From Today's IBD:
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Osama bin Soprano
National Security: Pundits don't see much difference between George W. Bush and John Kerry when it comes to Iraq. But the challenger's own words show how false that is.
Kerry has been extraordinarily careful on the stump, portraying himself as just as tough on terrorism as the president. But a recent interview published in The New York Times Magazine shows his "plan" for the war on terror is nothing of the sort, and that his tough talk is little more than spin.
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said.
Ah yes, "the place." It was called the 1990s. During that decade, we were hit by attack after terrorist attack — from the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. And what did we do? Nothing, really.
Terrorism in those days was seen as less a threat to the U.S. than, in Kerry's word, a "nuisance" to be managed. The Clinton administration, in one of its more famous foreign policy missteps, viewed terrorism as a "law enforcement problem."
Which is exactly how Kerry sees it now — at least off the campaign trail, when he lets his guard down. Terrorism, he thinks, is a manageable crime. Like prostitution or gambling.
"As a former law enforcement person," Kerry told the Times, "I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
So there you have it. Osama bin Laden isn't a murdering extremist Muslim fanatic, bent on world subjugation, even at the cost of millions of lives. He's Tony Soprano.
Such an idea, of course, is based on faulty logic. It assumes that terrorists are like criminals. They're not. Criminals are, in some way, rational. They want money and power, and take risks — commit crimes — to get them.
Terrorists aren't like that at all. They might be rational as to the means they use — bombings to terrorize the public, for instance — but their motivations are anything but.
They seek neither wealth nor power, but something else — the reversal of 1,000 years of perceived Muslim humiliation caused by the success and expansion of the western, Judeo-Christian world.
And to restore Islam's lost glory and bring back the medieval caliphate, they're willing to conduct a sustained terror campaign that disrupts and destroys Western faith in its own democracy.
Kerry wants us to believe he's tough on terrorism and wouldn't tolerate further terrorist attacks. But he shrinks from what that logic actually leads to: the recognition that we're in a global war — World War IV if you will, pitting civilized, democratic nations against Islamofascist thugs.
If they could, they'd end our way of life — even if it means exploding an atomic bomb or biological weapon in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or anywhere the human devastation would be horrific and the economic disruption great.
This is why Kerry can't be taken seriously on terror — and why voters should think long and hard when they step into the voting booth. As his comments in the Times show, the "tough Kerry" seen on the hustings is an anomaly and simply not believable.
But no one should really be surprised. Kerry's entire senatorial career — all 20 years of it — can be described as one big "no" vote against anything that would make America more secure. |
