The foreign policy of the Democratic Party verges on deliberate
defeatism: afraid of American “dominance” in the world, many
Democrats would prefer that America tie wars than win them. Because
they would like to see America put in its place — this isn’t an
overstatement; just listen to the Democrats’ constant complaints
about America’s lone “superpower” status — their contribution to
the war effort is defined by deep ambivalence. They don’t
necessarily want their country to lose, but they are not so sure if
they want it to win either. They often define this ambivalence as
“patriotism”: we’re henpecking and sapping American military morale
for the country’s own good, they’ll say, lest it become too
“arrogant.”
As they did during the Cold War, the Democrats see their role in
the war on terrorism as that of harsh, inflexible monitors of their
own country. “Patriotism” thus translates into endless temporizing,
moral equivalence, and a campaign to place suicidal limitations on
their country’s military leadership. All of this is accompanied by
a gross lack of proportion and perspective and a dilettantish
indifference to the consequences of a lost war.
Democrats will tell the military to fight with one arm tied
behind its back from the comfortable spot of standing behind it.
From this safe vantage point, they can offer up such fine
sentiments as: although a “democracy must often fight with one hand
tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.” (Al Gore,
quoting someone else, used that line in a speech.) Democrats love
this high-minded and windy talk, especially since someone else is
doing the difficult work of preventing terrorists from cutting off
their hands.
It is striking how black-and-white, how totally lacking in
empathy, Democrats become when their own country’s military
soldiers, who are operating under very tricky circumstances, are
under discussion. The Democrats’ weakness for “situation ethics”
suddenly disappears and they become know-it-alls on the moral
particulars of military life. Certain acts are intrinsically wrong,
they thunder, even as they argue in every other context that no
such acts exist.
The Democrats warm to this discussion of human rights in direct
proportion to the evil of the human being whose rights are under
examination: a party that has never seen abortion as a human rights
abuse is worried that terrorists are standing for too long and
aren’t sleeping in properly conditioned rooms.
CIA director Porter Goss recently made a sensible distinction
between tough interrogation and torture, a distinction which the
Democrats dismiss with easy indignation and false piety (this is a
party that considers the death penalty for mass murderers to be
“cruel and unusual punishment”; there is no reason to trust its
definition of “torture” ), but a distinction which is essential to
military victory.
“An enemy that’s working in an amorphous network that doesn’t
have to worry about a bunch of regulations, chain of command, rule
of law or anything else has got a huge advantage over a stultified,
slow-moving, bureaucratic, by-the-book” army, Goss has said. “So we
have to, within the law and within all the requirements of our
professional ethics in this profession, develop agility. And that
means putting a lot of judgment in the hands of individuals
overseas.”
When Democrats reject such distinctions and say the CIA
interrogations are making America “like the terrorists,” they
simply reveal their ignorance of America’s enemy. The Democrats’
soft definition of torture would make Al Qaeda agents laugh.
The Democrats’ tendency to hype with great melodrama the evil of
their country while remaining clueless about the monstrosities of
the enemy is connected to their agnostic foreign policy: Were they
to see the enemy too clearly, they would have to support a more
dominant role for America than they wish. Wanting to put America in
its place on the international stage, with “parity” but not
advantage over others, they have to portray threats to America very
benignly. This explains how the Democrats could stumble into the
absurd position of saying that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was
terrorist-free and that he just wasn’t the sort of person to
associate with Muslim terrorists. This whitewash of pre-war Iraq
has become essential to the Democrats’ assertion that America could
have won the war on terrorism while ignoring one of its loci — an
assertion no more persuasive than the Democrats’ claim that Marxist
expansionism in Central America had nothing to do with the Soviet
threat.
Given the nonstop talk about what the Bush administration didn’t
find in Iraq, it is high time Bush officials remind people of what
they did find there: a chaotically administered, out-of-control
weapons program that was easily accessible to terrorists. As
inspector David Kay reported, Iraqi scientists up until the
beginning of the war were “actively working to produce a biological
weapon using the poison ricin”; “We know that terrorists were
passing through Iraq. And now we know that there was little control
over Iraq’s weapons capabilities….The country had the technology,
the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing
through the country — and no central control.” Iraq under Saddam
Hussein was arguably more dangerous than even Bush had assumed, Kay
said: “I actually think what we learned during the inspection made
Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought
it was before the war.”
The Democrats, ignoring this, and working themselves into a
fever over Iraq’s perilous condition even as they simultaneously
argue no such dangerous condition existed under Saddam Hussein, are
rooting at best for an American tie in this front of the war on
terrorism. But a tie against terrorists is a defeat, a defeat which
only a twisted Democratic foreign policy that fears too much
American success could pass off as a victory.
