“Clinton’s Military”

I didn’t catch this earlier, but apparently earlier this week, in a comment on a NYT article, Josh Marshall claims that “Bush is winning the war with Clinton’s military.”

Well, not exactly. It would be just as, and possibly more, accurate to say that he’s doing it despite Clinton’s military (e.g., the JAG who vetoed taking out the cyclops early on). Even more to the point, we quite likely would have been moving out more quickly, on more fronts, if the arsenal (e.g., cruise missiles) hadn’t been so depleted by various ineffective usages over the past eight years, and not replaced.

The fact that we’re winning the war with “Clinton’s military” is really not very meaningful, since we can’t run a controlled experiment to see how much better or worse we’d be doing with, say, “Dole’s military.”