I’m coming near the end of a 24-hour, drop-by appearance in my home town, playing hooky from residential conference some 50 miles away. Thursday afternoon I went to a small-group presentation on the 9/11 Commission’s work, given by its Executive Director Phil Zelikow. Then I got to watch the Democratic Convention on C-SPAN, including John Kerry’s 55-minute “acceptance” speech…
A couple of themes emerged as common to both experiences: themes that show us just how eager Kerry and the rest of the Dems are these days not to lay themselves open to any charges that at a time when the country is at “war” they are openly attacking or criticizing the Prez on matters of significance.
Especially regarding foreign policy.
Thus, at a time when everyone realizes that the main issue is Iraq, Kerry is not telling us anything specific at all about what he would do there that is different from what the current Prez is already doing– except, perhaps, “internationalize” it a bit more (though heaven knows, Bush has been trying to do that, as well, without too much success).
And at a time when just about everyone in the US with two synapses to rub together in their brains realizes that the Bush administration’s fawning embrace of Sharon’s agenda in Palestine has been building huge resentment of US policy throughout the more-vital-than-ever Muslim world, and boosting recruitment for the Islamist extremist groups considerably– not a word from Kerry or any of the rest of the Dems that would indicate even a chink of light between them and Bush/Sharon on Palestine.
Similarly in the work of the 9/11 Commission…
The commission’s half-dozen Democratic members evidently all agreed to go along with a report that voices no explicit criticism whatsoever of Bush’s decision to launch the war against Iraq. This, despite the fact that the report presents much evidence regarding (1) the fact that the war against Iraq had nothing to do with the campaign against Qaeda-style Islamist extremism, and (2) the degree to which the war against and later occupation of Iraq have actually undermined the campaign against al-Qaeda.
Then, too, in its consideration of the kind of “preventive diplomacy” actions the US should be taking to undercut the worldwide support for al-Qaeda, the report makes no mention of the need for robust peacemaking diplomacy on the Palestine question.
So, no mention anywhere in the Commission report of the need for urgent policy change on Palestine. No surprise there, I suppose. Would we expect US Democrats to come come out in an election year suggesting a policy of not supporting the Israeli Government to the hilt???
Incidentally, that’s why I was so glad Jimmy Carter at least mentioned something about that in his speech to the Dem Convention on Monday…
It would have been good if that very sensible, well-informed man Lee Hamilton, who was the Democratic Co-Chair of the Commission could have persuaded his co-believers to have made at least some mention, however bland, of the need to re-engage in Palestinian diplomacy…. But no. He did not.
Well, I’ll end this with a couple of quick observations. The first about the whole mis-en-scène of Kerry’s speech last night. His two daughters did a lovely job talking about him. Then came the “Band of Brothers” routine, with some seven or eight white former shipmates and one African-American former shipmate from JK’s time in Vietnam all filing onto the stage to “be there” for him. One of the shipmates then made a first wind-up speech, followed by a truly great wind-up from (former) Senator Max Cleland, a man who had three of his limbs blown off in an explosion in Vietnam.
Cleland was fabulous. I’ve never heard him speak before, but I thought he was great.
Kerry seems to have positioned himself quite successfully as, firstly, a spokesman for all the fighting-men and -women who make huge sacrifices in wars, but whose readiness to sacrifice can on occasion (with the clear implication that the war in Iraq is just such an occasion) be treated in a cavalier fashion by politicians who gratuitously and through deception start a war for less than compelling reasons.
Of course, a big related theme is the fact that in the era of the US-Vietnam war, JK himself volunteered to fight, and fought with great apparent bravery on the front-lines, while George W. Bush worked hard to evade any service at all, and certainly went nowhere near any front-lines.
I really like the pro-soldier part of Kerry’s stance, though I get a little uneasy when it bleeds over into being pro- military toughness (as opposed to, for example, being pro- diplomatic smarts.)
Oh well. He is who he is on all these issues. But we won’t really know who that is, now, till all the stage-managing that he and his handlers consider necessary for winning the election comes to an end on November 5.
And on the 9/11 Commission, meanwhile… David Ignatius has a good column in today’s WaPo on the strong but troubling campaign now underway to turn the commission’s report into some kind of a nationally “sacred” text:
- as President Bush and John Kerry race to endorse the commission’s agenda for change, you’d think the proposals had been handed down from heaven itself, rather than offered up for public discussion.
What these recommendations should trigger — and what the country badly needs — is a real debate about how best to fight terrorism, not a rubber stamp. America didn’t have such a national debate after Sept. 11, or before the Iraq war, and we’re suffering for it. The rush to climb on board the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendations suggests that politicians are still running scared. They want to be on the right side of the terrorism issue and worry about the details later. That kind of thinking is what got us into trouble in Iraq.
Later, he writes this:
- The ink was barely dry on the 567-page report when Kerry gave it his blanket endorsement…
Kerry’s support for government by commission is hardly reassuring. The country needs a president who will take control of anti-terrorism policy, sift good proposals from bad and steer a steady course away from the maelstrom in which the United States finds itself.
Sadly, Kerry’s me-too approach to the Sept. 11 commission is of a piece with his bland flag-waving on foreign policy in general. America is a nation at war. Yet we have no sense, even after Kerry has been nominated, of just what policies he would pursue in Iraq and the Middle East. There’s a three-alarm blaze outside and he’s telling us he supports the fire department.
But nor does he let Bush lightly, at all:
- The Bush administration’s effort to wrap itself in the bipartisan flag of the commission is even more outrageous. Do the administration’s spin controllers think the country has forgotten that the president refused to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify before the panel until forced to do so by public outcry? Do they think people won’t actually read the report and see its devastating account of the administration’s failure to mobilize for the al Qaeda threat?
David’s main theme in the column is “Let the debate begin”–not over the various strands of the historical record that were fairly well and elegantly presented in the report by Phil Zelikow and his team, but over the portion on “Where do we go from here?”
And that means, imho, not just over organizational/bureaucratic aspects of what to do like, “do we really a new National Intelligence Czar?” (David says No)– but even more importantly over what the international politics and diplomacy of the response should be.
But that, we won’t really hear about until after the election.