The News
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago will finally move the party past the most fundamental dividing line in Democratic politics this century: The Iraq War.
For the first time since the 2003 war, the Democratic ticket will not have a candidate publicly associated with supporting the invasion.
In fact, it features two candidates whose national political careers only began after the decision had been made. Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t even an elected official in the run-up to the invasion, instead working in the City Attorney’s office ahead of her campaign to become District Attorney of San Francisco that would start her climb up the political ranks.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz entered national politics in the 2006 midterm elections, running as an Iraq War critic. He has faced campaign attacks on his military record in the race, including his retirement during that campaign before his National Guard unit deployed to Iraq, but the criticism has little to do with his judgment about the war itself.
“We’re aging past the debates that basically cleaved the party into different factions for years,” Tyson Brody, a Democratic operative who had pointed out the novelty on X, told Semafor. “For people old enough to have been paying attention in 2002 and 2003, it feels welcome.”
In this article:
Benjy’s view
The current rifts in the Democratic Party over Gaza pale in comparison to the deep divisions over Iraq, a war of choice the US led with the backing of many top Democrats, and which defined nearly two decades of national party politics.
In 2004, John Kerry struggled to explain his support for the war amid an underdog challenge from Howard Dean. In 2008, Barack Obama’s early opposition to a “dumb war” as an obscure state legislator was central to his defeat of Hillary Clinton, who supported the operation as a senator. Clinton’s image with the left never recovered from that vote, which played a part in Bernie Sanders’ run against her in 2016 as well.
And while foreign policy was a relatively minor issue in the 2020 primaries, Sanders used the same attack against Joe Biden, demanding he “admit he was dead wrong” on Iraq. Even as president, Biden’s personal arc of supporting the war, helping oversee a withdrawal of troops as vice president, and later withdrawing from Afghanistan as president, while losing his son Beau Biden along the way to what he suspected was a war-related illness, will be central for future biographers.
None of the all-stars in the party expected to challenge for the Democratic nomination in future races are especially associated with the Iraq War debates either. While the field includes some veterans of the Global War on Terror — Pete Buttigieg, Wes Moore — the big names were either too young to be public figures or did not hold relevant positions at the time.
The View From Republicans
Ironically, the Republican Party is arguably more riven by Iraq War politics this cycle, despite having far less internal agita in the run-up to the war.
JD Vance, an Iraq veteran, pointedly arrived at the Republican National Convention to his signature campaign song, “America First,” an anti-Iraq War anthem by the late Merle Haggard (Its hook: “Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track / And let’s rebuild America first”).
That moment also capped off an evolution for the party. It wasn’t until 2015, when Jeb Bush ran for president and Donald Trump (falsely) portrayed himself as an early Iraq War opponent, that many of the party’s leading lights decisively acknowledged it had been a mistake. Since then, a strain of MAGA has made defeating the “neoconservatives” who enabled the war a top priority, which is where Vance’s use of the song comes into play. This split continues to be the subtext to conservative debates over the war in Ukraine and, in some corners, aid to Israel.
Notable
- Harris is still defining her own profile independent of Biden’s presidency, and foreign policy is one of twenty topics I wrote that I’d be interested in hearing more from her on.