I think John Kerry finally gets it. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago, the Democratic hopeful laid out his thoughts on how best to combat terrorism and offered illuminating insight into what the national security strategy of a Kerry presidency might be. Most importantly, Kerry seemed to agree with Bush that we are in fact engaged in a war against terrorism.
"I remember feeling a rage, a huge anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war,'" Kerry recalled saying on Sept. 11, 2001.
At first, it may seem frivolous to question this seemingly obvious supposition. In many liberal think tanks, however, this very presumption is being discredited. The so-called war on terror, in their view, is simply metaphorical, more akin to the war on poverty or the war on drugs than to World War II. This line of reasoning has some validity. There is an inherent difficulty in declaring war on a noun, for terrorism is essentially a method rather than a doctrine. But though recognizing that the term has its limitations, it is absolutely imperative that the current fight against terror be considered a war, albeit a different sort of one than we have waged in the past. Kerry noted this difference in the interview.
"There's a danger in it,"' Kerry said, "but it's real. You know, when your buildings are bombed and 3,000 people get killed, and airplanes are hijacked, and a nation is terrorized the way we were, and people continue to plot to do you injury, that's an act of war, and it's serious business. But it's a different kind of war. You have to understand that this is not the sands of Iwo Jima. This is a completely new, different kind of war from any we've fought previously."
One of the reasons that the Sept. 11 attacks were so deadly and effective was because for a long time, there had been a war going on, although one of the belligerents was in denial - the United States. In the past when we were attacked we would lob cruise missiles into abandoned terrorist training camps in the mountains, or even more ineffectually, we would issue subpoenas in a federal court. When we employed the latter option after the first attack on the World Trade Center, all it accomplished was to let Osama bin Laden discover that the CIA was tracking his satellite phone calls. The result was that he relied more on human couriers to plan attacks, and our intelligence services therefore had little idea what al-Qaeda was planning in the late '90s.
Sept. 11 must stand as a turning point. The attacks of that day were not a crime and should not be treated as such. If they are treated as a crime then it would mean we would have to arrest bin Laden, for to kill him without due process would be illegal. Then what? Should we hold his trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where bin Laden would be immune from the death penalty and consequently, for the rest of his life, there would be suicide bombings and hijackings undertaken in the hopes of winning his release?
We are now living in an age of terrorism. As terrorists cannot operate independently of states, any state that harbors or offers material support to terrorists must be subject to military action. This is precisely why Afghanistan was attacked - it was offering bin Laden protection.
I hope Kerry understands this. I think, to a certain extent, he does. I am afraid, though, that he puts too much emphasis on the law enforcement aspect of the war on terror at the expense of the military dimension. One part of his interview reflected this and was seized upon by his political opponents.
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
Dick Cheney attacked Kerry's call to relegate terror to a "nuisance" as evidence that he is unfit to lead. But Kerry is right. We will never be fully able to prevent an individual from engaging in terrorism in a free society. Our only hope is to fight terrorism so aggressively that it cannot be a serious threat. Kerry's admission was similar to a moment of candor Bush also had on the Today show in August when he said he did not think the United States could actually triumph in the war on terror in the foreseeable future. "I don't think you can win it," Bush admitted. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
Kerry's comment that called for terrorism to be a nuisance was a moment of forthrightness, not weakness. What was more disconcerting was his analogizing of terrorism to gambling and prostitution. I think that Kerry's intention was to illustrate that we have largely disrupted organized crime, and we can do the same with terrorism. But that is where the analogy should end.
If some people have trouble recognizing that we are currently engaged in a war, it is unsurprising. This is largely the fault of the Bush administration. The government has asked very little sacrifice of the American people, doling our tax cuts rather than asking for increased public service. This notwithstanding, though, we must realize we are at war with Islamist terrorism and act accordingly. To do otherwise would leave us vulnerable to another Sept. 11.
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