Jewish World Review Feb. 18, 2004 / 26 Shevat, 5764
Tony Blankley
Kerry's pre-emptive war policy
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Consider the following hypothetical situation. In September 2005, the president is informed by his CIA director that they have concluded there is a one in two chance that North Korea will transfer five nuclear bombs to bin Laden within the next month, and that after the transfer, despite our best efforts, the CIA judges that it is more likely than not bin Laden will succeed in detonating at least one of them in a major American city, resulting in one to three million deaths. Should the president consider taking pre-emptive military action? And let's assume that the president is named John Kerry.
Returning from the hypothetical to the current reality, Senator Kerry and the Democrats have severely chastised President Bush for advocating and practicing pre-emptive war. In a major foreign policy address at Georgetown University last year, Mr. Kerry said that the Bush administration relies "unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations." Two months ago, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Kerry accused President Bush of being "enthralled by the idea of preemption and American military might ... " Virtually across the board, the Democratic Party's national leadership has condemned President Bush's September 2002 National Security Strategy Document, which embraces (where justified) preemptive military action.
Also, not only Mr. Kerry and the Democrats, but most of the major media have harshly criticized the president for going to war in Iraq without having proof beyond a doubt that Iraq then had weapons of mass destruction. And yet, I would hope that a notional President Kerry confronted with the hypothetical described at the beginning of this column would not stand by his and his party's purported policy on preemption and certainty.
It makes fine campaign rhetoric to proclaim that he will never "take America into war" without absolutely certain intelligence, and never to do it unilaterally or preemptively. But, as Henry Kissinger has written, the advantage that critics after the event have over statesmen is that statesmen must act with inadequate information within an inadequate time. If Senator Kerry is president in September 2005, according to the above hypothetical, even if he has busily been reforming the CIA, he would be faced with making a command decision with ambiguous intelligence assessments. Would he be willing to take a one in two bet on the lives of millions of American citizens? Those odds are pretty good if you are betting on a horse. They stink if you are betting on your constitutional duty to protect Americans from foreign attack and slaughter.
Senator Kerry appears to be an intelligent, rational person. Surely he would at least consider preemptive action on ambiguous information in the hypothetical case cited. Unless he is prepared to categorically reject such considerations, he has no principled difference with President Bush. His differences with the president are merely ones of case-by-case judgment calls and implementing skills.
It would be good if sometime during the election campaign Sen. Kerry were confronted with such a proposition. After all, this election campaign is going to be about more than individuals; it will be about first principles of governance in the age of terrorism. We know President Bush's first principles they are written by his war decisions over the last three years. The Democratic contender's principles can only be written in his words. The media should compel maximum precision in those words over the next nine months.
But regarding Bush's Iraq diplomacy, Senator Kerry has already provided some specific words at his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in December. They are revealing. In the question period after the speech, a Newsweek reporter asked whether Kerry, who faulted the president's diplomacy, could have done a better job.
"Yes. Absolutely. Let me explain," Kerry said. The senator went on to say: "Now at the time, (the French and Germans) were pushing for a second vote. But there was a way through that path ... I don't think it took a lot of skill or analysis to understand that the politics of their populations at that time were not ready to move. And any president ought to understand the politics of other people's electorates ... "He then suggested we could isolate the French and German governments by co-operating with their delays for a little while.
Was Sen. Kerry being naïve or disingenuous with that answer? Surely he knew that German Chancellor Schroeder had himself whipped-up anti American fervor to win his election. And France's Chirac riding a wave of anti-Americanism out of his own corruption scandals had already admitted the Iraqi WMD threat but categorically rejected an armed response. This was great domestic politics for both those European leaders. Sen. Kerry would have held American security hostage to fanatically anti-American French and German public opinion being cheered on by their cynically calculating leaders.
Senator Kerry's portentously delivered criticisms of President Bush's foreign policy sound credible to the credulous listener. But when one looks closely, his foreign policy strategies seem to be well described by Blanche DuBois' last words in the Tennessee Williams play, "Streetcar Named Desire": "Whoever you are I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington
and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
02/11/04: George W. Bush grand strategist?
02/04/04: Elections in the age of terror
01/28/04: There's a war on?
01/21/04: It's good that we live in ignorance of the future
01/14/04: The strange case of immigration politics
01/07/04: Funding for American presidential elections is beginning to go global
12/31/03: Make us laugh
12/24/03: War prophesies
12/17/03: Analyze this!
12/10/03: Until peace is ready to be negotiated …
12/03/03: AFL-CIO meets Monty Python
11/26/03: Republicans need to learn from the Romans
11/19/03: All of a sudden we have a responsible media?
11/12/03: To arms
11/05/03: Mayor Mike's appetite for self-destructive accusations
10/29/03: A bloody march to peace
10/22/03: Calls for a general 's head because his comments may have ruffled the feathers of our esteemed enemies!?
10/08/03: The leakers' agony
10/01/03: Managing a scandal
09/24/03: Will we have to balance our strong ethical and religious revulsion of cloning against the danger of being surpassed by a gene-manipulated super-race?
09/17/03: The skinny on the First Ladies
09/10/03: More than cynicism will be needed to defeat prez
09/03/03: Dead Man Politickin'
08/27/03: Patience is not America's long suit
08/13/03: George Will's trifecta of punitive aspirations
07/30/03: A question for the candidates: Whose side are you on?
07/23/03: When GOPers attack their leader
07/17/03: Spanish fest mirrors U.S. elections
07/09/03: On the horns of a dilemma
06/25/03: The continuing deaths of American and British soldiers in Iraq
should not be rhetorically minimized -- but sanctified
06/18/03: No reason to feel defensive about criticism of the war on terrorism
06/11/03: The Clintons self-proclaimed geniuses have no defense against the charge of cunning mendacity
06/04/03: George 'Machiavelli' Bush? Nah
05/28/03: When 'progressives' become reactionaries
05/21/03: Yes, this conservative is defending the NYTimes
05/14/03: Playing the politics of deflation
05/07/03: Only the stupid could think it'll be the economy: Comparing the Bushes
04/30/03: How to squelch increasing Iraqi distrust of America
04/25/03: Winning the war, losing the peace
04/16/03: Our own domestic Senate Republican Guard better be prepared for a grinding
04/03/03: At this human moment we need to act like humans, not just calculating analysts
04/02/03: If we could only draft Jennings' eyebrow to the cause, we wouldn't need the 4th Armored Division?
03/26/03: This war is showing the world who we really are
03/19/03: Time for America to laugh at itself
03/13/03: They're coming out of the woodwork: Russert, Buchanan and Moran
03/05/03: Franc-tireur
02/26/03: World history is shifting under our feet --- even our most
experienced statesmen are, effectively, inexperienced
02/19/03: The shame! We've mischaracterized the French
02/12/03: Schroeder and Chirac will be disproportionately undercutting their interests
02/05/03: We need to rise above our temporary anger and seek to preserve our bonds with our European cousins
01/29/03: Who is President Bush's stupidest opponent: Saddam Hussein or Tom Daschle?
01/22/03: We call them our European cousins --- but I demand a DNA test
01/16/03: Dems bare partisan teeth
01/02/03: Before the cheering must come the struggle
12/27/02: Long ago and far away
12/18/02: Be glad that Gore's gone?
12/11/02: What fun! A titanic, once-in-a-century partisan battle royal is in the offing
12/04/02: Kerry atwitter
11/27/02: The unThankful list
11/20/02: First the scare, then the yawn
11/13/02: It's going to be a long two years for Lefty Pelosi and the Frisco Dems
11/06/02: Technology: A pollster's worst enemy --- thank goodness!
10/31/02: Watch this election's Wheel of Fate
10/23/02: The Ari and Colin Show: Politics has never been, well, more vaudeville-like
10/09/02: Bush beats drums of realism
10/02/02: Needed: A political chromatograph to detect any true statements in the public domain
09/25/02: Buchanan's new mag
09/18/02: There are many forms of peace
09/11/02: The imperial period of our history starts
09/04/02: Memo to Powell: In periods of upheaval, the refusal to act gives aid to those bent on destruction
08/30/02: Logging old growth is a sham issue
© 2002, Creators Syndicate
|