No, what one might call the “let’s-pretend-con” position is taken by the GOP; the Dems just need to take up the “real-con” position on terrorism.
First priority, for now and forever, should be to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. Think 9/11 changed things? If terrorists set a nuke off in one of our major cities, it would make 9/11 look trivial, both in terms of the actual carnage, and in terms of the country’s response.
This means allocating the resources to secure nuclear materials in the former USSR as swiftly as is reasonably possible. This means making nuclear arms nonproliferation and control our #1 diplomatic priority. This means pursuing a foreign policy that doesn’t put small, nasty countries in the position of feeling they need nukes as a poison pill to keep us from invading. This means rewinding the clock three years and not invading Iraq. (Oops.)
Because, let’s face it, since terrorists don’t themselves have access to sophisticated engineering facilities, the most likely way for them to get a nuke in the next 15-20 years is for them to obtain a working bomb from a country that already has them, such as Iran or Pakistan. So our first goal should be to minimize the number of Irans and Pakistans that have nuclear weapons. (Not sure how we best do that in a post-Iraq world, but it’s not the only seemingly insoluble problem our invasion of Iraq has created.)
At some point, we will have to worry about terrorists being able to build their own nukes if they get enough plutonium or U-235, but not just yet. But with that day in mind, we should give a high priority to controlling, accounting for, and regularly inspecting nuclear materials around the world.
We also need to keep an eye on developments with bio and chem weapons, to forestall the day when they can be used as weapons of mass destruction. (I took the position two years ago that they aren’t WMDs yet, and I’ve seen no evidence to change my mind since.)
And we need to guard against terrorism by conventional means. This means that rather than simply have an airline-passenger-harassment program to give the public the impression they’re being protected (but without the reality), we need a more thoroughgoing program to inspect cargo coming into our ports and put on our planes. We’ve known this for three years, but little has been done. Similarly, we need to protect our nuclear and chemical plants.
Finally, there’s the terrorists themselves. They aren’t a static group, of course. Bush’s initial stated post-9/11 policy was the right approach: conduct a foreign policy that at the very least commands the respect of the bulk of people in the Islamic world, thereby drying up the sea in which Islamic terrorists swim. Then track down and capture or kill those engaged in international terrorism.
(FWIW, Bush specified at the beginning that our concern is with international terrorism. Terrorism that’s one country’s domestic politics carried out by violent means is primarily the concern of that country. There will be exceptions to this, but a policy on terrorism need not address them up front.)
The diplomatic policy should be consistently pro-democratic, but not one that seeks to gain democracy through drastic upheavals: such upheavals are, in the short run, a cure worse than the disease. Neither France in 1791 nor Iraq in 2004 was a good place to live. But in the past 30-some years, we’ve seen countries like Taiwan and South Korea transition from authoritarianism to democracy; we need to suss out how best to nudge countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria down this path. Steady pressure on such governments to allow and give greater freedom over time to opposition groups must be part of this picture. We may wind up with variations on Islamic democracy or even theocracy, but that’s the risk we take. We need to make it clear that if that’s what they choose, we’re prepared to live with that - as long as they don’t support terrorism.
Both for purposes of diplomacy and antiterrorist intelligence, we need to actively encourage and support not just study of the appropriate languages such as Arabic and Farsi, but study of the culture as well. Our biggest problem in operating in the Islamic world in any manner, be it trying to win hearts and minds, working with friendly intelligence agencies in the region, or playing cat-and-mouse with al-Qaeda operatives, is our poor understanding of the cultural milieu in which we must operate. FWIW, our intelligence agencies are trying hard to recruit speakers of Arabic and so forth, but the shortage is such that they wind up stealing from one another. Hence the need to create more speakers of Islamic languages and students of Islamic culture.
And we need more Special Forces troops and more CIA operatives to track down and capture or kill terrorists.
That’s my Democratic antiterror policy. Most of this is stuff that John Kerry ran on, this past fall. He regards nuclear proliferation as the #1 threat. He advocated a speedup of our efforts to help Russia control its nuclear material. He advocated inspecting containers being shipped into the country, air cargo, nuclear and chemical plants. He wanted to expand the Special Forces. And so forth.
Two other things we need to do, long-term, to aid our antiterrorist efforts. One is to reduce domestic demand for petroleum. As long as we depend on large quantities of imported oil, we’ll be hindered in our antiterrorist efforts by our dependence on countries such as Saudi Arabia. We can’t be honest about the Wahhabi role in promoting Islamic extremism as long as we have to kiss Saudi butt.
The other thing we need to do is become fiscally responsible once again as a nation. As long as we depend on foreign central banks to hold dangerously large quantities of our debt, there’s a lot of actors out there whose interests may often be different from ours who we have to keep happy. On occasion, pleasing them may interfere with what we need to do to combat terrorists. For a great power, we’re not in a great position these days. We need to be a good deal freer than we are right now from the entanglements of debt and energy dependency in order to be able to chart our own course.
