Who Stole the American Dream? (48 page)

Tea Party Republicans were triumphant, but some mainstream Republicans were alarmed by what one called the “dangerous folly” of the Tea Party’s game of chicken against the president. Former two-term Republican senator Chuck Com of Nebraska, who left the Senate in 2009, said he was
appalled at the “irresponsible actions of my party, the Republican Party…. I had never seen anything like it in my, in my lifetime. I think about some of the presidents that we’ve had on my side of the aisle—Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, and go right through them, Eisenhower. They would be stunned…. I was very disgusted in how this played out in Washington, this debt ceiling debate. It was an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican Party.”

Six months later, Maine’s Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican, voiced similar anger when she announced last February that she was quitting the Senate after thirty-four years in Congress and would not
seek reelection despite being a strong favorite. “
I find it frustrating that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies [have] become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions,” Snowe declared. Seeing no realistic prospect for change, Snowe said bluntly: “I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate.”

Some mainstream Republican senators such as Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana, like GOP presidential candidates playing to the hard-core Right in the primaries, swerved to adopt hard right positions in their reelection campaigns to ward off Tea Party purging. Hatch survived the initial Tea Party purge, but
Lugar was knocked off.

Conservative columnist David Brooks likened Republican primaries to “heresy trials” imposing ideological purity, and he sharply chided Hatch and Lugar for bowing to these pressures. “
It’s not honorable to kowtow to the extremes so you can preserve your political career,” Brooks commented. “Of course, this is exactly what has been happening in the Republican Party for the past half century. Over the decades, one pattern has been constant: [Right] Wingers fight to take over the party, mainstream Republicans bob and weave to keep their seats. Republicans on the extremes ferociously attack their fellow party members. Those in the middle backpedal to avoid conflict.” The danger, Brooks warned, is that the new right-wing extremists “don’t believe in governance. They have zero tolerance for the compromises needed to get legislation passed…. It’s grievance politics.”

In the past, mainstream Republicans and Democrats have tackled politically explosive issues such as the national debt or the future of Social Security and Medicare through bipartisan commissions that work out of the political limelight to forge compromises based on shared sacrifice. But in the New Power Game, the time-tested approach of mutual give-and-take has been discarded in favor of what politicians themselves deride as “the permanent political campaign,” pushed especially by the Republican hard Right.

“
Today’s Republican Party,” observed Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “is an insurgent outlier. It has
become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromises; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government.”

The Democratic Party is “no paragon of virtue,” Mann and Ornstein contend, but they find Congressional Democrats more ideologically diverse, more open to incremental changes of policies, and more prepared to seek compromise and bargaining with Republicans.

For Washington to get functioning properly again, Mann and Ornstein argue, the Republican Party has to return to its more traditional footing. “
Bringing the Republican Party back into the mainstream of American politics and policy,” they assert, “and [a] return to a more regular, problem-solving orientation for both parties, would go a long way toward reducing the dysfunctionality of American politics.”

It would also help revitalize the U.S. economy and recover the American Dream, as would a reduction of America’s ambitious global military footprint and operations.

MATTHEW HOH KNOWS
the Afghan war from the inside. He volunteered to go, and he was a perfect fit for Afghanistan. At thirty-five, he had the right mix of experience, energy, courage, and commitment. After college, Hoh had enlisted in the U.S. Marines. By 2006, with the Iraq war at its worst, he was a marine captain commanding a combat engineer company in what Hoh called “
the
hell that was Anbar Province”—a hotbed of Sunni resistance where Americans suffered extremely heavy casualties.

Hoh knew how to get Iraqis to cooperate with Americans. In 2004–2005, he had supervised a major reconstruction effort by five thousand Iraqis in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, spending tens of millions of dollars to rebuild roads and mosques. His program had been singled out for praise. Then came Hoh’s sixteen-month combat tour in Anbar Province, where he was cited for “uncommon bravery” and recommended for promotion. But, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Hoh mustered out of the U.S. Marines. However, when President Obama ramped up the Afghan war and sent in
twenty-one thousand more U.S. troops in March 2009, Hoh volunteered to serve again.

The State Department grabbed him and sent him to heavy combat zones, first in the east and then into the southern heartland of the Taliban. Hoh studied the local culture and dug into Afghan history. In Zabul Province, he worked to help local officials increase their effectiveness and
win support among the tribes. In the east, he had seen that the tribes had little affinity for the Taliban but had been driven into a working alliance with the Taliban out of resentment against American military intrusions. In the south, Hoh found people motivated not by Taliban ideology, but by family ties and loyalty to tribe and village.
There was not one insurgency, he discovered, but hundreds, and what united them was their hostility toward the corrupt central government in Kabul, especially after the fraud-ridden reelection of President Hamid Karzai in August 2009.

Over time, Hoh came to the conclusion that the war had gone off track. He was troubled both by the American rationale for fighting in Afghanistan and by the way the war was being fought. As he saw it, the United States was no longer fighting al-Qaeda and global terrorism, but we had gotten sucked into an Afghan quagmire—a civil
war between feuding Afghan tribes and warlords. Al-Qaeda’s terrorists had fled to Pakistan or to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond. What was left now, he thought, was a domestic Afghan conflict that pitted urban, secular, educated Afghans in Kabul against the rural, religious, illiterate Pashtun tribes in the south and east. Initially, America had arrived as an ally that ousted a hated Taliban regime. Now, Hoh believed,
America was widely perceived as the occupier.

“I believe that
the people we are fighting there are fighting us because we are occupying them—not for any ideological reasons, not because of any links to al-Qaeda, not because of any fundamental hatred toward the West,” Hoh would later say. “The only reason they’re fighting us is because we are occupying them.”

Within a year, Hoh resigned. “
I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan …,” Hoh wrote to the State Department. “My resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end…. We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.”

Matthew Hoh had put his finger on what the Bush administration ignored and the Obama administration played down—the impact of the Afghan and Iraqi wars on the U.S. economy and the toll they were taking on domestic programs for average Americans.

President Bush sidestepped a guns-vs.-butter debate by never raising taxes to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or for America’s global war against al-Qaeda. The wars have added more than $2 trillion to the U.S. national debt. In Matthew Hoh’s terms, Bush
mortgaged the nation’s economy for years to come. Not until the tenth year of the Afghan war, when domestic programs faced severe cutbacks as Congress grappled with the national debt, was there a public clamor for cutting military spending.

Paradoxically, it was President Obama’s first draw-down of U.S. troops in Afghanistan that triggered protests. There was wide public disappointment in June 2011 over Obama’s long-awaited announcement that
the initial withdrawal would be just ten thousand U.S. troops by the end of 2011 and twenty-three thousand more by mid-2012.

Both Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals rebelled. In the House of Representatives, they pushed for a faster pullout. To loud applause, Republican Walter Jones of North Carolina declared: “
If we’re going to cut programs for children who need milk in the morning, if we’re going to cut programs for seniors who need a sandwich at lunch, if we’re going to cut veterans benefits, then, for God’s sake, let’s bring back our troops from Afghanistan.” The resolution for a faster pullout was beaten—but only very narrowly, by 215–204—a vote that posed a warning for the future.

Out in the country, there were echoes of discontent. The U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution urging an early end to the wars and rechanneling funds from military to domestic programs. Minneapolis mayor R. T. Rybak protested that American cities were being
forced to make “deeply painful cuts to the most core services while the defense budget continued to escape scrutiny.” Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa angrily objected: “That we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City absolutely boggles the mind.” During the Senate’s partisan wrangling over the debt ceiling, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin III remonstrated: “
We can no longer, in good conscience, cut services and programs at home, raise taxes or—and this is very important—lift the debt ceiling in order to fund nation-building in Afghanistan. The question the president faces—we all face—is quite simple: Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation’s fiscal peril, we cannot do both.”

What had pushed the guns-vs.-butter debate to the front burner was uneasiness at the staggering costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a growing awareness that they were fueling the national debt because they had not been paid for.

Congress has directly
appropriated $1.4 trillion in funds earmarked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from September 11, 2001, through 2012, but those figures vastly understate the total costs. They leave out $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion of increases in other war-related spending and national security costs supporting the two wars and the war on terrorism.

From government budget documents, the Eisenhower Study Group, a team of scholars at Brown and Boston Universities,
totaled the costs of the war through fiscal year 2015 this way: