Perhaps the most frustrating part of the national security “debate” is that it’s so terribly predictable. Going into an election cycle, the Republicans trot out their poll-tested soundbites and repeat them ad nauseum: cut and run, defeato-crats, waving the white flag, etc. The Dems, to varying degrees, go on the defensive, explaining why the Republican smears are untrue, while criticizing the GOP for blatantly politicizing and exploiting the issue.
The debate, at this point, seems to be over whether Dems want to “coddle” terrorists and “blame America.” Indeed, most conservatives seem to have convinced themselves that the left doesn’t want to fight a war on terror at all. Dems don’t necessarily have to return fire with the same disregard for accuracy, but they can offer a choice.
* The Republican plan for combating terrorism: Fight the war in Iraq — indefinitely — and impose democracy at the barrel of a gun.
* The Democratic plan for combating terrorism: Emphasize intelligence gathering and law-enforcement to track down terrorist cells and terrorist leaders, while vastly improving domestic security measures (ports, transportation, cargo inspection).
Granted, I could describe the GOP approach quicker, while the Dems’ took a sentence that included a comma, but it’s not so complicated that it couldn’t be repeated on a Fox News interview.
Oh, and our way has the added benefit of being effective, while their way fosters more terrorism.
I saw one conservative blog argue today that Dems want to capture terrorists like Osama bin Laden, but that wouldn’t “have prevented this terrorist attack.” That may be true, but how did the war in Iraq prevent this attack?
It didn’t. The intelligence gathering and law-enforcement efforts that Bush derided as weak-kneed appeasement did. Indeed, as Publius explained very well today, the thwarted plot “demonstrates the utter failure of the Iraq War as anti-terrorism policy.”
The key…is to focus on the nature of that threat. The 9/11 hijackers share a lot of similarities with the UK would-be bombers (who I’m assuming are the real deal). They were not agents of any state — but were instead a group of alienated and unaffiliated Muslims financed by non-state actors. These individuals lived in liberal democracies and were essentially a criminal syndicate — a jihadist mafia operating in the shadows of a “free” country. This lends support to Yglesias’s point that the biggest threat to our safety is not an unwillingness to kill these people, but the inability to identify them (or to find them).
Any remedy for this serious problem needs to be tailored to fit the nature of the threat. Thus, what’s needed to keep us safe is, as Joe Biden rightly said, “gumshoe” work. Our safety depends on our ability to gather intelligence, to act on tips, to work leads, to aggressively monitor the movement of finances, etc. For that reason, effective policy really does closely resemble law enforcement activities.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but this seems like an argument that most Americans would understand and find compelling. They already oppose the war in Iraq and believe it was a mistake, but they’re anxious to continue an effective war on terror.
Democrats can deliver one; Republicans can’t. All the smears in Karl Rove’s playbook won’t change the fact that the GOP’s terror-fighting policies are backwards.