A Profound Ignorance

There’s been a lot of coverage over John Kerry’s recent comments in The New York Times, but it is an issue that deserves such coverage. I’ve long harped on what I see as a profound ignorance about the nature of this war on the part of John Kerry, and what he says in this interview only cements that position. In his words:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. ”As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Here’s the problem with that worldview: terrorism isn’t like prostitution or gambling. It’s not a law enforcement problem. It is an act of war. An attitude of tolerance is the most singularly and destructive attitude one can have on this war.

The forces of Islamofascist terrorism have one goal: the destruction of the West and the imposition of shari’a worldwide. A hooker isn’t going to murder hundreds of schoolchildren like the terrorists did in Beslan. Gamblers don’t take down buildings. Such a comparison is not only profoundly and deeply idiotic, but also indicative of an attitude that is antithetical to victory in this war. Gambling doesn’t look like this. Prostitution doesn’t threaten the lives of every single American with nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.

Whether John Kerry chooses to acknowledge it or not, terrorism does and always will threaten our lives every day until we diminish this threat. Kerry is right in a sense, in that we can never fully end the threat of terrorism, but as Eugene Volokh quite astutely notes, what Kerry is calling for is a horrendously flawed analogy:

I see Kerry’s point: Terrorists, unlike Nazi Germany or the USSR, can’t be entirely defeated, because there’ll always be the possibility that some more springing up. We can end the war on some particular terrorists by killing them all or getting them to stop, but we can’t end the war on terrorism generally that way. The best we can hope for is that there’ll be a lot fewer terrorist attacks. That’s certainly an important point, and it’s worth keeping in mind.

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, “escort services” are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It’s true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren’t “threatening the fabric of [American] life,” but that’s because they never threatened it that much in the first place. One can live in a nation with millions of acts of prostitution or illegal gambling per year or per day. There are good reasons for simply calling off those wars altogether. Surely the strategy for dealing with terrorism must be very different, in nearly every conceivable way, from the strategy for dealing with prostitution or illegal gambling. (Maybe if Kerry had simply compared terrorism to organized crime, the analogy might have been a bit closer. But even there, it would be pretty distant, and in any event “organized crime” seemed in his quote to be a way of characterizing certain kinds of prostitution or illegal gambling offenses — he didn’t even refer to the more harmful forms of organized crime.)

The issue here is one of attitude. John Kerry thinks that terrorism should be tolerated, while George W. Bush wants to ensure that anyone who attempts to harm us gets blown to hell, brought to justice, or trapped in some remote hellhole until such time as the other two can be applied. There isn’t even a remotely apt comparison between the two, and it is irresponsible in the extreme for Kerry to countenance such a comparison.

The attitudes being expressed here are the attitudes of a typical Boston brahmin who comes from a Foreign Service father. It is as Roger L. Simon points out – John Kerry’s foreign policy is to return to the status quo of the 1990s when al-Qaeda was gathering strength and launching an ever-more ambitious series of attacks against the United States, finally culminating on September 11, 2001. As The Belmont Club finds in their analysis:

Bai’s article reminds me of one of those products which are described on the packaging as being a new space age, high-technology, portable illumination aid which on closer inspection turns out to be a flashlight. When the newfangled description of terrorism as a “blended threat” is subtracted, the entire program consists of the policies of the late 1990s. Bilateral talks with North Korea. Oslo. G-8. The United Nations. Warrants of arrest. Extradition requests. Not a single new element in the entire package, except the fancy rationale. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is anything objectionable about a flashlight, but a more candid characterization of Kerry’s proposals is not a voyage into uncharted waters so much as return to the world of September 10; in Kerry’s words “back to the place we were”. It has the virtue of producing known results, and suffers only from the defect that those results do not include being able to prevent massive attacks on the American mainland.

At the end of the day, all it takes is one lucky shot.

One vial of anthrax released in the DC metro…

A few grams of smallpox released at Denver International…

One bomb in a busy school…

One nuclear weapon in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

All it takes is one attempt that succeeds and hundreds, thousands, or even millions are dead. For us to play defense, we have to deflect every attempt they make. Even if we abolished all privacy and freedom in this country, we couldn’t do it. We’ll never be safe unless we’re on offense.

It’s clear John Kerry doesn’t want to play offense. It’s increasingly and overwhelmingly clear that for John Kerry September 11, 2001 was an aberration, a one-shot deal that doesn’t change much and just says that we need to do more of the same. For Senator Kerry, it’s still September 10, 2001 in terms of foreign policy – a time when international institutions still had the fa&ccedi;ade of respectability, when we could treat terrorism like a law enforcement exercise, and when terrorism was something that happened over there.

It is not acceptable for someone who holds such attitudes to be the Commander in Chief of the United States in a time of this war against terrorists. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had compared the Nazis to mere rum-runners, how would America have reacted? If he said we had to make do with the occasional Nazi invasion and a few concentration camps here and there in order to preserve the old order, would have been considered a great leader? If he said that Pearl Harbor was a sign that America needed to reengage with the League of Nations since Americans were 90% of the casualties against the Japanese, would he have been wise?

If one cannot even see the war, one cannot lead it. It is clear that John Kerry does not have the vision, and his foreign policy is based upon nothing more than a profound ignorance of the world we live in.