Taking On Mr. Dean
The Democrats have one last chance to avoid a Dukakis-like debacle.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
Saddam Hussein's capture is playing as bad news for Democrats who want to retake the White House next year, but we'd say it's an opportunity. Democrats are getting one, last, pre-primary chance to stop themselves from leaping off the foreign-policy cliff along with Howard Dean.
One of the mysteries of this Democratic Presidential contest has been why there has been so little debate over national security. Mr. Dean has led the pack into full-throated opposition to President Bush's anti-terror policy, and most of the candidates have followed him into the anger swamps. Saddam's arrest at least offers a chance to ask Democratic voters to consider if they really want to nominate a post-September 11 version of Mike Dukakis in a tank.
Joe Lieberman was first into this much-needed breach, as you'd expect from a candidate who has been strong on Saddam all along. "This news makes clear the choice the Democrats face next year," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a much more dangerous place."
The other candidate well-positioned to take advantage of Saddam's capture is Dick Gephardt. The former House Majority leader bucked the vast majority of his caucus to vote for war against Saddam, and unlike John Kerry he hasn't tried to run away from that record. Yesterday, he accused Mr. Dean of issuing "contradictory statements on Iraq over the last year" and using "this issue to constantly attack his Democratic opponents and to seek political advantage."
Those contradictions include his assertion last February that "Saddam must disarm," even as he refused to support a credible threat of force that would compel Saddam to do so. More recently Mr. Dean has been insisting that the U.S. can't "afford to fail" in Iraq, yet he opposed President Bush's request for $87 billion to finish the job.
Some had predicted that, as he got closer to the nomination, Mr. Dean would veer back to the center. But there was no sign of that yesterday, as the former Vermont Governor delivered a much-anticipated foreign policy address. "My position on the war has not changed," he told the Pacific Council on International Policy. "The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will help keep our soldiers safer. But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer."
This line of thinking--that Saddam was a bad man but no threat to America or its interests--will certainly come as a surprise to the Clinton officials who called him such a threat many times. And we doubt most voters will believe in the unthreatening nature of a man who pillaged the Kuwaiti oil fields and would have probably taken Saudi Arabia had he not been pushed back at the cost of American lives and treasure. His other non-threats include attempting to assassinate George H.W. Bush.
It's also not encouraging that Mr. Dean's first instinct in response to Saddam's capture was to call for taking "the American label off the war." He suggested seeking help from the likes of the U.N., which fled Iraq after the first truck bomb, and NATO, where France recently mocked an alliance request for more helicopters in Afghanistan. Now is precisely the time for the U.S. to press the intelligence advantage that resulted in--and should flow from--the capture of Saddam, not to give the Baathist remnants a breathing space.
Mr. Dean has also just named a stable of foreign policy advisers from the dovish end of the Democratic spectrum. One of them--former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake--was responsible for squelching indigenous Iraqi efforts to topple Saddam in the mid-1990s. Ashton Carter was an architect of the failed arms-control strategy for resisting the former Soviet Union.
Given all of this, it's a shame that most of the other Democratic candidates have allowed Mr. Dean a national-security pass. Retired General Wesley Clark had the resume to resist but as a candidate has been just as anti-war as Mr. Dean. This weekend he reiterated that "all of the concerns that I have voiced about Iraq remain." As for Senator Kerry, another great-looking resume, he has faded in the polls as even Democrats find his many flip-flops on Iraq an omen of weak leadership. He too declared that Saddam's capture is a chance to turn Iraq over to Kofi Annan's protection.
Messrs. Lieberman and Gephardt are at least offering a choice, and not a post-Vietnam echo of Mr. Dean, and we hope they keep it up. By taking the debate to the front-runner, they may help save their party from repeating its post-Vietnam Cold War mistake of showing weakness on national security. After September 11, this is a losing platform.
It's also bad for the country to have one of the two major political parties nominate a candidate whom voters won't be able to trust on the most important duty any President has. There's still time before Iowa and New Hampshire for Democrats to ask themselves if political suicide is really painless.
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