THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS :

A New Questioning of the War (David Broder, June 30, 2002, Washington Post)

...a realization that was slowly dawning during a two-week swing that took me from Madison, Wis., to Lansing, Mich., to San Francisco and finally to Des Moines, Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Much of my time was spent with Democrats, ranging from a mayors' convention to interviews with candidates for legislative and statewide office in all four states. And what I heard convinces me that the nine-month moratorium on dissent from Bush's war on terrorism is coming to an end.

I am not talking about a shift in overall public opinion, where support for the president as commander in chief remains high. Madison and San Francisco were notorious as centers of anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and the peace movement also has been a long-standing element among Iowa Democratic activists. The late Harold Hughes, Iowa's governor and senator, was one of the first Democrats to break with Lyndon Johnson over the war.

The fresh questioning of the war on terrorism is also a phenomenon of the Democratic left. But if I have learned anything in four decades of covering politics, it is to pay heed when you hear the same questions -- in almost the same phrases -- popping up in different parts of the country.

Perhaps nothing is more central to the mythology of the modern Left than that they were responsible, in the 60s and 70s, for getting us out of that awful war in Vietnam and that this righteous action will redound to their credit through the ages. No number of boat people and no killing fields will ever convince them otherwise.

This represents a great danger to the Democrats in the current context because there are so many party activists and elected officials who still feel this way and who would welcome the opportunity to relive their youth. We can already see cracks and fissures in the House, where members of the Black Caucus and a few others are resistant to our support of Israel. We could see much more vocal opposition to the war develop once we get busy in Iraq. That's all well and good. Democrats opposed the last war with Iraq and it didn't hurt them at all.

But there's a huge danger here. Suppose they do begin to agitate against the war, or defense appropriations, or security measures, or whatever, and then there's another significant terrorist event? It's easy enough to bad mouth a war when it's thousands of miles away and doesn't much implicate our own national security, but it would be a disaster for the Democrats if their Left develops a head of steam against the war and then the war explodes (literally) here at home again.

UPDATE :
WISELY WARILY :
Democrats Moving Warily on Iraq (Ethan Wallison, July 1, 2002, Roll Call)

With military operations against Iraq's Saddam Hussein seemingly inevitable, House Democrats have plunged into a thorny internal debate over whether and how strongly to challenge President Bush as he presses ahead with the war on terror.

The discussion is essentially taking place in the gray area between Congressional prerogative in war matters and the genuine wariness - even dissent - at the left-liberal end of the Democratic Caucus about the president's aims, particularly in Iraq.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2002 9:28 PM