America is sick of war

last updated 8 January 2015

George Will

The Washington Post

Since 1972, Republicans “have enjoyed a presumption of superiority regarding national security,” said George Will. That presumption is now gone. President Obama’s foreign policy has been aggressive and largely successful: Osama bin Laden is dead, and the drone war kills more terrorists every day. Yet Republicans bitterly complain that Obama is a wimp who made a terrible mistake by pulling out of Iraq and is making the same mistake by winding down Afghanistan. When he becomes president, Mitt Romney has vowed, we’ll fight on in Afghanistan until the Taliban is “defeated.” After 10 years of war, much of it fruitless, is this really what the American people want to hear? Clearly not. Yet some Republicans are even clamoring for two more wars, in Syria and Iran. These same hawks are in an uproar that Obama has proposed trimming the military budget by 8 percent over 10 years, even though the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 17 nations combined. Memo to the GOP: The voters have had quite enough of foreign nation-building, and want to attend to the problems at home. “Republicans who think America is being endangered by ‘appeasement’ and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.”