THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Bruce Herschensohn pointed out that "Republicans want a big military, but they don't want it to go anywhere. Liberals want a small military, but they want it to go everywhere." In other words, liberals always want to cut back the armed forces and spend all the government's money on social programs. At the same time, they want to use American forces to run the affairs of every country in the world. For humanitarian reasons, of course.

That is how "The Best and the Brightest" got us into Vietnam. This was the Harvard crowd around John Kennedy in the early 1960s. Kennedy went through with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but the minute it got serious, he pulled out all American air support for it. The Cubans he had promised to support were slaughtered.

So when things got rough in South Vietnam, Kennedy's advisors wanted a small-scale response. They sent in military advisors, expanding the war a bit. In short, they did what Clinton is doing today. They started small-scale and then expanded, step by step. Under liberal policy, the other side got more serious with each step, so the liberals responded by sending in more troops. And so it went, just as it is going today in Serbia.

This process was described by David Halberstam in his book, "The Best and the Brightest." He was a Kennedy liberal, and he knew those people personally. He watched them get us into Vietnam, step by step. Liberals want American troops everywhere. They don't want them to stay out and they don't want them to win.

Some time back, General Colin Powell was discussing the size and excellent armament of American armed forces. While Powell was proud of the size and strength of American forces, he consistently opposed the State Department's proposals to use those troops for action in the Balkans and other areas. This prompted Secretary of State Albright to ask, "What good are those forces if we can't USE them."

Historically, the reason one wanted large armed forces was so that one would NOT have to use them. Sweden and Switzerland have spent more per capita on their armed forces in this century than any other countries in Europe. Germany spent a lot on armed forces during the two world wars, but Sweden and Switzerland have maintained huge military establishments during every single year of this century.

The result has been that neither Sweden nor Switzerland has spent a single day at war during this century. That is the ideal use of military expenditures: to keep your military large enough so that no one wants to attack you.

Usually it is the Defense Department that tends to be militant in foreign policy, and the State Department has tended to lean more toward diplomacy. But President Clinton has now stated that the enemy today is not Nazism or Communism, but Hate. America's power is to be used around the world to crush Hate.

Translation: America's forces around the world are to be used to crush what America DEFINES as Hate. This gives a green light to liberals. Liberals do all the defining for America. Liberals propose, conservatives oppose. But conservatives never do the defining.

The State Department has been a stronghold of the political left since Franklin Roosevelt took over, so the State Department is straining at the leash to enforce this new "anti-Hate" policy for which American power is to be used.

This explains why Secretary Albright would ask, "What good are these forces if we can't USE them."

The question Albright asked could only have been asked by a liberal in our own time. In any other time, it would be assumed that no one would ask such a question unless he was a fascist. It is a very, very cold-blooded question, after all: "Why do we have all these people in uniform if we don't put them in harm's way?"

Who would ask that?

Think about it. What would a liberal have said in 1980 if Reagan had asked, "Why do we have all these soldiers if we don't USE them." There would have been a shriek from the media that could be heard in Europe by the naked ear.

But when Albright asked it, it was not even considered odd. And no respectable conservative is going to question it.

That includes the war hero who worries so much about the welfare of American troops, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the liberal's favorite conservative.