By William M. Arkin
The Los Angeles Times
June 21, 2004
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry got a
boost last week when 27 retired U.S. diplomats, admirals and four-star
generals, including a number of prominent Republican appointees from former Bush
and Reagan administrations, publicly urged Americans to vote President Bush out
of office.
They did not explicitly endorse Kerry, but the old warriors
and insiders find themselves far more comfortable with the Massachusetts senator
than with Bush when it comes to their favorite subject. Not only has Kerry
firmly surrounded himself with Clinton standard-bearers on foreign policy and
defense, but he has espoused his own brand of warmongering.
I would love
nothing better than to see Bush out of office, but Kerry is a gloomy
alternative. Worse yet, in the short term, his "me too, only better" approach
to the war on terrorism could actually serve to make the United States less
safe.
Kerry's defense plans might be a slam-dunk for the atherosclerotic
set in the natio nal security community, but here is the alternative that the
senator offers to Democrats and people of liberal values in November:
• no plan to withdraw from Iraq, not even the kind of "secret plan"
the late President Nixon offered on Vietnam, and no change in
Afghanistan;
• continuation of Bush's preemption policy;
• a larger military with many more special operations units,
plus accelerated spending on "transformation," which in today's defense jargon
means creation of greater capability to intervene around the world on short
notice;
• a new domestic intelligence agency and a vastly
beefed-up homeland security program.
Kerry's defense advisors see much
of this as innocuous rhetoric to protect the Democratic candidate's flanks from
traditional conservative accusations of being soft on national security. At the
same time, it represents a calculated strategy to "keep your head low and
win."
In his stump speeches, Kerry stresses a spirited dose of
alliances, the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a
return to what he calls an "America that listens and leads again." He roundly
criticizes the Bush administration on Iraq, Afghanistan and homeland security.
He promises as commander in chief that he will never ask the troops "to fight a
war without a plan to win the peace."
All that is to the good. Yet when
Kerry describes the contemporary world, and the challenges that the U.S. faces,
he sounds just like the president, the vice president and Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld. Terrorism, he says, "present[s] the central
national security challenge of our generation." Preventing terrorists from
"gaining weapons of mass murder" is his No. 1 security goal, and Kerry says he
would strike first if any attack "appears imminent." The senator promises to
"use military force to protect American interests anywhere in the world,
whenever necessary." On May 27 in Seattle, he promised to "take th e fight to
the enemy on every continent" (I guess that probably doesn't include
Antarctica).
Beyond rhetoric, Kerry proposes to add 40,000 troops to the
Army and to double the "Special Forces capability to fight the war on terror,"
presumably jumping from the current 48,000 to 96,000.
On homeland
security, there isn't a constituency that Kerry doesn't pander to. National
Guard, local government, police, firefighters, public health services, even
AmeriCorps — the modest domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps — all
should be beefed up, he says, to "protect America." He even proposes a new
"community defense service" of homeland security wardens à la civil defense
in the Cold War, which would surely be the looniest club that ever
existed.
Even his serious proposals are problematic. The homeland
security plan is defeatist and out of control. On the Army, though it sounds as
if adding active-duty troops would solve the current overburden in Iraq and
relieve the National Gua rd and reserves, the reality is that adding 40,000 to
the end strength would take two or more years, according to one of Kerry's own
advisors. Special Forces are even more difficult and time-consuming to
manufacture.
But the biggest problem is that the basic premise of
military growth is that we will continue to fight at the Bush pace. And relying
more on special operations? That's the Rumsfeld doctrine: fast and light,
covert and unaccountable. But anyone who is not an administration toady must
recognize by now that ninja magicians can do only so much and that the cost of
not having enough regular soldiers on the ground is a theme that runs from Tora
Bora and the postwar insurgency in Iraq to the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal.
Special-ops troops tend to get you involved in, well, special
operations. Making them a centerpiece of U.S. military planning and force
structures builds a bias into the decision-making process that favors covert
action and the unfortunate belief that we can prevail over te rrorism by killing
terrorists faster than they are recruited.
Kerry proposes these buildups
because he accepts the central premise of the Bush administration: Terrorists
are so threatening that we must sacrifice our liberties, change our government
and military and, ultimately, our way of life in order to fight them.
In
this 60th anniversary year of D-day, I find it astounding that anyone could be
so callous and ahistorical as to point to the threat we faced from a Nazi foe
that truly had the capacity to destroy our way of life and compare it to a few
thousand or even a few tens of thousands of terrorists who, at their worst, can
do no more than threaten to panic Western society with random bloodshed. It is
equally absurd to compare the war on terrorism to the Cold War, when the United
States could literally have been destroyed by thousands of nuclear weapons (a
possibility, though not a threat, that persists today from Russian and Chinese
nukes).
Challenge the Hysteria
Intelligent people, and I
assume that includes Kerry, must begin to challenge the basic premise behind the
post-9/11 hysteria. Terrorists may be a growing threat, and we may be
unprepared to deal with the challenges they pose, but they have no hope of
destroying our society. Only we can do that.
By overstating the threat
and overreacting to incidents, we not only give terrorists exactly what they
seek, but we seem to create a panicked environment that clouds our judgment when
it comes to intelligence, propels us into military adventures abroad and
distorts our priorities at home.
Americans should demand a certain
level of competence and accountability from their government to protect them,
but the Bush (and Kerry) approach is not securing a peaceful future. In fact,
the entire war on terrorism, based on the false assumption that it is a war for
our survival, seems to be feeding hatred and aggravating the fault
lines.
We need to rethink this problem, pure and simple, and Kerry needs
to unburden himself from the conventional wisdom.
Otherwise, for many in
the Islamic world, Kerry's adoption of the Bush administration's worldview and
strategies merely reinforces the idea that the United States is indeed the
problem, that there is a clash of civilizations that only might can resolve and
that Islam will be an American target no matter who is president. If reducing
terrorist attacks is the goal, I can't imagine more dangerous perceptions to
foster.
The United States would be safer with a Democratic political
platform that demonstrated fundamental disagreement about our current course.
It's tough in a campaign season to stop worrying about the polling
booth and start thinking afresh about national security. So here is one final
argument against Kerry's muscle-bound "me-too-ism," an argument rooted in
domestic, not foreign, policy concerns: For young people energized by the
Howard Dean campaign, for liberals and the silent majority, Kerry's carbon-copy
campaign conveys th e impression that political involvement doesn't matter.
Whether you back Kerry, stay home, vote for Ralph Nader or stick with the Bush
team, the result will be the same.
If revitalizing American democracy
and reinforcing its most precious values are our key objectives, I can't imagine
a worse message for a Democratic presidential candidate to be sending.