Leadership Matters

Michael Totten makes the hawkish case for Kerry. It's pretty weak, as Totten himself admits:

A hawkish case for Kerry is a tough case to make. He's a weak candidate. There is no getting around it.

To see the benefits of a Kerry Administration you have to look past Kerry himself. If he is elected a critical cultural and political shift will dramatically change the way the Democratic Party behaves no matter what he actually does while in office.

The argument, in brief, is that if John Kerry is elected, the anti-war idiots will basically go home and be quiet, as they were during the Clinton administration, and let Kerry do whatever he wants. Since it is inevitable that we'll be attacked again, Kerry will be forced by events to respond in some way.

OK, this is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far. First, I don't think we want to be making political decisions based on whether or not the anarchists and anti-globalization guys are in the streets. There's a technical term for where that leads: mob rule.

Worse, it is a huge assumption to make that John Kerry would react robustly to an attack. While I don't believe that a major attack would be ignored, or even a relatively minor attack in the current climate, by a putative Kerry administration, I do not trust their instincts to respond adequately.

After all, Bill Clinton could be said to have responded robustly to the embassy attacks: he attacked some of bin Laden's training camps and a possibly al Qaeda-related chemical plant which may have been producing chemical weapons. (I'm certainly willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt in such a case.) Further, Operation Desert Fox was a quite robust response to the provocations Saddam was making in the no-fly zones and by pushing out the UN inspectors who had been disarming him. Yet neither of these responses was adequate, as has been determined with the passage of time.

Worse, Kerry's public statements (to the extent you can extract a coherent narrative from them) are basically that the Iraq campaign was deeply wrong and the best thing we can do is to run away and give lip service to the new Iraqi government. Handling the War on Terror as an intelligence and law enforcement matter, and handling Iraq as not our problem, will not advance our security one bit; if anything they open us up to further attacks.

And worse, Kerry has ruled out pre-emption as a strategy for dealing with emerging issues. How, then, does he plan on handling Iran and preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons? Would he depend on the UN, after its ineffectiveness and irrelevance were demonstrated in Iraq and after the Oil for Food scandals? Or would he depend on the Europeans, whose reputations in foreign affairs also suffered from a deep unseriousness on Iraq, and who are similarly entangled in Iranian oil interests? Or, worst of all, would he depend on the Iranian Ayatollahs, who declared themselves our enemies decades ago and continually since then?

Frankly, I cannot conceive of a case where Kerry's response to an attack would be better than Bush's; nor can I determine a way in which his preventative approach would be more effective; nor can I determine a sequence of events that would somehow overcome the proven incompetence of the Democrats at handling international crises. This incompetence goes far beyond Kerry, deep into the heart of the Democrats' foreign policy thinking: the brain trust of the Democrats on foreign policy have moved out of the Democrat Party and into the Republican. There's a collective name for them, too: neocons.

The Democrats don't have a bench on this issue, which is why the last administration ended up with Madeleine Albright as SecState and Les Aspin as SecDef. If the best hawkish case for Kerry is to believe that a weak-charactered President and an inexperienced and (if Kerry's campaign staff picks are representative) sycophantic Cabinet will suddenly develop competence and a backbone when faced with a crisis, there's no real case to make.

UPDATE: See also the comments at Michael Totten's personal blog.

UPDATE: Actually, I should be clear. I think Totten did the Kerry campaign an excellent service. This article is actually the best case I've yet seen for Kerry as an acceptable candidate. I just don't buy it.

Posted by Jeff at September 20, 2004 01:55 PM | Link Cosmos