This post has been building up for some time, thinking itself out, gestating, if you will. A must read, Bill Whittle's Deterence helped me firm up some ideas. A link today at PoliPundit leading to this a NYT's piece on liberal's and Kerry's take on the GWOT brought things to a point where they were ready to be written.
From Polipundit quoting Kerry:
‘’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.'’
Kerry and the left so misunderstand the GWOT they really do present a clear and present danger to our nation - there's no other possible conclusion. Failure to understand the GWOT as a true war, versus a quality of life or "nuisance" issue is flawed thinking. One back alley BJ or quickie in a car does not a 9/11 make. Prostitutes aren't hell bent on growing their numbers, infringing upon our way of life until they take it over. Their crime is parasitic in nature. It requires the greater society in which it exists to survive in order to sustain itself. Terrorists are predatory in nature. They do not seek to "live" off of, or within a host, they seek to destroy their prey. And we, our way of life ARE terrorist's prey, not their enablers.
The left doesn't see it that way. They attempt to always look inward, to figure out what it is "we" are doing wrong to cultivate terrorism in the world. They cannot seem to grasp the fundamental truth that evil exists within the world and one must either confront and destroy it, or risk the perils of living in a world in which it exists. Given 9/11 and the prospect of the proliferation of ever more deadly weapons we can no longer afford to simply "exist" in a world that aides and abets terrorism, we MUST stamp it out. And we can.
Lately I've been thinking of right versus left in this regard as existing on a continuum of strength versus kindness. Both left and right are both strong as well as kind. But in terms of how we see the world and seek answers to its problems, I posit the left looks first to kindness while the right prefers to fall back on strength. Define it however you wish - emotion versus logic, military versus diplomatic - the left prefers solutions which are generically more "kind," in the broadest sense of the term. While the right, when practical, prefers taking the problems head on and in force - not always with arms, by the way.
Whether it's welfare reform, school reform, abortion, etc, solutions of the right tend to desire a sort of strength in character, or action, or dsicipline. The left opts for a less demanding, softer less confrontative approach. For example, left: don't show the strength of character to not get pregnant, we understand, we will provide abortion. right: be strong, take responsibility for yourself, be abstinent if you must. But be strong. Left: The economy is tough, getting work is hard, that's okay, we should help you out, here's welfare. Right: Yes, things are tough, but you mjust find a way to get on. Pick yourself up, find some work, build from there. The list can go one and on. And I am in no way suggesting that either side is all or nothing. But the general paradigm of kindness versus strength does indeed describe a large part of thinking of left versus right.
The left seeks to "understand," to morally equate, to "care." That is all well and good and it IS the right way to approach some problems. But not all of them, and certainly NOT the GWOT. The risks are too great for a non-aggressive strategy that seeks to do anything but ferret out terrorist elements as quickly and forcefully as possible and destroy them.
I am not suggesting that the right is all strength and the left all compassion - we are all a mix. But the mix or balance on the left is decidedly different than on the right. The following quote represents the real danger of a Kerry presidency, and it has little to do with Kerry himself.
Inside liberal think-tanks, there are Democratic foreign-policy experts who are challenging some of Bush's most basic assumptions about the post-9/11 world -- including, most provocatively, the very idea that we are, in fact, in a war. But Kerry has tended to steer clear of this conversation, preferring to attack Bush for the way he is fighting terrorism rather than for the way in which he perceives and frames the threat itself.
In the liberal view, the enemy this time -- an entirely new kind of ''non-state actor'' known as Al Qaeda -- more closely resembles an especially murderous drug cartel than it does the vaunted Red Army. Instead of military might, liberal thinkers believe, the moment calls for a combination of expansive diplomacy abroad and interdiction at home, an effort more akin to the war on drugs than to any conventional war of the last century.
Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should include a strong military option argue that the ''war on terror'' is a flawed construct. ''We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense,'' says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's secretary of state. ''The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''
With a Kerry presidency, you don't simply get "Kerry." You get thought tanks, appointees, Cabinet Secretaries, judges, etc, most if not all with a left or liberal bent. Even if Kerry were comitted to fighting the GWOT as aggressively as President Bush, the apparatus around him would always pull against that approach, suggesting summit over interdiction, words over actions.
Terrorism, with its escalating ways and means cannot be dealt with from a point of kindness and understanding. It MUST be stood up to with strength and determination. And there is only one side of the political argument, this year, that has the answer to our nation's and the world's most significant problem. A Kerry presidency with a Democrat administration would be about the most foolish and truly dangerous thing we could do to ourselves at this critical juncture. I hope enough of the body politic takes the time and applies the reasoning to figure it out before November 2nd.
Is this "Great Minds" again.....see trackback.
Regards, Bobt
Posted by: Bob Taylor | Sunday, October 10, 2004 at 08:18 PM