Current Events
America's war One of the least admirable things about the Republican leadership of the past decade was its reaction to President Clinton's Operations Allied Force and Desert Fox against Serbia and Iraq respectively. Too many of them -- Trent Lott's comments on Desert Fox spring to mind -- refused to acknowledge these military actions as specifically American undertakings, instead preferring to characterize them as Clintonian efforts, and therefore unworthy of their support. I don't think it's too much to say that there were definitely some who would not have minded terribly if Allied Force had failed; a triumphant Milosevic would be a small price to pay for a humiliated Clinton. This was, of course, a loathesome and wrong attitude. Whatever you may have thought of Clinton -- not much, in my case -- the fact remained that the United States at war is the United States at war, not Bill Clinton lobbing his own missiles on his free time. There was a fundamental disconnect between the ordinary demands of patriotism and references to "Clinton's war" or "Clinton's attack on Iraq" when those phrases were used to disavow, differentiate and distance oneself from those actions. I don't care what you think of the President: you don't wish for your nation's defeat; and you don't selectively disassociate yourself from your country.
