June
27, 2003, 8:45 a.m.
The Democrats’ Dilemma
Do they want
to fight terrorists — or only Republicans?
emocrats face a dilemma: The war on terrorism has restored national security
as a priority issue just as a new presidential-election campaign is beginning
to take shape.
That's a problem
because Democrats have long been perceived by voters as less competent than
Republicans when it comes to national security. For nearly a quarter century,
from Lyndon Johnson's retirement in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1969
to Bill Clinton's election in 1992 soon after the conclusion of the Cold
War, Republicans continually occupied the Oval Office — with only one,
brief interlude.
That interlude came with Jimmy Carter's election in 1977, a victory that
was largely the fallout of the Watergate scandal. And during Carter's last
14 months in office, the headlines were dominated by the Iran hostage crisis
— which did nothing to improve the public's perception of Democrats'
ability to deal effectively with America's enemies abroad.
So now, Democrats have a choice: (1) Restore their party's credibility on
matters of war and peace, or (2) bet that another scandal will get voters
angry enough to again throw the Republican rascals out of the White House.
Such seasoned Democratic strategists as Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign
manager, are making a strong case in favor of the first option. "Our
party and its leaders must wake up to the fact that we can no longer give
short shrift to security issues if we hope to regain our status as the majority
party," she recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed coauthored
with Timothy Bergreen, the founder of Democrats
for National Security. They believe their party can — indeed must
— resurrect the traditions of such muscular Democrats as Sen. Scoop
Jackson, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy.
But returning to that tradition implies moving away from the more pacific
approaches of such Democratic leaders as Walter Mondale, Gene McCarthy,
George McGovern, and Michael Dukakis. And the left wing of the Democratic
party wants no part of such a shift.
Instead, Democrats such as presidential hopeful Howard Dean, New York
Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Sen. Carl Levin and favor option (2);
they're looking to the Carter election as a model. But not content to pray
for a new Republican scandal, they're hoping to manufacture one by transforming
the mystery over what's become of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
into a scandal. Or, as one Democratic strategist candidly said to me backstage
at CNN the other day: "What's lying about sex compared to lying about
war? This will be another Watergate."
This week, The New Republic has joined the fray with a cover story,
"Deception and Democracy: The Selling of the Iraq War." What's
most peculiar here is that TNR was in favor of the war — and
still is. (My guess is that TNR's pro-war stance infuriated many
of its readers, and this attack on President Bush's "honesty"
is meant to try to make it up to them.)
The problem is that this line of attack is based on a patent falsehood.
There can be no doubt that Saddam had WMDs. He used chemical weapons to
slaughter thousands of Kurdish civilians, and against Iranian combatants
as well. He attempted to build nuclear weapons but the Israelis bombed his
nuclear facilities 21 years ago this month, and U.S. forces seized his rebuilt
facilities after the Gulf War ten years later — and found that he was
closer to building a bomb than U.S. intelligence analysts had estimated.
CNN is right now reporting "Nuke Program Parts Unearthed in Baghdad."
Saddam admitted producing biological weapons (e.g. 8,500 liters of anthrax)
and U.S. forces have found what appear to be mobile biological-weapons laboratories.
The only serious question is what happened to the products of Saddam's WMD
programs? Are they hidden somewhere in Iraq? Were they transferred to another
country, perhaps Syria and/or Lebanon? Or did he somehow get rid of them
secretly — and in violation of U.N. resolutions demanding that destruction
of WMD be verified by international inspectors? And, if so, did he leave
in place a network of laboratories prepared to make new WMDs as soon as
the heat was off, as some intelligence analysts believe?
This last scenario sounds particularly credible if you try to think like
Saddam might have thought. He had reason to hope that the "international
community" would rein Bush in and prevent an invasion. Failing that,
he probably concluded that the U.S. would not prevail easily or quickly
against his well-financed and war-hardened war machine. Surely, Iraq's military
would put up a better fight than had the Taliban in Afghanistan — a
primitive country in the eyes of an Arab Baathist chauvinist like Saddam.
Saddam may have calculated that if American troops both took a beating —
a la Mogadishu — and were also unable to find any WMDs, pressure would
quickly mount at home and abroad for a ceasefire that would leave Saddam
in power — with his prestige greatly enhanced for having once again
entered the lion's den and survived. Out would go the inspectors, the sanctions
would be lifted and WMD production could resume posthaste.
Democrat scandalmongers are not pondering such questions. Instead, they
are peddling a scenario so fantastic that not even Saddam's mouthpiece,
Baghdad Bob, would have dared trot it out: That there were no WMDs and Bush
knew it — but that he pretended otherwise as part of a vast (right-wing?)
conspiracy that would have included Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Tony
Blair — and, of course, Bill Clinton, who bombed what he said were
suspected WMD sites in 1998, after the U.N. inspectors were forced to go
home. And don't forget to include the U.N. Security Council, every member
of which signed Resolution 1441 which did not ask whether Saddam had WMDs
but rather gave his regime "a final opportunity to comply with its
disarmament obligations."
The Democrats have a dilemma. Donna
Brazile, Tim Bergreen, and other sober-minded Democrats have a way out,
a way that will make it harder for Republicans to win elections but easier
for Americans to become more secure in an era of great peril. By contrast,
Howard Dean and his friends are digging a hole that it could take Democrats
a generation to get out of.
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emocrats face a dilemma: The war on terrorism has restored national security
as a priority issue just as a new presidential-election campaign is beginning
to take shape.
