| What was new at Tocqueville: October 11, 2004 |
Kerry on terror war: Win... and return to normalcy On September 9, Tocqueville's Gregory Fossedal encouraged both U.S. presidential candidates to "talk about victory" in the war on terror. Tell the public what it would look like; outline the standard we can use to judge progress; and most important, explain how we get there from here. (To read the article, click here.) Such a war might never be "won," he condeded, in the sense of generals signing a piece of paper with fancy quill pens, or every last miscreant in the world being disarmed. But victory can be achieved -- just as other wars have been well and truly declared "won" long before the last soldier laid down his arms; just as nuclear weapons might be made "impotent and obsolete" without eradicating every gram of plutonium. On October 10, Senator John Kerry made an intelligent statement to The New York Times Magazine picking up on those themes. (A followup, by the way, to his cogent and optimistic speech on "victory" at New York University in September. For news and links click here). The Bush campaign promptly snipped out part of Kerry's quotation and put out a snide television commercial scoffing at the notion that terrorists might one day be defeated just as Nazism and Communism or various criminal gangs were -- in being reduced to marginal, unimportant actors; in a word, "defeated" -- long before every last member or adherent was dead or disarmed. Mr. Kerry, to his credit, stuck to his guns and fired back with an ad labeling the Bush-Cheney campaign's whimpish pessimism for what it is: whimpish and pessimistic. Does Senator Kerry have what it takes to actually serve as the Elliot Ness (or, if you prefer, George Patton) of global terror? That's a separate question. But in daring to talk about victory, to take victory seriously, Mr. Kerry has put himself firmly in the camp of presidents from Reagan to Roosevelt, from Kennedy to Truman. These men insisted -- to a chorus of elite skepticism from both the left and right -- that, yes, democracy could triumph. When President Bush first mused, just before his party's convention, that the war on terror might be unwinnable, he had the good sense to promptly issue a statement saying he didn't mean it the way it sounded. That retraction was a good instinct -- and a suggestive proof that admitting a mistake is sometimes intelligent and manly. So Senator Kerry thinks America and its allies can win the war on terror? The appropriate response for Mr. Bush is not to cavil, but to join the debate and describe victory in his own terms. |
