn’t have agreed more when he said, “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

On August 2, 1963, in my second speech as a freshman senator, I took the floor to oppose our involvement in Vietnam. I called for lowering the then $50 billion military budget by $5 billion—a huge amount in 1963 dollars. “Have we not remembered that the defense of a great nation depends not only upon the quality of its arms, but also on the quality of its economic, political, and moral fabric?” I asked.

Fervently believing the answer to both of my questions was—and still is—no, I continued to call for a reduction in military spending each year until I left the Senate in 1981, swept out by the Republican tide that brought Ronald Reagan into the White House. But my efforts were hardly more than a futile exercise. When the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to a broad nuclear disarmament concept, it marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Already the United States had done away with the Cold War–era formula known as the “two-and-a-half-war doctrine,” which provided us with a military strong enough to take on the Soviet Union, China, and a lesser country simultaneously, should the need arise. But even with those reductions, the outcome is the same: we still have far more deterrence capabilities than we need. Indeed, I know of no country that is spoiling for war with the United States or wants to invade our shores. These days, if we want a war we have to send our soldiers into some other country.

The U.S. defense budget now stands at $700 billion (a figure that includes our nuclear weapons program and the supplemental costs of executing two wars), the highest it has been since World War II, adjusting for inflation—and about as much as the total of the world’s other nations’ military budgets combined. It consumes roughly half of our nation’s discretionary spending. So it’s curious to me that Tea Party extremists who want to reduce the federal government target infant formula, job training, and medical research rather than the Department of Defense. As I write, Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” budget calls for a 3 percent cut, or $22 billion, in the Pentagon budget. It would take five times that—$120 billion—just to bring it back to what it was under President Clinton. President Obama’s initial request for 2012 was $680 billion, or 51 percent of all U.S. discretionary spending, meaning that his baseline budget would go up even as the cost of prosecuting our wars falls.

You might be surprised to find that my role model for setting military spending is neither a liberal nor a Democrat. It is Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican who was elected president after serving as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. His farewell address, given at the White House, was shorter and less polished than the better-known inauguration speech that John F. Kennedy delivered from the U.S. Capitol’s East Portico three days later. But Eisenhower’s vision of the future, while more ominous, was more prescient than JFK’s soaring words.

As President Eisenhower explained, the Cold War years were the first in which the United States had a permanent armaments industry. “We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense,” he said. But just as George Washington cautioned against foreign entanglements in 1796, Eisenhower reminded Americans that we “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

I am told that in an earlier draft of his speech, he used the more apt phrase “military-industrial-congressional complex,” acknowledging the complicated role that the Senate and House of Representatives play in determining what the military can spend.

Cutting defense spending takes a measure of political will that my congressional colleagues could never muster. I understand why. First, each state has at least one military installation or factory producing military goods that provides jobs for constituents. Second, members of Congress do not want to give their political opponents an opening to brand them as “weak on defense.” I had to answer that charge on more than one occasion in South Dakota. But self-preservation by politicians can lead to disaster, as it did in 2002 when the fear of looking “soft” on terrorism prompted Congress to approve of George W. Bush’s wrongheaded war in Iraq. Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor did Iraq have any nuclear weapons as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld told us. They even brought General Colin Powell, then secretary of state, into this falsehood.

Presidents are certainly not immune to the impulse to look tough on military matters. President Reagan’s weapons buildup was one of the hallmarks of his first term as president (along with his tax cuts). Any peace dividend we enjoyed under George H. W. Bush at the end of the Cold War did not last long. The defense budget rose again during the second term of Bill Clinton, who apparently wanted to establish an image as an unflinching leader beside a Republican Congress intent on impeaching him (one of the most ludicrous congressional efforts in American history). And in 2009, when President Obama agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan, I believe he did so at least partly to send an unequivocal message that he was a commander in chief with a firm hand.

But there is more than one definition of “tough.” We need to end the false choice between a bloated budget and a weak spine. Imagine what might have happened if more members of Congress had questioned President Bush’s rush into Iraq. Thousands of lives might have been spared. And according to estimates by Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stig-litz, $3 trillion in direct and indirect expenses might have been saved too. As for the Iraqis, our unjustified invasion and prolonged occupation smashed their country.

Do not mistake what I am saying. I do not want to strip this country of its military might. I understand that deterrence is vital to our well-being. But do we honestly think Iran or North Korea will launch a preemptive strike against the United States? Remember that our arsenal of fighter jets, battleships, submarines, and nuclear missiles did not stop nineteen al-Qaeda–trained men from bringing down four U.S. commercial airliners with box cutters and a few cans of Mace on 9/11.

I’m familiar with the argument that Osama bin Laden’s death was a triumph of U.S. military might. But if you’ll pardon the expression, I believe that is baloney. The cost of the small, hard-hitting, smooth-working squad of Navy SEALs that captured and killed bin Laden at his Pakistani compound was a minuscule fraction of the cost of the Afghan war. Our most symbolic victory was won by Special Ops, with a handful of men—not the 100,000 soldiers on the ground.

It seems that many Americans, especially Democrats, are finally losing their appetite for excessive military spending. An opinion poll by the Pew Research Center found that today just as many voters favor a decrease in military spending as favor an increase.

In a careful and convincing study, Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, and his associate Laura Conley have identified “unproven, over-budget, or strategically unnecessary” weapons and weapons programs that could be cut or canceled and not missed. Among them: the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. According to the study, the Osprey program has been plagued by so many technical problems since its 1991 inception that Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, called it a “turkey.” Rejecting the Navy’s request for twenty-four new Ospreys would save $9.1 billion. Also: cut procurement of the Navy and Marine F-35 Joint Strike Fighter variants. Since 2002, estimates of the lifetime operational costs of the F-35 have more than doubled to $1 trillion. Alternative fighter jets such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet continue to be effective in the Navy and the Marines, so cutting their variants while allowing the Air Force to keep its entire buy would control spiraling costs without compromising American air superiority. Savings: $16.43 billion by 2015.

Beyond the cost of needless tanks and submarines are our unnecessary expenditures on personnel. It is well past time to bring home our troops not only from Iraq and Afghanistan but also from Western Europe and South Korea. Hitler has been dead for more than sixty years. The Korean conflict ended in 1953. These onetime theaters of war, where our forces number 120,000 and 29,000, respectively, no longer need to use the United States as their policemen.

I’m reminded of the slogan I used in my 1972 campaign, “Come Home, America”—a mantra we borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. The idea was to bring the electorate back to the values upon which our nation was founded. Now I believe that same catchphrase is applicable in a different context: it is time to bring our troops home and tend to the pressing domestic matters we have overlooked for far too long. President Obama has announced a 10,000-troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011, with a second withdrawal of 23,000 soldiers in 2012. It’s a start. But why are we not bringing them all home, right now?

In the tradition of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, Admiral Michael Mullen, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the nation’s senior military officer—has warned that our mounting national debt is weakening our economy so much that it is the single biggest threat to national security. By overemphasizing defense, we weaken other sources of our national strength: the quality of our children’s education, the health of our citizenry, and our stewardship of the environment. No one decision will solve all of our problems, but by making the cuts I’ve suggested and others according to the Korb-Conley study I mentioned before, we can save more than a trillion dollars in the current decade.

It is time for Democrats—and for all Americans—to acknowledge that we are well past a place of diminishing returns. A generation ago, under far different circumstances, the Soviet Union spent so much on its arms buildup against the United States that its economy collapsed. As an old history professor, I am wondering if perhaps there is not a lesson in there for us. Being the strongest country on earth doesn’t mean much if our citizens cannot find worthwhile jobs or affordable housing, quality schools, good health care, and a clean environment.