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Kerry the Conservative? “[He]
is confident that the war on terrorism can be won, in the same way the
war on organized crime can be won. ‘There
will not be a treaty signed aboard the battleship What
well-known public figure said this?
John Kerry? John
Edwards? Bill or Hillary
Clinton? Ted Kennedy? Clearly
this person must be a liberal Democrat because conservatives know that
the war can be won as long as
George W. Bush is reelected and more countries are invaded.
In fact, conservatives have been known to deride anyone who
suggests that terrorism should be reduced to a mere nuisance as
“amazingly irresponsible and stunningly stupid” (Laura
Ingraham) or “absolutely idiotic” with not even “the
intelligence of a mynah bird” (Rush
Limbaugh). As
it happens, the noted liberal Democrat who spoke those words was none
other than Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser under
Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Scowcroft presented his assessment of the war on terror at a
conference of the Forum for International Security just a year after
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. None
of the usual suspects on the right accused Scowcroft of being a
defeatist liberal at the time he made those remarks.
However, all manner of names (some of them mentioned above) were
hurled at Senator John Kerry when he opined, in the New York Times Magazine of “We
have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the
focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance . . . . 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.” Why
the difference in response to the two very similar comments?
First and foremost, Kerry is a Democrat, and an unabashedly
liberal one, which makes him a target at the outset.
Second, he is attempting to unseat President George W. Bush, a
Republican, and an unabashedly liberal (well, perhaps slightly abashedly
liberal since he keeps trying to cover his leftist leanings with the
phrase “compassionate conservatism”) one who is nevertheless adored
by those who should know better. Put
those two facts together, and any time Kerry says anything that
indicates a lack of faith in Bush’s handling of the fight against
terrorism—or, for that matter, any other issue—he is in for a severe
drubbing at the hands of the commentators of what passes for
conservatism these days. Nevertheless, Kerry and Scowcroft are both on the mark when they argue that terrorism cannot be entirely eradicated but must not, at the same time, be allowed to rule our lives. Terrorism is a tactic, not a thing that can be wiped out if we simply take over enough countries and kill enough bad guys. For a president to declare war on terrorism is akin to a football coach’s declaring war on the Power-I offense; he can set up defenses against it, but there is no way he can force other coaches to stop employing it. Similarly, while the government cannot, as both Kerry and Scowcroft understand, completely eliminate such things as organized crime, gambling, and prostitution, it can, on occasion, break up major rings involved in these illegal activities, thus reducing their incidence. Presidents
have, in fact, declared war on various nonentities before.
Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty.
Richard Nixon declared war on drugs.
Both of these so-called wars proved to be utter failures, but
that hasn’t stopped later presidents from attempting their own wars on
nonentities. George W. Bush,
for example, declared
war on illiteracy. Ironically,
his tour to promote this phony war, which included his reading the
now-famous My Pet Goat to a
group of grade-schoolers in In
past decades, even under Republican administrations, conservatives have
been (or at least portrayed themselves as) the clear-eyed realists,
members of “what we call the reality-based community” who “believe
that solutions emerge from [their] judicious study of discernible
reality,” as
one senior Bush adviser derisively referred to journalist Ron Suskind
after Suskind had written an article the administration didn’t like. Meanwhile,
liberals were those starry-eyed believers in the transformative power of
government action, whether at home or abroad, to remake society into the
Left’s own image. In other
words, when liberals put government into gear, they could “create
their own reality,” as that same Bush adviser told Suskind the Bush
administration was going to do with the American “empire.”
Suskind and his ilk, said the aide, would “be left to just
study what we do.” Now
we are presented with the spectacle of an ostensibly conservative,
Republican president who believes that he can genuinely reshape the
world by military might and, as a consequence, put an end to the threat
of terrorism once and for all. Challenging
him is a liberal Democrat who takes the more levelheaded approach of
recognizing that there are limits to government’s ability to reshape
the world and to eradicate terrorism. Andrew
Sullivan put
it this way: I
expected to read in [the New York
Times Magazine piece in which Kerry said he wanted terrorism to be
reduced to a nuisance] a parody of 1990s liberalism but that’s not
what I found. It’s clear
Kerry believes that countering Jihadist terrorism is primarily a matter
of international police work, alliance building, terrorism, monitoring
financial transactions, use of special forces and special ops. But
Bush believes all this as well. It’s
just that he also believes in the transformative effect of regime change
and democratization in the Arab world, and Kerry appears to be a skeptic
in this respect. Count me
with Bush on this one (with a few reservations). But
notice this irony: Kerry’s
is clearly the more conservative position here. Conservatives
have traditionally been doubters with regard to the transmission of
Western values easily onto non-Western societies. They
certainly don’t believe it can happen overnight. Bush
is therefore running as a Gladstonian liberal in foreign affairs, which
is why it’s strange to hear some conservatives writing as if Kerry’s
candidacy is the equivalent of Armageddon. What,
then, are we to make of Kerry’s seeming conservatism when it comes to
national security matters? Since
he and Bush agree on practically every other issue, it would seem that a
lesser-of-two-evils conservative voter might therefore be able to make a
reasonable case for voting for Kerry, as Sullivan does (although he has
other reasons as well). Perhaps
it a measure of how far left both parties have shifted over the years
that a liberal senator from Massachusetts actually sounds more
conservative on some issues—Kerry has also voiced more concern over
excessive spending and deficits than Bush, the king of entitlements and
red ink, has—than a self-proclaimed conservative from the former
Republic of Texas. The
problem for our hypothetical conservative voter is that Kerry has
adopted so many positions on so many issues, and especially foreign
policy issues, that he’d be a shoo-in for a job as a contortionist if
he ever leaves politics. Thus
our voter is left in a quandary: Vote
for one of the two liberals in the race, neither of whom seems to have a
firm grip on either reality or consistency, or take a chance on a
third-party candidate who stands the proverbial snowball’s chance of
winning. Is
it any wonder that the ranks of nonvoters grow with every passing
election? One person’s
vote for the next American Idol
is far more likely to effect a positive change than his vote for any
politician is. Plus, American Idol at least contributes to the economy, which is more
than can be said for politicians.
Finally, and most importantly, even William
Hung is infinitely more entertaining than any presidential debate. |
