Red-Blue is actually hawk-dove

[dude1394]

Interesting article on foreign-policy and the democrat/rebublican thoughts about it. Much more at the link....
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../070115fa_fact

Clinton, Edwards, and Obama view themselves as internationalists—eager to keep America engaged in the world and willing to employ force if necessary. And yet, if polls are to be trusted, this outlook separates them from their party’s base. A 2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS. Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake—thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats. As the New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who has argued for a more assertive Democratic foreign policy, notes in an essay that will appear in a forthcoming collection produced by the Brookings and Hoover Institutions, “America’s red-blue divide is no longer chiefly between churched and unchurched. It is between hawk and dove.” He is not alone in arguing that Bush has done something that would have seemed impossible in late 2001: he has turned the fight against terrorism into a partisan issue.

continuing interesting stuff from that article.

Edwards is careful not to rule out the use of military force against Iran, but he would much rather talk about other things—his recent interest in Africa, and his antipoverty ideas, which are at the core of his candidacy. Edwards is genial in conversation, but he became almost testy when I brought up his vote, in 2002, in favor of the Iraq-war resolution. Edwards has repudiated his vote, unlike Clinton, who has not renounced her own support for the war despite demands from her backers that she do so. Edwards worries that his vote will be seen as evidence that he was somehow fooled by the Administration into giving it his support. “I was convinced that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons,” he said. “There was some disparity in the information I had about how far along he was in that process. I didn’t rely on George Bush for that. And I personally think there’s some dishonesty in suggesting that members of the United States Senate relied on George Bush for that information, because I don’t think it’s true. It’s great politics. But it’s not the truth.”

When I asked who was making this suggestion, he said, “I’ve just heard people say, I can’t even tell you who, I’ve just heard people say, ‘Well, you know, George Bush . . . misled us.’ You know, it’s just— I was there, it’s not what happened.” (Edwards would not single out anyone, but he appeared to be referring to, among others, his 2004 running mate, John Kerry, who has often said that he was lied to by the Bush Administration about W.M.D.s. “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true,” Kerry told a rally of liberal Democrats in June of last year.)

“I was on the Intelligence Committee,” Edwards went on, “so I got direct information from the intelligence community. And then I had a series of meetings with former Clinton Administration people. And they were all saying the same thing. Everything I was hearing in the Intelligence Committee was the same thing I was hearing from these guys. And there was nary a dissenting voice. And so, for me, the difficult judgment was not about the factual information, which I was convinced was accurate. It was about whether I was going to give authority to this President I didn’t trust. That was where the friction was for me. I decided to do it, and I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it.”