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Senator Harkin Calls Cheney A Coward
(Juan Cole, Informed Comment, August 18, 2004)
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin has let Dick Cheney have it over Cheney's questioning of John Kerry's ability to understand the war on terrorism--calling the vice president a "coward". CNN quotes him . . . "It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that," said the Iowa Democrat, a former Navy fighter pilot . . . The issue first arose when Harkin joined with Des Moines police officials protesting the call-up of a police officer who already had completed his eight year military commitment. Harkin said that it angered him to hear tough talk from Cheney. "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," said Harkin. "He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood," said Harkin. . . . Presumably Cheney did believe that fighting international Communism was a worthy cause. He did ask for and receive five deferments, one after another. It is clear that he had higher priorities, as he said, than fighting in the Vietnam War. . . . This behavior suggests not necessarily cowardice, but hypocrisy. If he was exercised about a threat, why not go meet it? It could be cowardice, of course. We cannot know for sure. But it was at least hypocrisy. . . . And that is the big difference between Cheney and Bush as wartime leaders on the one hand, and on the other Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Cheney and Bush are diplomatically tone deaf, projecting nothing but arrogance and being all too willing to humiliate traditional allies. They have no sensitivity. And it is for that reason that they have the U.S. stuck in Iraq with only one really significant military ally, the U.K. (the Italians only have 3,000 troops there, and most countries just a few hundred, which makes their presence a token one). They have perhaps permanently alienated all the countries that might have lent the U.S. a hand. . . . And that pattern of arrogant, unilateral war-mongering worries me more than Cheney being a coward. . . . If the Bush/Cheney team gets back in, there will be further wars and massive disturbances to world peace and security, starting with Iran. Maybe the whole doctrine of pre-emptive war is a form of inferiority complex, impelling Cheney to be a strident war-monger to try to vindicate his uninvolved youth. If he was a coward, he may be endangering us all (and especially our teenagers) in a desperate ploy to regain his own manhood.

posted by LoZo 1:07 PM