Reply #39: "Strong military and a 'willingness to use it'"

[welshTerrier2]

this is a very, very disturbing phrase ...

i've seen many posts from "new" Democrats suggesting that our Party has a long history of engaging in warfare, when appropriate, and implying that "the left" thinks the Party's "traditional past" is only one of pacifism ... they just love to push those themes ...

the truth, and most know it's the truth, is that many on "the left", regardless of whether they do so correctly or not, have a set of values on which they determine whether any given war is justified or NOT justified ... yes, some are, god forbid, pacifists ... but many believe that many or most wars fought by this country have been fought for other than their advertised purposes ... this does not make "the left" against a strong military and it does not make "the left" unwilling to use force when necessary ... the emphasis on "willingness to use force" without an equivalent emphasis on the necessity of evaluating the justification for war is NOT a Democratic Party traditional value ...

to suggest that the Democratic Party's traditions are in favor of a "Strong military and a 'willingness to use it'" without acknowledging that the underlying values are to use warfare ONLY AS A LAST RESORT and only when warfare is justified is an outright fabrication ... the problem with the revisionist history embodied in the phrase "willingness to use it" is NOT that the phrase is in error by "commission" but rather that it is in error by "omission" ...

the VALUE in which the use of the military in traditional Democratic Party beliefs is best encapsulated is that we, as Democrats, recognize the horrors of war and that, while it is sometimes necessary, we reserve the right to speak out against committing our country to war when we do not believe the war is justified ...

the reference "Strong military and a 'willingness to use it'", absent a recognition that war should be used only as a last resort and that citizens should reserve the right to protest against their government when they believe war is unjust, is a distortion of what the Democratic Party used to, and should still, stand for ...