Here is some of the continuing email argument between my brother and me about the presidential election and the war.
DATE: 2004-10-10 00:48:50
FROM: Seward, Jeff
TO: John Seward
This is a long NYT magazine piece that gives a very interesting account of what Kerry’s real foreign policy orientation would be as president. Sounds convincing. You won’t find it very attractive, I imagine, but I did.
Kerry’s Undeclared War
October 10, 2004
By MATT BAI
John Kerry has a thoughtful, forward-looking theory about
terrorism and how to fight it. But can it resonate with
Americans in the post-9/11 world?
DATE: 2004-10-10 12:33:26
FROM: john seward
TO: Jeff and Maria Seward
It’s good to get a glimpse into Kerry’s real foreign policy position,
but do I think that the war on terror is similar to the war on drugs?
No, I don’t. Do you? The drug cartels are not suicidal, they have no
grand plan to restore the caliphate. They’re just in it for the money.
They are not seeking to acquire WMD. They have no intention of
setting off a nuke in an American city. American cities are their
market. They are not being harbored or supported by rogue
nation-states. I see very little similarity, and even if I did, the
war on drugs is hardly a successful model. It’s conceivable to me that
Kerry would be in a better position, and be more skilled than Bush, to
wage the war, but only if he understands that it is a war. I don’t
think the threat has been exaggerated, as Kerry apparently does. I
think that, if anything, the threat continues to be underestimated, and
that time is not on our side. I would love to be wrong, but i don’t
think I am.
DATE: 2004-10-10 23:27:26
FROM: Seward, Jeff
TO: john seward
The ways in which it is like the drug war or prostitution or organized crime, as I understand Kerry to be describing it, are several. One, you cannot eliminate it but only reduce it to tolerable levels. It is clearly way above tolerable levels now. (By the way, the Bush campaign is already gearing up an ad saying that Kerry thinks it’s just a law enforcement problem and claiming he says it’s just a ‘nuisance’ in this article. That, of course, is a lie on both counts and typical of their willingness to twist things out of context. What he says is that it has important law enforcement components, and that our goal should be to reduce it to the level of a nuisance. Radically different idea.) Second, a lot of the ways it works are similar in the way that it involves non-state actors who may or may not be receiving aid from rogue states but who are involved in very complex, hard to track down networks across national boundaries that include complex financial networks. To that degree, our experience in dealing with these other criminal networks is highly relevant. This is not news to the Bush administration, of course. I think the main difference here is that Bush still clings to the notion that the main way to deal with these terrorist groups is through attacking their state sponsors; Kerry is suggesting that it may not be that easy, that they draw much of their strength and resilience from non-state networks.
It seems to me that Kerry fully accepts the notion that it is a ‘war’ in the sense that they are willing to commit acts of war against it; the article talks about how that was Kerry’s very first, visceral response to 9/11. But it really isn’t a ‘war’ in the sense that a primarily military response to the enemy is the obvious primary means of responding to it. I believe that, if we eliminated all major state support for Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda could still thrive. At that point, there is little or nothing that massed military forces could contribute to the continuing struggle against it. Special ops groups could be relevant, and Kerry has proposed doubling the level of such forces. But the struggle long-term, after the supporting states issue has been dealt with to the maximum feasible, is going to be more of an ideological, cultural struggle in which we manage to persuade the great majority of Muslims in the world that the US is not the Great Satan and that they have real, non-terrorist opportunities to construct better lives for their societies and for themselves that the US is helping to make possible.
This same argument, it seems to me, broke out at the beginning of the Cold War. George Kennan’s original ‘containment’ argument was not centered on a military response to the Soviet Union (although he understood perfectly well that it required a military dimension). He saw us as involved in a long-term competition that was primarily economic, political, and cultural that would eventually cause the moral collapse of communism. People like Paul Nitze tended to militarize the ‘containment’ doctrine and insist that we should use our economic strength to overwhelm the USSR in an arms race and even engage in agressive efforts at ‘rollback’ of communist states (a la John Foster Dulles’ early rhetoric). We’re still having that debate about the Cold War with the neocons insisting that the USSR would still be going strong if Reagan hadn’t threatened them with ‘Star Wars’ and threatened to win the arms race and bankrupt the economy. Liberal scholars tend to insist that Reagan was just playing the end game of a long process that we had won in much the way Kennan had originally suggested. The USSR had become a morally hollow shell that didn’t believe in itself anymore and had reached a deadend. Gorbachev, not so much Reagan, applied the coup de grace to an already dying system.
Kerry is a Kennanite on the ‘war on terror.’ Bush is a Nitzean. I think Kennan and Kerry have the better of that argument; they both have a more multidimensional understanding of American strength and the enemy’s weakness than those who want to cast this as primarily a military challenge that involves the ‘rollback’ of state sponsors of terrorism. That means they are more sensitive to the importance of mobilizing all the sources of American strength in the world (including, but not limited to, preserving and deepening our moral authority in the world) and sensitive to the way that the abuse or overuse of military force can seriously erode other important forms of US power, like our ability to mobilize allies and our attractiveness as a political and cultural alternative to extremism.
DATE: 2004-10-10 23:58:30
FROM: Seward, Jeff
TO: john seward
Well, the VP debate and the second B-K debate don’t seem to have produced any very decisive winners. That surprised me. I thought they would. I think it cuts both ways. My sense is that Kerry has now established himself as a perfectly credible president and has exposed the GOP negative attacks on him as being a caricature. At the same time, Bush has not imploded and the public is terrified still about terrorism. They don’t like the way Bush is handling Iraq, but they are convinced he will be very ‘tough’ in a direction of his choosing. They just wish he was capable of changing that direction in the face of failure. I actually think the public is probably more sympathetic to the general thrust of the direction Kerry is suggesting. But they aren’t convinced that Kerry is serious about the ‘tough’ part of that direction, and, if the debates aren’t decisive, he is still vulnerable to negative ads in the last three weeks of the campaign.
The undecideds are having a hard time finding something in these debates to make a decision with. Neither B nor K seem to have a plan for winning or extricating from the war in Iraq that seems plausible to the public and, when pressed on the subject, retreat to slogans and attacks on each other. The same is true about what they will do to cut the deficit in half. They both swear they will do it, but neither is willing to show how it can be done without abandoning core elements of their domestic policy strategies. I’m not sure the domestic debate will matter much. Kerry can clobber Bush on domestic stuff (and there is no guarantee that he will clobber him), and most undecided voters are going to make their decision on the basis of Iraq and terrorism even if they hate Bush’s domestic policy. This thing could come down to how bad the news in Iraq is the week before the election. A terrorist attack in the US between now and the election would help Bush big time, I think. A bunch of bad news about terrorism in Iraq, though, helps Kerry, it seems to me. If the terrorists want to swing the election against Bush, they would be wise to target Baghdad and not Washington.
DATE: 2004-10-11 10:08:01
FROM: john seward
TO: Seward, Jeff
The reason the terrorists are not just a nuisance is because of the
likelihood that they will sooner or later acquire WMD. If and when
they do, it will be from rogue states, like Iraq, Libya, Iran, North
Korea, Syria, and Pakistan. Iraq and Libya have been removed from the
list, as well as, at least for now, Pakistan. Once the danger of Al
Qaeda getting its hands on WMD has been eliminated, then I agree, it
becomes largely a law enforcement problem. But we’re not there yet,
and until we are, military force, threatened or actual, against
nation-states, has to be the primary strategy. Based on his record and
his rhetoric, I don’t think Kerry is up to the task. Of course the
Republicans are spinning his words and over-simplifying his position,
but I think their basic criticism of Kerry’s position is valid.
The Soviet Union was an evil empire, but it was a rational,
self-interested evil empire. That’s not what we’re dealing with now.
Suicidal maniacs are not impressed with deterrence and containment.
They’ve made a commitment to death. That’s their weapon and their
strategy.
DATE: 2004-10-11 10:29:19
FROM: john seward
TO: Seward, Jeff
Libya has abandoned its nuclear program. The Pakistani nuclear bazaar
has been shut down. Syria has backed off significantly. Saudi Arabia
has become more cooperative. Saddam’s bribery of France and Russia,
and the U.N. oil for weapons and palaces program have been exposed and
shut down. All of these developments are the result of what we are
doing in Iraq. If the neocon dream of a stable democracy in Iraq does
not come to pass (and the verdict is still very much out), the overthrow
of Saddam will still have been an astounding success, and a major
victory in the WOT. When Kerry, for purely political reasons, calls
this the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, he is being
naive, disingenuous, irresponsible, and dangerous.