The candidacy of Gen.
Wesley Clark for president has touched off a nasty debate inside the
Democratic Party. Not the one over whether he's really a Democrat --
that's so absurd it's hardly worth debating. The debate I'm talking
about is over whether a warrior should lead the party at all.
I say yes, and not just because the Democrats need credibility on
national security issues in order to beat George W. Bush next year.
To me, the U.S. military represents some of the best values of the
party: advancement without advantage, patriotism, multilateralism,
shared sacrifice and diversity.
Where I come from, the military is one of the four pillars of
societal advancement. Becoming a doctor, lawyer, minister or soldier
is how many of the people I grew up with -- or their parents --
entered the middle class.
Believe it or not, not every black kid can get an athletic
scholarship. So the military is one of the ways people without trust
funds can pay for college, learn a trade, even see the world. The
daughter of one of our family friends, Nigerian immigrants who
struggled to give their kids a good, middle-class life in Denver, is
now an officer in the U.S. Army, having graduated from West Point,
just like Clark.
And while it's sometimes hard for me to imagine her as an officer
-- I used to baby-sit her little brother -- I believe the military
gave her advantages she might not otherwise have come by.
In the military, integration thrives alongside meritocracy. When
the University of Michigan's affirmative action program came under
assault from the Bush administration, it was the armed forces that
stepped forward to defend the idea of diversity, citing the vastly
improved military that resulted when the forces sought to make their
ranks reflect America.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, when the media slipped into a
chilling, McCarthyite posture, it was military leaders and soldiers
who spoke most eloquently about people's right to dissent.
And while our armed forces are by no means perfect (the treatment
of women at the academies being a major black eye), they represent
some of the brightest, bravest people in our society. In the armed
forces, people like my younger brother find lifelong friendships
with people of all backgrounds.
You'd think progressives would embrace those things, yet some on
the left seem to have a reflexive suspicion of the military and a
sense that because it is an instrument of war, the people in it are
necessarily warmongers.
Recently, a prominent left-wing columnist, Sean Gonsalves, took
liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to task for supporting Clark. Other
prominent writers, like Norman Solomon, have chimed in, and posts to
left-leaning message boards denouncing Clark as a tool of the
military-industrial complex are growing.
But is the kid who's learning to be a technician, engineer or
pilot in the services a warmonger? Are the underpaid, exhausted men
and women in uniform responsible for the wars they prosecute? Of
course not. And neither are the generals. War is the burden of
soldiers, but the responsibility of civilian society. That's us.
We supposedly own our government in a democracy. If our leaders
take us to war, they do it with our explicit or implied consent.
As for Kosovo, which has become the cause of many who oppose
Clark: I can live with a war to stop ongoing genocide. It's the ones
to knock off tin-pot dictators for 20-year-old genocide, phony ties
to Sept. 11 and phantom weapons of mass destruction that this
progressive has a problem
with.
