Freedom's Fidelity

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Decisions and Consequences

Victor Davis Hanson, as usual, nails it:

Senator John Kerry has recently opined, "Why hasn't Osama Bin Laden been captured or killed, and how will he be destroyed before he next appears on tape to spread his disgusting message?"

Then the senator argued that bin Laden lives "because Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon didn't use American troops to do the job and instead outsourced the job of killing the world's #1 terrorist to Afghan warlords, this cold blooded killer got away."
About the same time, Senator Clinton intoned of Iran, "I believe we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations. I don't believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others and standing on the sidelines."

This liberal saber rattling is born of an understandable desire to restore their lost credibility on national security, but they have failed to notice two problems with their newfound approach.

First, if the United States did seek to engage mostly indigenous Afghan troops or Pakistani soldiers, or if we did allow Britain, France, and Germany to run negotiations with Iran, then such "outsourcing" might be better described as "multilateralism."

Such joint efforts are precisely what Democrat stalwarts like Kerry and Clinton prefer to the old "going it alone," "unilateralism," and "alienating our allies," when the United States largely handles problems itself. I have no doubt that daily missile-firing Predator sorties across Pakistan, or American planes over Iranian nuclear sites, would be met by howls from Europeans, Middle Easterners, and, at the opportune crest of popular indignation, Kerry and Clinton themselves.

Second, the new bellicose language of Kerry and Clinton suggests that both have some better ideas about how to solve the problem of catching bin Laden and stopping Iran from going nuclear. But in both cases, there are, to be frank, only awful and God-awful choices. And if either presidential aspirant were intellectually honest, then he (or she) would describe the glum alternatives in detail when trashing the present policy.

But neither is honest, only opportunistic. Unsurprisingly critics of our current course offer no serious alternative policy. When it comes to Iraq, Bush is too unilateral in 2006, but he wasn't in 2002 when both senators Kerry and Clinton voted for the use of force against Iraq? When it comes to Iran, the Bush administration is now acting too multi-laterally, and the White House is now "downplaying threats". Got all that? Me neither.

Politicians who are not the president are afforded the luxury of throwing out all sorts of rhetoric without having to face the consequences of seeing such rhetoric tested against reality.

As Hanson goes on to note, Hillary seems to be suggesting a unilateral strike without saying what that might entail.

....But the singular form of the noun "strike" is disingenuous, more so when it is cloaked in the now-squishy "no option will be taken off the table" lingo.

Instead, if she wants to raise the stakes and contemplate the consequences, the senator should at least apprise her upper-West Side constituents of what the word "strike" entails: Perhaps two or three weeks of messy bombing, shown on CNN round-the-clock. Unavoidable collateral damage served up hourly on Al Jazeera as "genocide." Missed targets, followed by worries about retribution from terrorists, now armed with nuclear waste and righteous indignation, vowing to "avenge" the infidel attack. Shiite turmoil in Iraq. Investigations into overflights of Muslim airspace. Contention over American use of Turkish, Iraqi, or Kuwaiti facilities to attack another Muslim country. Iranian-backed Hezbollah incursions into Israel. Fierce denunciations from the Russians and Chinese. Private glee and public "remorse" from the Europeans. Pulitzer-prizes and whistle-blower adulation for CIA leakers and Washington Post up-and-coming reporters. More Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky rants, reverberated by yet more shrillness from Sens. Boxer, Durbin, and Kennedy. Sky-high oil prices with the attendant conspiratorial talk about oil grabs and Zionist plotting. And more still.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Paul  permalink | |