|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
National Defense: The Case For The Democrats |
|
|
|
(Source: The Lexington Institute; issued Feb. 27, 2006)
(© The Lexington Institute; reproduced by permission)
|
|
|
|
On the final day of the second millennium, in the final edition of the Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius expressed doubt about the defense team that president-elect George Bush was assembling. Given Bush's lack of experience with defense and foreign policy, Ignatius wrote, it made sense to surround him with seasoned statesmen like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. But Ignatius complained that "these guys were old hands 25 years ago," and wondered whether Bush was picking "old faces for a new world."
Today, Ignatius looks prophetic. Bush's tenure as commander-in-chief has been a disaster, mainly because his advisors repeatedly misjudged the challenges facing the nation. The most traumatic terrorist attack in history, the failure to control migration across the southern border, the proliferation of nuclear weapons among the world's worst regimes, the specter of defeat in Iraq -- how many failures are needed before voters decide the Republican reputation for defending the nation is about as reliable as their former reputation for fiscal prudence? In other words, when will voters give Democrats another chance to prove they're serious about national defense? Judging from Bush's record, it won't be long.
--Homeland security: In the biggest defense speech of his first presidential campaign, George Bush pledged to "defend the American people against missiles and terror." Today, midway through Bush's second term, the nation still doesn't have an operational missile-defense system and still hasn't recovered from the 9-11 terrorist atrocities that occurred on his watch. Osama bin Laden is still at large and half a million illegal immigrants still cross the southern border every year. The response to Hurricane Katrina revealed a federal government incapable of dealing with domestic disasters. National Guard first-responders in the U.S. have been stripped of chemical-detection and night-vision equipment to supply forces in Iraq. So where does Bush focus his political energies? On assuring that a state-controlled Arab company can run U.S. ports. No wonder we all feel safer now than when Bill Clinton was president.
--Defeating Terrorism: The president's partisans say he has prevented a repeat of 9-11 attacks by waging an unrelenting war on terrorists. But if that war was being waged effectively, wouldn't Osama and Omar, Zawahiri and Zarkawi be in custody? A more likely explanation for the lack of follow-on attacks is that the terrorists aren't very capable beyond their native lands. Once you embrace that view, though, their one big success in America on 9-11 looks even more embarrassing for Bush. So the administration prefers to paint the terrorist challenge in lurid, Cold War terms (as Rebecca Christie of Dow Jones newswires recently noted). Unfortunately, the alarmist interpretation has become self-fulfilling in Iraq, because every nut in the world now knows that a handful of poorly-equipped but dedicated extremists can tie down the U.S. military indefinitely.
--Preventing Proliferation: The Pentagon's recently completed quadrennial defense review identifies weapons of mass destruction as the most urgent category of emerging threats that the nation faces. However, the administration's fiscal 2007 defense spending request that accompanied the quadrennial review to Capitol Hill proposes to spend 95% of the military budget on other things. Very little has been accomplished on Bush's watch to slow the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, Iran and North Korea. Aside from invoking ritual incantations about needing better intelligence, administration policymakers don't seem to have a clue what to do about nuclear (or chemical, or biological) proliferation.
Maybe it's time to give the Democrats a chance, before 9-11 looks like a footnote to far worse times.
-ends-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
