The Democrats’ Dilemma
Clifford D. May
June 19, 2003
URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/May20030619.shtml
Democrats face a dilemma: The War on Terrorism has restored national security as a priority issue just as a new presidential election campaign is beginning to take shape.
That’s a problem because Democrats have long been perceived by voters as less competent than Republicans when it comes to national security. For nearly a quarter century, from Lyndon Johnson’s retirement in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1969 to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 soon after the conclusion of the Cold War, Republicans continually occupied the Oval Office – with only one, brief interlude.
That interlude came with Jimmy Carter’s election in 1977, a victory that was largely the fallout of the Watergate scandal. And during Carter’s last 14 months in office, the headlines were dominated by the Iran hostage crisis – which did nothing to improve the public’s perception of Democrats’ ability to deal effectively with America’s enemies abroad.
So now, Democrats have a choice: (1) Restore their party’s credibility on matters of war and peace, or (2) bet that another scandal will get voters angry enough to again throw the Republican rascals out of the White House.
Such seasoned Democratic strategists as Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, are making a strong case in favor of the first option. “Our party and its leaders must wake up to the fact that we can no longer give short shrift to security issues if we hope to regain our status as the majority party,” she recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed coauthored with Timothy Bergreen, the founder of Democrats for National Security. They believe their party can -- indeed must -- resurrect the traditions of such muscular Democrats as Sen. Scoop Jackson, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy.
But returning to that tradition implies moving away from the more pacific approaches of such Democratic leaders as Walter Mondale, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern and Michael Dukakis. And the left wing of the Democratic Party wants no part of such a shift.
Instead, Democrats such as presidential hopeful Howard Dean, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Sen. Carl Levin favor option (2); they’re looking to the Carter election as a model. But not content to pray for a new Republican scandal, they’re hoping to manufacture one by transforming the mystery over what’s become of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into a scandal. Or, as one Democratic strategist candidly said to me backstage at CNN last week: “What’s lying about sex compared to lying about war? This will be another Watergate.”
The problem with that formulation is that it is based on a patent falsehood. There can be no doubt that Saddam had WMD. He used chemical weapons to slaughter thousands of Kurdish civilians, and against Iranian combatants as well. He attempted to build nuclear weapons but the Israelis bombed his nuclear facilities 21 years ago this week, and US forces seized his re-built facilities after the Gulf War ten years later – and found that he was closer to building a bomb than intelligence analysts had estimated. Saddam admitted producing biological weapons (e.g. 8,500 liters of anthrax) and in recent days, US forces have found mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The only serious question is what happened to the products of his WMD programs? Are they hidden somewhere in Iraq? Were they transferred to another country, perhaps Syria and/or Lebanon? Or did he somehow get rid of them secretly – and in violation of UN resolutions demanding that destruction of WMD be verified by international inspectors? And, if so, did he leave in place a network of laboratories prepared to make new WMD as soon as the heat was off, as some intelligence analysts believe?
Democrat scandal mongers are not pondering such questions. Instead, they are peddling a scenario so fantastic that not even Saddam’s mouthpiece, Baghdad Bob, would have dared trot it out: That there were no WMD and Bush knew it -- but that he pretended otherwise as part of a vast (right-wing?) conspiracy that would have included Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Tony Blair – and, of course, Bill Clinton, who bombed what he claimed were WMD sites in 1998, after the UN inspectors were forced to go home. And don’t forget to include the UN Security Council, every member of which signed Resolution 1441 which did not asl whether Saddam had WMD but rather gave his regime "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations."
The Democrats have a dilemma. Donna Brazile and her colleagues have a way out, a way that will make it harder for Republicans to win elections but easier for Americans to become more secure. By contrast, Howard Dean and his friends are digging a hole that it could take Democrats a generation to get out of.
Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank on terrorism, and is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.
©2003 Clifford D. May |
