The White House seems to have an inordinate fondness for the derisive use of the phrase “law enforcement operation.” It’s intended to describe how Democrats, particularly John Kerry, want to approach the war on terror. Bush, for example, told a Florida audience on March 20:
“Kerry said, and I quote, ‘The war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation.’ (Audience boos.) I disagree. I disagree….. After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and supporters declared war on the United States of America — and war is what they got. (Audience applauds.)
Bush, apparently pleased with himself, has used almost the identical words again and again and again. Cheney’s used it a few times himself.
It’s pretty easy to see the image Bush wants the public to imagine. While Bush sends the most powerful military in the world to battle terrorists, we’re told, Kerry is satisfied fighting al Queda with cops and lawyers.
As Jon Chait explained earlier this week, this charge, like so many Bush is using against Kerry, is completely untrue.
The most obviously dishonest thing about this line of attack is that it begins with Kerry’s actual view (the war on terror is mostly law enforcement and intelligence-gathering) and proceeds to imply something else: that he thinks the war on terror is entirely a matter of law enforcement and intelligence-gathering.
It’s revealing that, before applying it to Kerry, Bush originally ascribed the “law enforcement” approach to the Clinton administration. It’s true that, in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration and the intelligence community did not yet understand that terrorist acts by al-Qaida amounted to coordinated assaults, rather than the random acts of a few fanatics, à la the Oklahoma City bombing. But once they started to grasp the problem, it’s simply not true that the Clintonites viewed al-Qaida as nothing more than an international criminal gang. “We were operating under the law of armed conflict,” Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger told the Sept. 11 commission, “… not under law enforcement principles.”
But Bush isn’t just wrong about Clinton’s approach, he has entirely mischaracterized Kerry’s specific approach to the issue.
It’s even more obviously false that Kerry would merely “serve our enemies with legal papers.” Kerry not only favored military intervention against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, he favored it more aggressively than Bush. When Osama Bin Laden and his coterie were trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001, Bush inexplicably relied on poorly trained Afghan mercenaries to surround the hideout. Predictably, and maddeningly, this allowed them to escape. At the time Kerry called for American ground troops to do the job instead.
Chait also had a little fun explaining that the phrase Bush and Cheney use so contemptuously actually describes the conservative approach, whether they realize it or not.
Conservatives see the war on terror as a traditional war primarily involving the military because they see the main enemies as states. If you want to defeat a state, you need more than law enforcement and intelligence-gathering; you need armies. The conservative predisposition was summed up shortly after Sept. 11 by Charles Krauthammer. “Terrorists cannot operate without the succor and protection of governments,” he wrote, “The planet is divided into countries. Unless terrorists want to camp in Antarctica, they must live in sovereign states.”
This formulation, while appealingly simple, is obviously false. The Sep. 11 hijackers all resided either in the United States or in Western Europe, under governments that gave them no support whatsoever. We can’t root them out by sending the 3rd Infantry Division into Germany or Dearborn, Mich. Even in Afghanistan and western Pakistan, we’re relying not on massed ground forces but on intelligence-gathering and law enforcement.
Chait’s thorough debunking doesn’t mean Bush will stop using the phrase incessantly — that’s surely impossible — but this at least explains why Bush is wrong when he does.