NO SURRENDER
Democrats Should
Be the War Party
A hawk can't fly without its left wing.
BY RICHARD J. TOFEL
Thursday, June 6, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ever since the liberation of Kabul last fall, the Democratic Party has been publicly floundering, clearly clueless about how effectively to play the role of the loyal opposition in the war on terror. It now seems, at least to this Democrat, that only one course offers the virtues of serving the national interest, offering a clear alternative to President Bush, and holding out the possibility of political gain. That course is for the Democrats to become the true War Party, the clear-eyed hawks--in essence, to outflank Mr. Bush on the right.
Such a policy would entail criticizing the administration's policy toward Iraq not for excessive bombast, or lack of enthusiasm for multilateralism, but for insufficient results. It was widely mentioned, beginning about eight months ago, that we had about one year before Saddam Hussein would pose a mortal threat to our interests. (Where this one-year estimate came from no one ever seemed to say--just as no one ever said how many months' margin of error might be implicit in the estimate.) Well, we've exhausted perhaps two-thirds of our supposed window of nonvulnerability--and we have almost nothing to show for it.
Beyond Iraq, a War Party critique would ask why we were so timid at Tora Bora, and again in Operation Anaconda. It would ask why we have been reticent about pursuing al Qaeda into Pakistan's northwestern tribal territories, or into Kashmir. It would also ask why we have pussyfooted in Indonesia and the Philippines.
More fundamentally, it would ask why we continue to seem so solicitous of a Saudi regime that expresses no gratitude for our rescue of it from Saddam just 11 years ago, and no real remorse for its citizens' predominant role in the events of Sept. 11 and in the hierarchy of al Qaeda. This is a regime, moreover, that constantly drags its feet in efforts to choke off the financing of terror, upgrade airline security and end the teaching of anti-American and anti-Israeli hatred to children. A War Party critique would then ask why such a regime remains within the defense perimeter of the U.S. The jihadis want Mecca and Medina; we want the uninterrupted flow of oil. Perhaps both objectives can be met, even if the Saudi regime doesn't survive such a division.
A War Party policy would seek to put into practice what President Bush has only preached about other nations and the people in them being held to a choice of being "either with us or against us." That is attractive rhetoric indeed--especially as we now face that rare choice between good and evil, between the quick and the dead. But President Pervez Musharraf, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, have not truly been forced to choose. Nor has the House of Saud. Yasser Arafat has not even been asked to choose.
Above everything, a War Party policy would be focused on the future, and not on the past. It would move beyond the political game-playing of investigations about pre-Sept. 11 warnings, and the posterior-protecting trivialization of color-coded threat levels. It would, instead, recognize that we already have ample warnings of innumerable future threats--and would concentrate on curbing them rather than just listing them.
A War Party policy in this new shadowy war would no more deride our agencies in the shadows--the FBI and the CIA--than any party, in wartime, would consider deriding our military. Instead a War Party would amply fund the FBI, provide incentives for amply staffing it, and quietly insist on excellence from top to bottom.
The focus on the future would be spurred by a simple, and central, insight: that after the next attack, the American people will ask their leaders not why they didn't provide a warning of the carnage, but why they didn't do more to prevent it. And they will ask this especially of the president of the United States, who swears an oath to "preserve, protect and defend."
Which brings us to the politics of such a policy. Seen in the light of today's events, Democratic leaders view a War Party policy as unthinkable. What of our "allies"? they wonder. What of academia? The Washington press corps? The State Department? The United Nations? Jimmy Carter? Jesse Jackson?
But this was precisely the sort of thinking that paralyzed the Republican Party before Pearl Harbor (and even after the Anschluss, the fall of France and the Battle of Britain). It is why virtually an entire generation of Republican leaders became ineligible to lead the country after Dec. 7, 1941--and why no one in the pre-Pearl Harbor leadership of the party was ever nominated for president, much less elected.
That is the choice for Democrats today, I believe. The Pearl Harbor of our time--the moment that truly changes everything--was not last Sept. 11, I fear. It lies ahead. And that looming threat requires us to choose between becoming the America Firsters of the 21st Century and returning to being the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.
It is still not too late to make our choice. But time is growing short.
Mr. Tofel is assistant to the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. |
