On August 5, speaking to the UNITY conference of minority journalists, John Kerry said, "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history."
It seems to have been an ad lib, and, in retrospect, not an especially wise one. Still, the sentiment clearly expressed therein is a fairly anodyne one. Republicans will surely deny that a Kerry administration would, in fact, fight a more effective war on terrorism, but they can hardly deny that it's a worthy goal -- and one would have to drink a lot of Kook-Aid indeed to believe that there is no room for improvement over current policies.
Thus Kerry sought to join a debate -- which candidate will be more effective in combating terrorism -- that could prove highly inconvenient for the Bush administration. The president's main contribution to the war on terrorism, after all, has been to put the struggle against al-Qaeda on hold in favor of invading Iraq. We did this because Saddam Hussein might use his nuclear weapons program to build a bomb that, via his ties to al-Qaeda, would be deployed against the United States. Truly that would have been a serious security threat -- except for the small matter that the nuclear program was nonexistent, and that the "connections" to al-Qaeda were so vague as to be meaningless.
Meanwhile, terrorism is up around the world, al-Qaeda's leadership escaped our grasp in Afghanistan, "homeland security" is a joke, anti-proliferation policy is an ineffectual mess, and the global jihad network has metastasized. One of the president's counterterrorism czars resigned in disgust at the president's incompetence and wrote a book denouncing him. The czar's deputy resigned in disgust at the president's incompetence and became Kerry's chief national-security adviser. The leader of the CIA's campaign against Osama bin Laden in the 1990s didn't resign in disgust, but he has written a book denouncing the president's incompetence. The experts, it seems, think there's room for improvement.
This is not the debate the Republican Party wants to have. Rather, its members would like to run against a fantasy Democrat of their own creation -- a candidate whose plan is to simply surrender in the war on terrorism, not the one whose team is led by defectors from Bush's failed approach.
So what's a GOP hack to do? Why, what GOP hacks always do: make things up. Hence the August 5 "memorandum to opinion leaders" penned by Gary Schmitt of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. According to Schmitt, Kerry "told an audience in Washington, D.C. today that if elected he would wage 'a more sensitive war on terror,'" which is plainly not what Kerry meant. Nevertheless, by stringing this together with a couple more selective quotations, Schmitt was able to reach the conclusion that, secretly, Kerry "does not really favor pre-emptive military strikes against terrorists." It's a strange line of criticism against a man whose stated goal is "to get the terrorists before they get us." Stranger still, President Bush has never launched a preemptive military strike against terrorists; no, he launched a retaliatory strike against the Taliban and a preventative war against Iraq. Misquotation, it seems, can produce some pretty interesting results.
Jonah Goldberg picked up the ball and ran with it the next day, basing an entire column on misquoting Kerry à la Schmitt. Things died down a bit then and it looked, for once, like a spurious line of attack would die the ignominious death it so richly deserved. Optimists, though, hadn't counted on the Cheney factor: The vice president gave the bogus story an additional bounce with an August 12 broadside against Kerry, misquoting the senator and noting that "a sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek chemical nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more. The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity."
Now "Vice President Says Political Opponent is Wrong" is a bit of a dog-bites-man story, so you might think the press would report the more interesting "Vice President Misrepresents Political Opponent's Remarks" angle. But no, the nation's major papers dutifully relayed Cheney's attack and relegated response from the Kerry campaign far down in the stories where many readers will miss it. What's more, none of them felt compelled to take the rudimentary step of reporting what Kerry actually said. After all, as The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung helpfully explained last week, the press is "inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power" -- a strange understanding of the Fourth Estate's proper role that is perhaps best explained by Post Executive Editor Len Downie's bizarre theory that the content of media coverage is unrelated to policy outcomes.
In the real world, this stuff matters. Just as the vice president says, the United States never won a war by sitting around the campfire with the enemy and singing "Kumbaya." Nor, however, are wars won by macho posturing and chest-thumping. The Wehrmacht was plenty tough and not unduly concerned with sensitivity, but it was beaten nonetheless -- not through grand displays of virility but through superior manpower, materiel, and strategy. Suicide terrorists who train in remote mountains and are led by a man who seems happy to spend years hiding out in a cave aren't going to be any more impressed by our toughness than by our sensitivity. Counterterrorism as pissing contest is a struggle we're bound to lose.
But while we can't out-tough the terrorists, we can think of smart ways to deny them access to nuclear weapons, cut off their funding, prevent the emergence of failed states where they can train, undercut the appeal of their recruiting drives, and better coordinate our intelligence to locate and kill them. Unfortunately, the president isn't interested in doing any of those things. Instead, his latest initiative was to designate as director of central intelligence a political hack who doesn't think that nuclear weapons are especially dangerous and is, for a person who's supposedly been performing congressional oversight of the CIA for several years now, oddly ill-informed about the state of North Korea's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
I believe we can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terrorism that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history. And because we can, we should. If the president disagrees, he should tell us why.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
