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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
5) Private individuals have an inalienable right to keep AK-47s in their homes.
Associated more with the Republican Party than with the Democrats, Second Amendment fundamentalism is violently at odds with an effective war on terrorism. In Pakistan's on-again, off-again battle against al-Qaida, Pervez Musharraf has been attempting to disarm violent young men in the Northwest Frontier Province. The Bush administration is no doubt supporting him in words and deeds. But what does the NRA have to say about this egregious violation of the right to bear arms? True, the U.S. Constitution does not apply in Pakistan. But what about the underlying principle that all individuals have a "natural right" to protect themselves against their government? The Republicans are inhibited from making us safer for this reason too. The current war to defend ourselves against transnational terrorism obviously requires us to make dangerous weapons inaccessible to private individuals. But the dependence of our basic freedoms on the banning of military-style weapons seems almost impossible for Republicans to articulate or understand.
6) Strict adherence to law and the Constitution is a recipe for failure in the war against terror.
In boasting that the Republicans alone are competent to fight terrorism, Cheney accused the Democrats of interpreting terrorism as a form of criminality. That is an unforgivable blunder, he went on to say, since we are actually engaged in a "war" where due process and other legal niceties must frequently be set aside. But the Bush administration's dismissive attitude toward "law," revealed in the infamous torture memos and elsewhere, is one of the major reasons why it has waged the war on terror with such stunning incompetence. "Law" is not simply an obstacle to executive-branch flexibility, as the Republicans claim. For one thing, a central purpose of law is to filter out disinformation, stemming from witness malice, and to ensure that decision making is based on double-checked facts. Cheney's and Bush's cavalier attitude toward law is based on their belief that, in the face of a potentially catastrophic terror attack, we need to unleash lethal force long before sketchy intelligence matures into trustworthy evidence.
A direct consequence of this doctrine was their decision to invade Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence (provided by Iraqi exiles with an ax to grind) that could have been corrected if ordinary decision-making procedures ("law") had been respected. The Abu Ghraib scandal, as Seymour Hersh and others have reported, was the direct consequence of a decision, made at the top levels of the Bush administration, that the U.S. was not bound by the international laws of war, including the Geneva Convention, in fighting terrorism. The constitutional system of checks and balances is based on the premise that all decision makers are fallible and can benefit from adversarial process. The administration's persistent attempt to dismantle legislative and judicial oversight of executive action, thereby doing an end run around constitutionally established mechanisms for political self-correction, has made the country stupider and more vulnerable, not stronger, in the war against transnational terror. (It has also made a mockery of Bush's claim to be exporting democratic transparency and accountability to the Middle East.)
7) The only serious threats facing the U.S. are threats the U.S. can handle militarily.
On paper, the Bush administration has accurately described the new security environment in which the U.S. finds itself after the Cold War. The two principal threats to U.S. national security are the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and nonstate terrorist groups who are not susceptible to deterrence and who, using smuggling routes difficult for U.S. authorities to shut down, may eventually be able to deliver a WMD to a U.S. urban center. So why has the Bush administration allowed itself to get sidetracked from tackling these dire threats? If it were serious about WMD proliferation, it would have given much more serious attention to Russia, for example. And if it were serious about nonstate terrorists, it would have been much more aggressive along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Instead, it has expended more than a thousand U.S. lives, countless Iraqi ones and a vast treasure to topple a dictator who, even in a worst case, presented only a relatively remote threat to U.S. security.
One reason that the Bush counterterrorism strategy has gone so disastrously awry is that the Republicans are ideologically and dogmatically committed to the proposition that military means are invariably the most effective means for dealing with threats to U.S. security. The Republicans cannot be trusted to wage an effective war on terrorism, because the principal means for combating nonstate terrorism is not military force but international police cooperation and the principal means for combating proliferation is not military force but tightening up the existing international nonproliferation regime. Although military force and the threat of military force can be useful in these efforts, it cannot be the principal tool. But the Republicans will never agree to reduce the excessive proportion of our national security assets that currently flow to the Pentagon, even though the Pentagon, the right tool for countering the Soviet threat, is the wrong tool for countering the terrorist threat. That is another reason why they must be replaced.
8) The only serious threats facing the U.S. are threats that the U.S. can handle alone.
The cheers that arose at the Republican Convention every time a speaker maligned the United Nations or France are characteristic of the ingrained parochialism and xenophobia of the Republican Party. True, it is not possible to rule the world through the United Nations. But neither is it possible to enhance U.S. security without voluntary cooperation from other countries. There is no such thing as unilateral counterproliferation. There is no such thing as unilateral counterterrorism. These are contradictions in terms. The instinctive unilateralism of the Republican Party has made America less safe. The seething hatred that people around the world feel for George W. Bush has made America less safe. This is because the principal instrument for shutting down terrorist networks is information. To fight terrorism, the U.S. needs extensive linguistic and cultural knowledge about remote and inaccessible parts of the world. This knowledge exists, but most of it is in the heads of non-Americans whose cooperation with our efforts we must assiduously seek.
The Republicans have proved such incompetent managers of American national security, among other reasons, because they have not designed a counterterrorism strategy with an eye to maximizing the useful information available to U.S. decision makers. On the contrary, their blunderbuss tactics of poorly targeted intimidation and violence have shut down many vital channels of information. The inability of Americans to communicate effectively with the rest of the world has now become a serious danger to our national security. There is very little chance that this defiant and self-defeating ignorance of and indifference to the rest of mankind will be mitigated under a Republican administration. That is just one more reason to pray, and vote, for a change.
The Bush administration's manifest failure to make us safer has ideological roots. American national security has been put at risk because of the Republicans' own "pre-9/11 mind-set." This mind-set includes distrust of centralized government, unquestioning faith in the private sector, hostility to nonmarket distributions, sympathy with religious certainty and scriptural fundamentalism, the belief that freedom demands an unregulated market in military-style weaponry, unawareness that "law" protects decision makers from disinformation, a proclivity to apply military solutions to nonmilitary problems, and a reluctance to take the interests and opinions of other countries into account. This dogmatic and erroneous set of beliefs and dispositions has prevented Cheney and Bush from coming to a clear understanding of the unprecedented threats we face and devising an adequate response.
We need to take seriously their steadfast refusal to admit even their most obvious mistakes. If reelected, they are promising, apparently without embarrassment, to continue unswervingly on the path that has brought us where we are today. If we want to know how they will conduct the war against terrorism in a second term, we need only examine the mess they have wrought over the past three years. Bush's and Cheney's spectacular mishandling of the war on terror has many causes, but none more important than the stale ideology that continues to becloud and paralyze their minds.
