The other day, someone told me, “Most wars are started by Democrats.”
I asked him if he remembered the first George Bush’s invasion of Panama.
He didn’t.
I asked him if he remembered Ronald Reagan sending troops to the island of Grenada to take out the Marxist regime there.
He didn’t.
There are plenty of occasions in the post-WW II era that Republican Presidents have either started a war or sent American troops into harms way.
President Eisenhower sent 14,000 troops into Lebanon in 1958. Both Marines and Army troops went in on July 15, 1958 and stayed until October 25, 1958. These were backed by seventy Navy ships nearby in the Mediterranean.
Ronald Reagan also sent troops into Lebanon. They were first sent in during August 1982 and left on September 10, 1982. After a massacre of Palestinian refugees, US troops were sent back in on September 29. A car bomb exploded at the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. On October 23, a truck bomb attack on a Marine barracks killed 241, perhaps the largest loss of life on one day for the US since the end of WWII. On the same day, terrorists killed 58 French troops in a separate attack.
On February 27, 1984, President Reagan ordered all US troops out of Lebanon.
Ronald Reagan sent US troops in to take the Caribbean island of Grenada on October 23, 1983. Two thousand troops were sent in at first, and another four thousand came later. Although this was a small operation, by American standards, there has been intense criticism. The invasion took place with little preparation. The invading troops did not have proper military maps of the island, for instance.
President Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya on April 14, 1986 in response to a series of terrorist attacks. It is possible that the attack was intended to kill Libyan Dictator Moamar Khadafi. In any case, he survived.
President Reagan authorized the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers with American flags and sent US naval forces to the Persian Gulf to protect them from harassment from Iran. This operation took place from July 24, 1987 to September 26, 1988. In retrospect, it looks like a rehearsal for the Persian Gulf War.
President George Bush sent 21,000 troops to invade Panama on December 20, 1989. Although the fighting only took three days and the deaths of 23 US soldiers is considered a small number, it is not without controversy. About 500 Panamanian civilians were killed, in addition to 150 members of the armed forces loyal to Dictator Manuel Noriega. The invasion did put an elected Panamanian President back in power. Nevertheless, there was international criticism. The Organization of American States and the European Parliament condemned the invasion.
The Persian Gulf War started when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. President Bush assembled an international coalition to assist US troops in invading Iraq. The war officially ended on February 28, 1991 after a successful invasion, although Bush decided not to take Baghdad.
On December 4, 1992, President Bush ordered troops into Somalia. President Clinton inherited the Somalia mission when he took office in 1993. The last American troops were ordered out by President Clinton on March 1995.
The War in Afghanistan was going on before the US got involved. Congress passed a Joint Resolution authorizing force against those responsible for the 9-11 attacks. George W. Bush signed it on September 18, 2001, which led to US involvement. US air strikes began on October 7, 2001 and the first ground troops arrived in November and December. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that “major combat” was over on May 1, 2003. The US continued to have almost 40,000 troops there for years afterward.
The Iraq War: Most Americans saw the Iraq War as a result of the 9-11 attacks. Most histories find no basis for this notion. The Administration of George W. Bush claimed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. Based largely on that claim or popular belief in it, Congress passed the Iraq Resolution in October 2002. The Iraq War officially continued from March 20, 2003 to December 18, 2011. Despite the supposed end of the war, the Obama Administration sent troops back into Iraq in 2014.
I have left Vietnam out of this assessment since the origins of full-scale American involvement in that war are blurred over several presidencies.
The Korean War happened during the Truman Administration, and Harry Truman was a Democrat. Congress approved military action in Korea in August of 1950, so Truman did not proceed without Congressional approval. Truman did confine the war to the Korean Peninsula, refusing to get into a broader war with China.
There is no simple measure of whether a President acted wisely in military matters. It is clear that a number of military actions ordered by Republican Presidents have been conveniently forgotten by partisans.
