Ghost of McGovern haunts Democratic foreign policy

 Ghost of McGovern haunts Democratic foreign policy

The 2024 election marks the 20th in my 79 years.

The only true antiwar presidential nominee in my lifetime was Democrat George McGovern in 1972. He ran against pro Vietnam War president Richard Nixon, who claimed America could achieve peace with honor there. McGovern said ‘Bunk’ and pledged to end the war without, as Nixon’s policy guaranteed, getting hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese, and tens of thousands more U.S. soldiers killed. Result? The U.S. electorate rejected McGovern’s vision overwhelmingly, giving Nixon 49 states and a 23.2% vote margin. Democrats, traditionally less militaristic than Republicans, learned a hard lesson: never campaign for peace over war.

In the 13 presidential elections since, including this one, Democrats dared not champion peace against war loving Republicans. In 2004, former Vietnam peace advocate John Kerry had the chance to call out George W. Bush for his illegal, immoral and criminal Iraq war. Instead he bailed, campaigning on winning the war, which was in tatters, by fighting it more intelligently.

In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama hinted at withdrawing from senseless wars. Once in office, he not only didn’t fully end them, he added to America’s Wars of Shame, intervening in Libya, Yemen and Syria; helping turn them into failed states, with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees.

Trump also campaigned against America’s forever wars, then dropped more bombs than Obama, assassinated a high ranking Iranian general, and nearly started massive wars against both Iran and North Korea.

But rather than call out and campaign against this military bellicosity, Joe Biden campaigned for more military spending, more confrontation with China and Russia, adversaries he called “near peer powers”.

Biden got off to a good start by quickly ending America’s disastrous 20 year war in Afghanistan. Then he doubled, tripled quadrupled down on other perpetual warfare thruout his first term.

He’s provoked and enabled the Russian war in Ukraine, sabotaging every effort to end it early on. Ukraine is no longer a sustainable country without US life support. Hundreds of thousands are unnecessarily dead.

He’s expanded provocative rhetoric and military exercises against North Korea and China in the Far East.

He’s enabled and supported Israel’s near genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza following Hamas’ attacks.

He’s committed to spending a second hundred billion of scarce American treasure to fund these totally unnecessary, self-destructive policies.

Biden is no fool regarding electability. He knows peace doesn’t sell with a war obsessed government and military fueled by companies selling hundreds of billions in weapons of mass civilian destruction. They ply their madness over a clueless, compliant and complicit electorate. And astride Biden’s shoulder, every blood drenched step of the way, is the ghost of George McGovern.