Will the Democrats' new control of the House and Senate shake things up that much abroad? They certainly will have plenty of opportunities to alter the present American course of fighting terrorists, the war in Iraq and our overall foreign policy.
For over three years, partisan opponents of the Bush administration have made two arguments against its conduct of the "global war on terror."
First, they've argued, the absence of another Sept. 11-like attack has not been the result of anything our government has done, here or overseas. Remember, after conditions in Iraq began to worsen, they began to say we were in even more jeopardy at home than we were five years ago.
Secondly, Democrats claimed, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act and targeted wiretaps have probably hurt Americans' civil liberties more than they've harmed terrorists.
So there is at last the opportunity to match prior rhetoric with action by stopping the money for these efforts. Then we could at last learn whether Democratic critics were right that much of President Bush's actions to combat terror have been either superfluous or counterproductive.
Likewise, in regard to the war in Iraq, which many Bush critics have compared to Vietnam, we will soon see whether the Democrats have a viable alternative plan.
Right now, there are really only three courses of future action in Iraq, two of which were presented by different factions of the Democratic Party in the months leading up to the midterm elections.
The first choice, the logical response to criticism by some Democrats that the U.S. has had too few troops in Iraq, is to add more — as we did in Vietnam between 1964 and 1969.
The second — and opposite — choice, as proposed by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean and Congressman John Murtha, D-Pa., is to bring the soldiers home, or at least redeploy them elsewhere, whether immediately or on a timetable. That way we could wash our hands of the supposed fiasco in Iraq as Democrats once did when they cut off funds to Vietnam in 1974-5.
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