Andrew Ferguson misperceives a central tenet of the “War-wimp†argument in this piece. It's not, as he describes it, that “only men with military experience are justified in ordering other military men into combat,†rather it’s that military men know more about war—and all the many things that can, and are likely to, go wrong when you start one than people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis Libby, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Christopher Hitchens, Condoleezza Rice, George Will, and of course Richard Perle, etc, who have never seen a shot fired in anger, and hence should be listened to with great care and respect for their views before undertaking so risky and fraught a mission as an unprovoked war in a place like Iraq.
In this case, the people with the military experience did not think war was such a good idea—an idea that was buried in The Washington Post but known, nevertheless—and they were, of course, right. The invasion has turned into disaster because of the duplicity and incompetence of its civilian planners. The military did what it was supposed to do—kill people and secure territory. It failed in doing what it should never have been asked to do, which is to build a new nation from scratch. Those who profess to honor the military and thus mistreat it should be called to answer for it.
Still, once you get past his phony “On the One Handism,†Ferguson gets one thing quite right. I quote at length:
Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further--and here we'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.
Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn't really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.
When you think about it, the very notion that this story is dominating the election, on the front pages of the newspapers and the Sunday gabfests could hardly be more idiotic. In the first place, it doesn’t matter a whit whether thirty years ago, what “really happenedâ€â€”which is of course, never knowable—matches Kerry’s version or those of his detractors. If you vote for John Kerry you are going to get one kind of presidency, and if you vote for George W. Bush, you are going to get another kind. They are quite different, and really, if you have half a brain, it shouldn’t be too hard to make up your mind.
In the second place, as Ferguson points out, if you really do care about this kind of thing—and I can’t stop you—then all you really need to know is that Kerry volunteered to fight in Vietnam and then returned home to fight for his country to do the right thing by its veterans and stop asking them to die for an impossible cause. Bush, on the other hand, supported the war, but used his daddy’s influence to stay out of the war, specifically requested not to be sent to Vietnam, and then wasted the government’s million dollar investment in his training by failing to show up for training and forfeiting his right to fly the planes in the unlikely event he would ever be asked to. (Lucky for Bush, Nixon didn’t abuse the Nation Guard the way he and Cheney are.)
We may never know whether Bush was a deserter during this time, before he secured his special, special treatment, but his actions sure look a little fishy. Meanwhile, we are arguing about the guy who served, both in Vietnam and at home, risking his life in the first instance and his political future in the second. The fact that such lunacy can decide an election in the world’s most powerful nation strikes me rather terrifying-- an indictment of the quality of our nation’s political discourse and particularly the mainstream’s media’s role in policing it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/ 
