Game On Now For National Security Debate Posted by David Schanzer

I am pleased to be invited as a guest blogger for the next three weeks.  I'd like to discuss what I think about a lot -- how progressives can present sensible and strong national security policies to the electorate. 

My current concern is that there is sense that the Iraq debacle will be such a drag on Republicans that progressives will win the national security debate simply by being anti-war.  I don't think this is correct. 

2008 is not 2006.  There is a big difference in the public's mind about putting a new party in control of the Congress and electing the commander-in-chief.  The 2006 election was a protest vote against Bush's war policies and a response to congressional corruption and lack of oversight of an incompetent executive branch.  The hurdle that John Kerry could not surmount in the public's mind will still be there for the next Democratic candidate for President -- "Will he or she do what it takes to keep us safe?"  The Iraq war has lowered this bar somewhat for Democrats, but it still remains higher for Democrats than Republicans at least until Democrats win a post-9/11 election.   

With the Iraq albatross around their neck, Republicans will be even more eager to play the "weak on national security" card against Democrats.  This was on clear display last week as Rudy Giuliani took great glee (and got rave reviews in conservative circles), for taunting Democrats for "not understand[ing] the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us" and claiming "America will be safer with a Republican president."

Unfortunately, the Democratic frontrunners did little to dispel this notion during the first presidential candidates' debate.  Obama chose to talk about the Hurricane Katrina response when asked the first thing he would do after a terrorist attack on U.S. soil   And, when Brian Williams served up the Giuliani quotes on a silver platter to Clinton, she did not discuss how to defeat al Qaeda or combat the spread of the global jihadist movement, but instead expounded on the virtues of greater port and subway security. 

This isn't going to cut it in a general election.   Because of the still lingering security gap Democrats face, progressives cannot wait until the general election to start speaking convincingly about the threats the nation faces and how to deal with them.  Promising to end the Iraq war (as if that could actually be accomplished), will not necessarily be enough to defeat a Republican opponent who is not Bush and will most certainly have his own plan to wind down the war. 

Now is the time to get our game day faces on for the national security debate.   And we will have to do better than our congressional leaders and presidential candidates have done in this regard since the election.  In my posts over the next three weeks, I'll be discussing some ideas about what I think progressives ought to be saying to prevail in this debate. 

Comments

[Zathras]

Just to identify a point of comparison, the man who first made the word "progressive" a force in national politics was Theodore Roosevelt, who was in what we would today call foreign policy and national security affairs right up to his eyeballs. His problem in this area eventually became that people feared his insistent calls for preparedness would get us involved in war with Germany; the calls were rejected, and his political opponents congratulated themselves for having thwarted Roosevelt's bellicosity -- and swiftly found themselves drawn, wholly unprepared, to World War One.

The point is that a Democratic Presidential candidate will have a hard time coming up with magic words that make the American public confident that national security is in good hands if that candidate has no record of great interest in national security. The leading Democratic candidates do not, in fact, have such a record; there are no Roosevelts among them. This isn't to say their views on specific issues will always be seen as wrong, only that they will have a hard time gaining most Americans' trust.

I don't, in fact, agree that this is necessarily a fatal weakness for a Democratic candidate in 2008. The Bush administration has gotten us in a very bad position in Iraq and elsewhere, and does not show signs of being able to retrieve that position within the next eighteen months. But if I am right, and a Democrat gets elected who is really most interested in other things, that Democrat will lose support very rapidly if problems continue in the national security field. He (or she) will be immediately suspected of not knowing what he is doing, and the charge will most likely be true.

To minimize the risk, Democrats could look beyond the leading candidates. Biden, Dodd and Richardson may be a little shallow in their knowledge of the defense budget, but at least they have done some work in the foreign affairs field. I don't necessarily trust their judgment, but the point is arguable, and we're not reduced to listening for magic words.

[Hmph]

Instead of talking about what progressives should say, why don't you just, y'know, actually say it yourself?

Sniping at Democrats by Democrats has become a cottage industry. Instead of perpetuating this Republican frame/smear by talking about the failings of Democrats, why not talk about what you/the candidates/we will do (and in fact are doing) differently and better than Republicans?

If I wanted to read the proclamations of Beinart-ism circa 2003, I'd go to the New Republic. Your bio indicates that you really know this stuff, so why declare a pox on both houses when Democrats are better on this stuff than Republicans? Saying the right things is helpful; talking about how Democrats will only win if they use words you like because everybody thinks they're soft reinforces conservative hit-job talking points.

[Jim Rockford]

This is why Democrats will lose, and IMHO lose rather decisively in the Presidential Election of 2008 barring some monumental mis-step by a Republican opponent.

Saying "Bush's Iraq conduct is bad" is not enough. People already know that and want neither an unending commitment to Iraq nor handing the place over to Iran and Al Qaeda (which is what the surrender deadline consists of).

Americans want something DIFFERENT from Bush, but not what Dems have on offer. Unfortunately the Moveon.org, Daily Kos, MyDD etc. lunatics that run the Democratic Party have taken it's already inherent weaknesses, i.e. profound pacifism to the point of idiotic appeasement, and morphed it into sheer lunacy.

Over 30% of Dem voters believe in lunatic conspiracy theories about 9/11: it was GWB, or the CIA, or the "Jewwwwwsssssss!!!!!" etc. You could find that lunatic idiocy in any Arab nation.

BOTH Al Qaeda and Iran are committed to our destruction. Both Khomeni and bin Laden have long argued that Americans are weak and kill enough of us and we will surrender. Zawahari has just announced the Dem's Surrender Bill (which btw will be a devastating Lee Atwater style attack add) proves his point that Al Qaeda has "already" driven the US out of Iraq and will soon destroy us.

Given that over 40 nations possess fissile material for nuclear weapons, and Pakistan's slow-motion slide into Al Qaeda's take-over (read Bill Roggio's Fourth Rail reporting on the abject surrender by Musharraf to the Red Mosque on imposition of Sharia Law and hand-over to the Taliban of most of the NW Frontier), this is not a trivial concern.

People understood that under the rules of engagement in Vietnam (fear of Chinese entry ala Korea or nuclear war with Russia) winning was not really possible and losing could be mitigated by Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia's loathing of Chinese and Vietnamese peoples. Given that Iran and Al Qaeda both argue that they can destroy the US and will (at very little cost due to "American Cowardice"), and both will soon have nuclear weapons, this is not Vietnam. Not 1968 or even 1975.

Any Democrat to be successful must have a logical and common-sense approach to:

A. Deny Iran and Al Qaeda control of Iraq.
B. Deter both from nuking us.

Since the only thing that will work, be logical, and appeal to common sense is the realistic threat of overwhelming force (i.e. "I'll nuke em pre-emptively if I have to") and the ENTIRE Dem Party courtesy of Moveon.org (protested against bombing AFGHANISTAN two days after 9/11) and Daily Kos etc. this is a non-starter.

Reps got a wake-up call on Iraq (current policy isn't working for most Americans) and Dems vastly over-estimated the desire of Americans to swallow defeat by Al Qaeda and Iran. [If they'd wanted that Dem victory margins would have been overwhelming.]

I would *like* a competitive Dem candidate for the Presidency, but I don't see that happening due to Moveon and the rest. Wild Card: if Al Qaeda attacks us successfully, GWB *might* be able to blame new restrictions on his ability to wiretap terrorists and interrogate them. If so Dems could be painted to "own" that given the great amount of concern they have over KSM's waterboarding and the like. Believe me Rove has those quotes on ice somewhere.

[Don Bacon]

A progressive foreign policy?
Well we'll see what develops.
I suspect it'll be the traditional Democratic policy of US world hegemony, recently adopted and perverted by the neocons, with a new dress on and called "progressive".
It's the American way. The country was built on land taken from others, and then extended across the waters to places like Haiti, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and The Philippines.
Two factors drove the policy: power and money
Participation in two European wars and an Asian war jacked up profits, but then things went badly in Korea and Vietnam, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not to worry, the money angle is now paramount. Corporate profits have doubled and tripled in the last four or five years, the stock market is at an all-time high and people are learning new ways to make blood money. The traditional policy and profit connection between the Pentagon and the armaments industry in hardware has been extended to services, where military and security support services are contracted out by people who have, or will, work for those same companies. The two most notorious examples are Richard Cheney and George Tenet who have made millions in blood money from taxpayer-funded corporations they're connected with.
Iran, sandwiched between two countries the US now occupies, is next on the imperialistic horizon. Clinton and Edwards are screaming for a military assault, and Obama says that Iran is a threat to the US and that "America is the last, best hope of Earth". The Chinese, Greeks, Brazilians and others who look at the Iraq fiasco may have a different opinion. Regarding Iran, it is a threat--to the purported US hegemony in the Middle East dating from the Carter Doctrine.
The "threats the nation facers"? The threat of terrorism, now exacerbated by our anti-Muslim forign policy, has been around forever and requires intelligence and policing. Warfare, as we are seeing, merely increases the threat of terrorism.
A truly progressive foreign policy? One in which the US basically minds its own business and employs diplomacy, not war, like the other 187 countries in the world except Israel? We'll see. I suspect that the only real relief from a policy awash in power and money, with defense expenditures now approaching a trillion dollars a year at a time when the U.S. is not thteatened by any other country, I suspect that the only real hope for a progressive foreign policy based on diplomacy and not war is a return of the Rockefeller Republicans.
Of course if ones' aim is to use propaganda to whip up public anxiety in order to win an election then one has a completely different agenda.

[BobN]

Welcome, to DA, David. You're just what this blog needs--another Neocon Lite.

[Jerry Mayer]

Hey, Rockford--got a citation on that 30% of Dem voters who believe that GWB or the CIA or the Jews were responsible for 9-11? And before we get all high and mighty about stupid Arab publics and what they believe about 9-11, I can send you cites that in the two years after 9-11, sometimes majorities, strong majorities of Americans believed that 1) Iraqis were among the 9-11 hijackers and 2) that Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning. Talk about mass stupidity.
I think if the Democrats follow your advice, and come out and say, we will preemptively nuke Iran if it goes nuclear, they only win the election if they push the Republicans to even greater levels of craziness. But as a responsible national security policy, that is dumb six ways to Sunday. You commit the US to take a nearly suicidal action which would forever alienate us from civilized nations. The US has managed to survive in a world in which Pakistan has nukes. We should do everything in our power to make sure the mullahs of Tehran don't get nukes, and we should take nothing off the table. But your proposal, that the Dems promise war preemptively, is a disaster as a policy, and quite likely a disaster politically. Suppose they get nukes...and we don't bomb them, because we realize that bombing them would be worse than their possession of them? America's credibility approaches the zero point.
A nuclear armed Islamic nation is already here. Nuking the next one will only ensure that Pakistan radicalizes further. And then...we bomb them? And then who's next?

[David Tomlin]

According to a poll done last August by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University, 36% of all Americans think 'it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."'

I'd put myself in the 'somewhat likely' cohort.

[David Tomlin]

Sorry, I forgot the link.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/279827_conspiracy02ww.html

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The Bush administration has gotten us in a very bad position in Iraq and elsewhere, and does not show signs of being able to retrieve that position within the next eighteen months.

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The Democratic front runners did little to dispel this notion during the first presidential candidates' debate.

[Amy Laurent]

Dodd and Richardson may be a little shallow in their knowledge of the defense budget, but at least they have done some work in the foreign affairs field!!

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The presidential primary season ends with the economy uppermost in voters' minds, but national security issues are never far away.With the Iraq albatross around their neck, Republicans will be even more eager to play the "weak on national security" card against Democrats.Good thinking.

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