After a depressingly long spell in which the presidential campaign was dominated by trivia -- who said what about whose lesbian daughter when, and so forth -- the Bush team has done us all a favor by releasing an ad that refocuses things on a serious topic. If John Kerry becomes president, you see, you're likely to be eaten by wolves.
Well, not really. The wolves are metaphorical -- they're terrorists. And the ad isn't so much serious as it is dishonest and absurd. But it's a step in the right direction. It turns out that "John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By $6 billion." All this happened "even after the first terrorist attack on America."
You might think that refers to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. If you were paying closer attention, you might even think it refers to the actual first terrorist attack on America: a suicide operation against U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. It turns out, however, to refer to the bombing attempt at the World Trade Center in the early 1990s. Even after that attack, at a time when Democrats and Republicans alike were looking to cut Cold War-era defense spending to help close the massive deficits generated by Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, Kerry voted to trim the intelligence budget. His proposal didn't pass. Instead, the Senate Republicans passed a somewhat different set of intelligence cuts.
This, according to George W. Bush, "would have weakened America's defenses, and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."
This would be a solid point if our main national-security threat came from wolves. Wolves kill other animals because they get hungry and they need to hunt to eat. But they'd just as soon not work inordinately hard to get their food. So, like other predators, they tend to go after the weakest target available. If you're the toughest caribou (or whatever) in the woods, the wolves will probably leave you alone. Unfortunately for us, our problem is less wolves than it is terrorists. And terrorists don't work that way. After all, whatever state the American defense and intelligence establishments were in on September 11, they certainly weren't the weakest in the world. Indeed, they were the strongest. But al-Qaeda hit us anyway -- not because its members were looking for an easy kill to get some dinner but because they regard the United States as waging war against the Islamic world and intend to fight us no matter how strong we get.
But making a reasonable argument wasn't really the point of the ad. Instead, it's intended to refer to a classic spot the Reagan campaign used against Walter Mondale in 1984 called "If There is a Bear." The narrator asks you to imagine a dispute about whether or not there's a bear in the woods and, if there is, how dangerous the bear is. "Since no one can really be sure who is right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?" It was an unusually sophisticated point for a political ad, and it made a great deal of sense. Faced with uncertainty about future needs, it makes sense to err on the side of caution, because the risk of underestimating the scale of the problem is significant. As it turned out, the Cold War hawks were wrong and the doves were largely right that by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union was not much of a security threat. And yet higher-than-necessary defense spending didn't do an enormous amount of harm (and would have done even less had it not been for the orgy of tax cutting Reagan simultaneously implemented), but if things had turned out the other way and America had spent too little, the harm could have been dire.
The general point Reagan was making still stands today. That's why it makes sense to propose, for example, to double America's overall Special Forces capabilities over the next few years. We don't know what kind of missions may arise in the future, but it's important to know that if targets do emerge, we won't miss them due to lack of competent forces. It makes a lot of sense to make this proposal part of a larger plan to add 40,000 new active-duty troops to the military, which is currently overextended on multiple fronts. Especially pressed are civil-affairs units, which play a leading role in post-conflict situations such as we have in Iraq or Afghanistan, and would play a significant role if our forces needed to be deployed to help a foreign government contain a terrorist problem existing inside its own borders. A smart candidate would propose adding more civil-affairs personnel to both the regular Army and the Reserves. With the active-duty military thus strengthened, the National Guard would spend less time abroad. A wise candidate would propose seizing this opportunity to re-orient the National Guard to homeland-security tasks -- a 21st-century version of its original mission (under the guise of state militias) to defend American soil while the regular military focuses on projecting power abroad.
It's possible, of course, that these new capacities won't get used. But it's not crazy to think that they might be. And the wealthiest nation on earth can easily afford to invest in them. But not if we're determined to maniacally cut taxes ever lower while blowing more than $1 trillion on privatizing Social Security. Unfortunately, the president doesn't seem to have paid much attention to Reagan's ad except to note that it involved an animal. That's why Bush isn't the candidate proposing these things and Kerry is.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
