We all know the full story here. Dopey vice president who can't conceive of ever going to war in Syria rips opponent for seeming to suggest this very thing, only to find himself two years later hoping no one will remember he said that because, boy, whadaya know, here we are bombing Syria!
But wasn't just Syria, and to me that's not even the most egregious thing here. Biden also drones on about how horrible it was to oppose a date certain for bringing "our warriors" home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and tell me if you hear the same thing I hear in this comment:
When Democrats talk about members of the Armed Forces - those on active duty but especially veterans - they have a tendency to infantalize them. You pick it up here in his reference to "our warriors." It drips with implication that the troops are helpless victims to whom we simply
owe the favor of bringing them home immediately, regardless of whether the mission has been accomplished. Why, to leave them in the field one day longer, how
dare you heartless Republicans!
It also misrepresents the nature of the commitment any one "warrior" makes. Members of the Armed Forces sign up for a specific duration of service, often three years. When their commitment is up, they are discharged. A friend of mine had about the happiest moment of her life this past week when her husband came home after that three-year commitment was completed - this despite the fact that we are going to
war counterterrorism operation right now.
When someone enlists in a branch of the Armed Services, they understand they could be deployed. They enlist because they are ready and willing to do it. Biden makes it sound like the nation is imposing an unconscionable hardship on them to ask them to go and fight when the nation needs that to happen. He doesn't see our "warriors" as the heroes they actually are. He sees them as victims who need to receive the beneficience of Democrat presidents and vice presidents who will "bring them home," even though in reality they will probably be redeployed somewhere else overseas when until their commitment has been fulfilled.
And oh, by the way, it
was a mistake to pull our troops out of Iraq, and we
do need to bomb Syria, as everyone now sees. Romney was right about these things just as he was right about Russia being our primary geopolitical rival. If Obama and Biden understood the world as well as Romney does, they might have anticipated some of these problems before they found themselves in the fix they're now in.
