Ah ha. A substantive response. Bravo!
I don't think so he provided the leadership to the Pentagon and the others to tell them to plan well.
Well, Rumsfeld is IMO a brilliant military strategist. He has done more to bring our military kicking and screaming into the present than anyone else. McNamara had the right ideas, but not the balls to pull them off. Rumsfeld has and is. In that respect, I think Bush chose a superb man for the job. The military side of the campaign against Iraq was absolutely brilliant. It is the political side that has been a disaster. Can't blame Rumsfeld for that. I give Bush full points for that appointment. So on military preparedness and leadership and defense planning (leaving out the USE of the military in Iraq, which is a different issue), I give Bush an A. Maybe an A-. But no less than that.
I also give him full points for picking Powell for Secretary of State. The problem is that Bush doesn't listen enough to Powell. And therein, IMO, hangs Bush's greatest weakness. he is too rigid about his core principles. He believes what he believes even beyond the point that it is intelligent to believe it. He gets a C- at best, maybe a D, for leadership flexibility.
But Kerry has the opposite problem. While Bush hangs on to beliefs far too long, Kerry doesn't seem to believe anything for more than the time it take to change his mind, which he changes about as often as I change the oil in my car.
So, which is better, somebody who is too slow to change their mind, or someone who is too fast to? I really don't know. I look for a middle candidate, someone between the Absolutist Bush and the Relativist Kerry, an Aristotelian moderate, and I don't find him.
As to the war on terror, the problem is that isn't really a war, and it is something on a scale we have never seen before -- and indeed I'm not sure that the world has seen before. State terrorism on this scale, yes. We have seen mass murders in state positions -- Stalin, Hitler, Pot Pol, etc., -- and there are some ways to deal with that. But this free-flowing international terror with the massive funding and organizational skills of Al Qaeda (and yes, they are brilliant organizers, make no mistake about it), driven by religious fervor we simply cannot comprehend, make them far beyond anything the IRA, the ETA, the Red Brigades, even Hamas, ever dreampt of. This is something the world has never seen before. So any approach has to be a try-out. We have to invent answers. Has Bush done a good job on that? I would say somewhat. There has been no new 9/11 attack on our home territory. That's success. But there are still lots of holes. Our intelligence operations, which were largely dismanteled by Clinton, are taking far too long to redesign, rebuild, and redirect to meet this new threat. And I don't think we have found the right balance between retaining civil liberties while accepting the risks thereof and giving up civil liberties to attempt to find more security.
So I give Bush a gentleman's C on the war on terror.
But, would Kerry do better? What affirmative program is Kerry recommending? What specific changes would he make? Would he amend the Patriot Act which he voted for, and if so how? All we have so far is fluff. Generalities that aren't going to count for a can of okra when it comes to dealing with al Qaeda. And between somebody whose programs have at least been successful in keeping terror out of the country, and somebody who has given us no clue what exactly he would do differently to keep us safe, I don't see a compelling argument for changing horses in this mid stream. I'm not happy with the horse I'm riding. But I don't see a compelling reason to change, either.
This is too long, so I'll address your other points in another post. |
