Anybody who doubts where John Kerry stands in relation to
history need only read the lengthy, ingratiating portrait of him by Matt Bai in last Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine.
Kerry is our Neville Chamberlain, assuring us that we are not
really at war, that the seeming conflict is all a misunderstanding
that can be cleared up with a little clever diplomacy, and that he
will bring us “peace in our time.”
After a flattering portrait of Kerry as cool-headed and
unflappable on September 11th (he was caught on a newsreel walking
calmly down the Capitol steps while those around him were
distraught), Bai, who has been covering the Kerry campaign for the
Times, begins by acknowledging that, as far as much of the
Democratic Party is concerned, the “War on Terror” is all an
invention of the Bush Administration.
Inside liberal think-tanks, there are Democratic
foreign-policy experts who are challenging some of Bush’s most
basic assumptions about the post-9-11 world — including, most
provocatively, the very idea that we are, in fact in a war…
In the liberal view, the enemy … more closely resembles
an especially murderous drug cartel.… Instead of military
might, liberal thinkers believe, the moment calls for a combination
of expansive diplomacy abroad and interdiction at home, an effort
more akin to the war on drugs than to any conventional war of the
last century.
Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should
include a strong military option argue that the “war on terror” is
a flawed construct. “We’re not in a war on terror, in the liberal
sense,” says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could
well become Kerry’s secretary of state. “The war on terror is like
saying ‘the war on poverty.’ It’s just a metaphor. What we’re
really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that
people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.”
Bai immediately tries to distance Kerry from these views, but he
arrives at the same place by wandering through Kerry’s tour of duty
of dealing with “the shadowy world of international drug lords” on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “If you don’t mind my
saying, I think I was ahead of the curve on this dark side of
globalization,” Kerry tells Bai. “I think that the Senate committee
reports on contras, narcotics and drugs, et cetera, is a seminal
report.” Kerry adds that “many of the interdiction tactics that
cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share
intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious
customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on
terror.”
As Bai notes, Kerry summed all this up in his 1997 book, The
New War — even though he acknowledges the book “barely
mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism.” “Kerry, a former
prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that,
was, if not winnable, then at least controllable.” Then comes the
quote that is already on the verge of becoming famous:
When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to
feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview
[than Bush]. “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. “As a former law-enforcement person, 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.”
You may have caught that reference to “the dark side of
globalization.” It’s a recurring theme.
“The challenge of beating back those nonstate actors — not just
Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces — is what Kerry
meant by the ‘dark side of globalization,’” write Bai. “He came
closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in
a speech he gave at UCLA last February. ‘The war on terror is not a
clash of civilizations,’ he said then. ‘It is a clash of
civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against
dogmatic fears of progress and the future.’”
All this leads exactly where you’d expect:
If Kerry’s foreign-policy frame is correct, then law
enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only,
strategy, you can employ against such forces, who need passports
and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish.
Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have
overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically
elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a
devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological
successor to Hitler and Stalin — and thus conferring on the
jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their
favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more
recruits.
In other words, if we just ignore them, they’ll go away. And if
we don’t ignore them but fight back, then it’s all our
fault.
So what would Kerry do to solve all this?
He would begin, if sworn into office, by going
immediately to the United Nations to deliver a speech recasting
American foreign policy. Whereas Bush has branded North Korea
“evil” and refuses to negotiate head on with its authoritarian
regime, Kerry would open bilateral talks over its burgeoning
nuclear program. Similarly, he has says he would rally other
nations behind sanctions against Iran if that country refuses to
abandon its nuclear ambitions. Kerry envisions appointing a
top-level envoy to restart the Middle East peace process, and he’s
intent on getting India and Pakistan to adopt key provisions of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty…
John Kerry sees himself as a king of ambassador-president,
shuttling to world capitals and reintegrating America by force of
personality, in the world community.
So what’s wrong with this picture?
Well, first of all, it never seems to occur to either Bai or
Kerry that Kerry’s model of international drug lords as the
template for Al Qaeda is wrong. (We’ll skip the
prostitution analogy for now and try to deal with serious things.)
Drug lords are businessmen trying to make money. They kill people
and try to bring down Third World governments as a means of
extending and protecting their business. They are driven by greed,
which, in the end, can be satiated.
Islamic terrorists are driven by religion, not money.
Their motives are not economic, which is exactly the
problem. Poverty and misery are not the underlying cause. In fact,
the major appeal of Islamic fundamentalism has been among the
educated elite. (Engineering students seem to make the best
recruits.) Exposure to Western culture usually makes Muslim
fundamentalists more radical, which is why Samuel
Huntington has called it a “Clash of Civilizations.” Al Qaeda does
not want to blow New York off the map because it wants to sell more
heroin. It wants to destroy America because it hates it and
believes Islam is destined to rule the world.
So here will come John Kerry, shuffling around Europe and the
Middle East, signing treaties, accepting promises, and assuring the
folks back home that everything is all right.
On top of this comes the argument that terror is really as “law
enforcement problem.” Liberals don’t have a very good track record
here, either. For more than 25 years, beginning with the U.S.
Supreme Court’s 1960s decisions in criminal procedure and the
academically driven “deprisonization movement,” liberals rooted
around the country looking for the “root causes” of crime, always
promising they were just ahead and that the problem was about to be
solved. Meanwhile, crime soared.
Then after 1990, two things happened. First, states started
reinforcing the death penalty. Second, Rudy Giuliani put into
effect James Q. Wilson and Richard Hernnstein’s “Broken Windows”
thesis, which said that enforcing public order and policing small
infractions was the way to prevent larger crimes. All of a sudden,
crime began a precipitous, decade-long drop back to 1960s levels.
The search for “root causes” was forgotten.
All this tells you what’s about to happen if John Kerry is
elected the next President. Not only does he not have the fortitude
to fight the war on terror, he doesn’t even believe we’re in a war.
Terror will be explained away as “crime” and ultimately “an
aberration.” Councils of world leaders will sit around mulling over
the problem — just as the U.N. now talks circles around itself
while ignoring the situation in Iran and the Sudan.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda or some offshoot will continue burrowing
until they accomplish their goal - another major terrorist attack
on our soil. At that point, Kerry will have an explanation similar
to Neville Chamberlain’s: “Everything would have worked if only
Hitler had kept his promises.”
