Why the Republicans can't fight terror
Driven by rigid right-wing ideology, their heavy-handed policies have made America and the world less safe, not more.
Sept. 16, 2004 | Vice President Cheney says that he and President Bush should be reelected because they alone know how to respond adequately to the terrorist threat. His Democratic opponents could never fight terrorism with sufficient élan, he elaborates, because they are trapped in "a pre-9/11 mind-set." They view terrorism as large-scale criminality, he says, to be fought by policemen and prosecutors within the bounds of law, while he and Bush see the battle against terror with open eyes, as a worldwide war against an implacable enemy to be waged with whatever means the White House and the Pentagon deem effective.
But the 2001-2004 Bush/Cheney record provides no support for the boast that Republicans are well equipped to fight transnational terrorism. On the contrary, that record, both before 9/11 and after, reveals an ideologically driven administration that has consistently made disastrously wrong decisions about how to fight terrorism.
Before 9/11, as we know from Bush's former top anti-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, the Bush administration cavalierly downplayed the terrorist threat. Prisoners of its own "pre-9/11 mind-set," it focused on extremely expensive and technically unproven Cold War programs such as ballistic missile defense, utterly irrelevant to the war on terror, and exhibited only lukewarm interest in ongoing programs to limit WMD proliferation.
The Bush administration's distracted security policy and irresponsible neglect of proliferation and the terrorist threat was presaged, we should remember, by the Clinton impeachment. The passionate drive to humiliate and weaken a sitting commander in chief revealed the Republican leadership's deep conviction, fed by ignorance and arrogance, that the world was no longer an especially dangerous place for the sole surviving superpower.
True, Cheney and Bush have both said that 9/11, from out of the blue, roused them from their pre-9/11 complacency about terrorism. And we should take them at their word. But they awoke feeling disoriented. Faced with something altogether new, they reverted to old and comforting habits.
The administration's response to 9/11 was manifestly shaped by a pre-9/11 agenda, even if the political support that Bush needed to carry out his highly risky invasion of Iraq did not materialize before the terrorist attack. After shattering the Taliban regime and driving al-Qaida further underground (without capturing its leadership), Cheney and Bush marketed their Iraq war plan by presenting it, mendaciously, as a justified response to 9/11 (based on false claims that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida) and also as preventive self-defense against an imminent threat of a WMD strike on the U.S. When these two selling points crumpled under inspection, the administration shifted to the refrain "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," as if Saddam's well-documented malignity, in and of itself, were an adequate casus belli. This phrase is rhetorically shrewd, because of its bumper-sticker simplicity: Anyone honestly trying to rebut it is forced into a complicated explanation, difficult for television reporters and audiences to absorb. But it is morally and politically despicable, because it obscures the real issue.
A reasonable answer requires a reasonable question. The question should not be: Would the world be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power? The politically responsible question, instead, is: Has the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq made the world and the U.S. safer than before? The answer to this question, obfuscated by Bush electioneering, is most certainly no, and that means, as perverse as it may seem, that the world is not better off with Hussein removed from power in this way, at this cost, with these consequences. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has weakened American national security because Bush's unimaginably clumsy management of postwar Iraq has swollen the ranks of young, enraged and lethally armed anti-American jihadists; has irritated and alienated potential partners around the world; and has tied down scarce national-security assets that we desperately need to confront much more dangerous and imminent threats.
To understand why a Republican administration has been unable to mount an effective war against terror, however, we need to look behind Cheney and Bush, and even behind the neocon architects and champions of the war in Iraq. The roots of the Republican failure to make us safer lie deeper. They can be traced, once again, to a distinctively Republican "pre-9/11 mind-set." This mind-set can be boiled down to a set of fundamental beliefs. When we measure these beliefs against the requirements of an effective counterterrorism strategy, we quickly understand why it would be a calamity for American national security if Cheney and Bush were reelected on Nov. 2.
1) Government is the problem, not the solution.
Hostility to government, distrust of government, the need to downsize government, to get government "off our backs" -- these are the central tenets of Republican political philosophy. But an effective war against transnational terrorism is violently at odds with these primitive anti-governmental passions. |
