Beware the Walter Cronkite Moment:

There are two ways of reading the significance of Will's jeremiad against the war in Afghanistan. The first is to recognize that for all of his pompous sententiousness, Will is a conservative of the old school, more in the tradition of William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, or Milton Friedman. Despite the frequent meretriciousness of their arguments, they were at least attempting to engage in debate by means of an educated demeanor in the hope of converting an intelligent audience. There is some reason to believe that tradition is as dead as Rockefeller Republicanism in terms of its influence over the GOP and the conservative movement of today. The belligerent caterwauling of the Hannitys and O'Reillys, with all the intellectual refinement of a drunken lout bellowing "USA!" at a sporting event, is now the predominant mode of expression among the Republican base. From that perspective, Will may be speaking for very few of his fellow Republicans, the vast majority of whom will forever be wedded to their (overwhelmingly vicarious) love of war.

But one should never discount the mental dexterity of the psychotically partisan true believer. The same people who are now screaming that health care reform is the moral equivalent of Stalinist Russia raised not a peep when George Bush rammed through Congress a one trillion dollar Medicare prescription drug bill that prohibited the government from restraining the pharmaceutical industry from its habitual licensed robbery. The same gibbering cretins like Glenn Beck who now tearfully posture that the country is being taken away from them kept silent when Bush illegally circumvented habeas corpus and Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments — that is, unless they were loudly cheering those same usurpations.

That kind of deeply dishonest mindset is characteristic of "authoritarian followers," the sort of people described in 1984 as engaging in the most spiteful kind of hatred made all the more irrational for its wildly inconsistent character. The only consistency is that their behavior is dictated by the momentary needs of the Party. One correspondent informed me today that his brother — a partisan Republican — is now antiwar. Why? "Because it's Obama's war."

That leads us to wonder whether a substantial number of Republicans will flip on the war, with no apparent consciousness that they had been rabidly for it for nearly a decade prior. We are reminded of the bombing of Serbia, which a substantial majority of House Republicans voted against authorizing. There were no doubt some Republicans who were sincerely against the war. But many of them (like Tom DeLay) were opposed to it not in principle but because it galled them that Clinton was strutting around and getting the "credit." The prolonged rants of Rush Limbaugh during the Serbian war were hard to decipher unless one was aware of the double-think that was going on: He, like DeLay, et al., would have been delighted to see Serbia reduced to radioactive rubble, but only if a Republican were "commander in chief." He was actually writhing with anger over the fact that Clinton got to play war lord, which by every right ought to be an exclusively Republican prerogative. But we can guess what the position of the Limbaughs and DeLays would have been had Bob Dole somehow won the 1996 election and then conducted a bombing campaign in the Balkans.

There is some sort of weird psychological tic in play that has been little commented on: that Republicans, and only Republicans, have moral title to the military. Accordingly, whereas ordinarily a war, any war, is automatically and ipso facto a good thing, it can be de-legitimated if it occurs during the presidency of a Democrat.

Obama has made a serious mistake by upping the ante in Afghanistan. It does no good for Afghanistan, it is bad for this country, and it endangers his presidency. It is precisely the kind of policy that follows, as night follows day, the juvenile formulas of the Democratic Leadership Council: faux-Machiavellian triangulation to frame Iraq as the bad war and Afghanistan as the good war. Already Congressional Democrats are nervous about the escalation, and the escalating casualties. But Obama should not expect help from the Republicans. If Afghanistan gets even messier than it is, there is a reasonable likelihood that they will bail on him; if he cuts his losses, after having rhetorically raised the stakes by repeatedly referring to Afghanistan as a necessary war, the GOP noise machine will howl that he is Neville Chamberlain, if not an outright traitor. After all, haven't they told him in a thousand ways they want him to fail?


* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] George F. Will, "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan," Washington Post, September 1, 2009.

[2] George F. Will, "A Retrospective on Disarmament," Washington Post, December 15, 2002.