[Mb-civic] Democrats' Narrow Vision - Fred Hiatt - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Democrats' Narrow Vision
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By Fred Hiatt
The Washington Post
Monday, April 3, 2006; A19

You can look at the Democrats' national security plan, released last 
week, as simply a political shield, akin to the upgraded body armor they 
promise for U.S. troops.

The party remains traumatized by the failure of biography to protect 
Vietnam veterans Max Cleland and John Kerry from charges of being soft 
on security.

So "Real Security" -- with its red, white and blue cover, its 
poll-tested phrases (policies that are "both tough and smart") printed 
in English and Spanish -- is an amulet for 2006 candidates: You see? We 
have a plan. We Democrats will buy more weaponry than the Bush 
administration, sign up more troops, give more to veterans, inspect more 
shipping containers.

But you can also look at the security plan as the Democrats say it is 
intended: as a serious strategy intended to show that the opposition 
party is ready to govern. Under that lens, it is a more interesting 
document.

The first thing you might notice is that the Democrats implicitly reject 
almost everything the Bush administration says about how Sept. 11 
changed the world, or our perception of it.

President Bush believes that the United States "is in the early years of 
a long struggle," according to his own national security strategy 
released last month, against "a new totalitarian ideology." To combat 
radical Islamist terrorism, he says, the United States must first and 
foremost offer better values, promoting democracy and opposing tyranny. 
It must be ready to take the fight to the enemy, including with 
preemptive action, because the nation can never be made safe only by 
guarding the homeland. And it must seek to ease the poverty that breeds 
hopelessness through "dramatically expanded" development aid and an 
emphasis on free markets and trade.

An opposition party could accept the goals but decry the 
administration's failure to reach them: the broken alliances, the 
screw-ups in Iraq, the lack of readiness illustrated by the pitiful 
response to Hurricane Katrina, the gulf between the rhetoric of human 
dignity and the record of torture and infringed liberty.

The Democrats do indeed attack the failures and promise an end to 
incompetence. But they also reveal a different world view, one that is 
far more cramped and inward-looking. While reassuring voters that they 
will keep "foreign interests" out of "our national security 
infrastructure" -- including "mass transit" -- the Democrats do not find 
space to mention democracy even once.

They promise to "destroy terrorist networks like al Qaeda," but there is 
no discussion of a broader threat, of a "global war" or a long Cold 
War-like struggle. They devote more space to homeland security than to 
anything else. There is no mention of preemptive action.

The document does promise, almost as an aside and without elaboration, 
to "lead international efforts to uphold and defend human rights" and to 
combat "the economic, social, and political conditions that allow 
extremism to thrive." But where Bush concluded from Sept. 11 that the 
acceptance of stable dictatorships in countries such as Egypt was 
ultimately self-defeating, Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democrats' leader 
in the Senate, told me that while "we of course acknowledge that 
democracy is our goal . . . we first have to have stability."

Certainly a respectable case can be made that there is no "global war" 
-- that the administration, whether from shock at the 2001 attacks or 
out of political cynicism, exaggerated the threat and distorted American 
priorities. There is an equally respectable argument that Bush's promise 
to end tyranny is dangerously romantic.

But then what is the vision? What does bring security? Bill Clinton and 
Al Gore, by the time they left office, had formed a view. The United 
States was the "indispensable nation," as Clinton said, that should lead 
international coalitions to combat transnational threats: not only 
failed states and terror but also genocide and ethnic cleansing, AIDS, 
human trafficking, climate change, and more.

The Democrats, led by Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), seem to have 
reverted to the it's-the-economy-stupid Clinton of 1992. A section of 
their plan focuses on alternative energy and conservation, for example, 
but the goal is only "to free America from dependence on foreign oil"; 
climate change isn't mentioned. Pandemics such as avian flu are to be 
combated by spending more on public health at home; the rest of the 
world doesn't figure in.

Throughout the plan, in fact, there is no discussion of values, of 
liberty or generosity, of free markets or foreign aid -- of any purpose 
for American leadership larger than self-protection. The pollsters may 
be satisfied, but John F. Kennedy would not recognize his party.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/02/AR2006040201184.html
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