Democratic Convention Unveiled a High Risk Strategy for the Election
by Ken Bell

What are we to make of the Democratic Convention?

Military strategists and historians of war from Sun Tzu to B.H. Liddell Hart and John Keegan all aver that it is almost never a good idea to risk the outcome of a battle or a war upon a direct frontal assault against an enemy’s fortified position. Rather like the redcoats at Boston’s Breed’s Hill, dispatched in short order by withering musketry once the whites of their eyes came into view, neither prudent nor successful.

Yet this is precisely what the Democratic convention in Boston was all about. The Democrats have openly and repeatedly declared that the decisive issue of the election of 2004 is what most observers have heretofore characterized as Bush’s greatest strength and Kerry’s greatest weakness: the conduct of foreign policy and of the war against FascIslam.

Only in a war of attrition, such as the trench warfare on the western front or at Gallipolli in the First World War, do frontal assaults seem to be the preferred approach of routinized and unimaginative generalship.

But that is precisely what our national politics have become: a perpetual war of attrition, waged relentlessly without surcease.
From the perspective of Democratic party activists, this campaign began the instant after Al Gore concluded his concession speech in December 2000.

We should, then, be less surprised than we are at the frontal assault, even if we remain shocked at the attendant display of uninhibited rancor, contempt and avowed hatred. (How illiberal!)

So now, in a strange contortion of Clausewitz, even the war itself has become an occasion for the continuation of politics by any means. But there certainly are some interesting aspects to the Democrats’ war of choice.

From a purely political vantage point, one wonders how it is that the Democratic party finds itself committed to this risky strategic approach with John Kerry and John Edwards as its nominees—having explicitly and deliberately selected this duo on the asserted basis of its ‘electability.’ Wouldn’t a Joe Lieberman-Evan Bayh ticket have a far greater chance of success in the present context—and most especially given the evident electoral strategy? But, of course, as all the events off the convention floor and out of the camera’s eye convincingly demonstrate, the mainstream of the Democratic party is too overwhelmingly dominated by ‘irreconcilables’ to have ever nominated a relatively moderate pro-war Democrat like Lieberman.

The Democrats do have certain advantages, and powerful allies, in a conflict drawn along these lines. Not least among these is the pacifist and anti-war ‘mainstream’ media, which has declared ‘quagmire’, ‘disaster’ or ‘defeat’ at least half a dozen times in the past two years. Even apart from George Soros’ millions, or the amazing scam they pulled on Bush with McCain-Feingold’s limitations on free speech and devious new backdoor finance schemes, the Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times and a host of others pulling for them.

But their Chicken Little narrative over the past eighteen months has vitiated, or at least diminished, the credibility of ‘the mainstream press.’ Much of the broader public is inoculated to the media’s pervasive bias, and increasingly immune to infection.

Unless the Democrats are able to convince a majority of the American people of the necessity for surrender in the War On Terror—an outcome too disastrous to contemplate—the nomination of John Kerry would appear to be extraordinarily problematic.

In essence, Kerry unabashedly asks the American people to judge him to be a credible commander-in-chief on the exclusive basis of four months of service in Vietnam a generation ago—and also conspicuously despite a thirty-year record of opposition to nearly every measure of military, intelligence or activist foreign policy that is now vital to our national survival in our global struggle against the forces of FascIslam.

For too many Americans, with their very lives at stake, this may be ‘a bridge too far.’

In truth, Kerry’s emphasis on his Vietnam service from the very beginning of his campaign is a massive and intentional diversion from his consistent history of pacifism, surrender and weakness on every single important national security issue that has confronted the nation since.

This attempt is breathtaking in its arrogance and cynicism. It presumes what Michael Moore—seated in the place of honor next to former President Jimmy Carter on the convention floor—has claimed to be true of Americans, that we are “the stupidest people on earth.” Are we?

If Democrats really believed that military service was a defining issue, they would have voted overwhelmingly for two real war heroes: George H. W. Bush (fished out of the Pacific after his plane crashed in World War II) over Bill Clinton in 1992, and Robert Dole (nearly killed and permanently maimed in World War II) over Clinton in 1996. They did not. They don’t believe the proposition at all. But they, and Senator Kerry in particular, are cynically willing to exploit it in order to divert the voting public from Kerry’s record.

Kerry deserves his current reputation as a man who is willing to take former President Clinton’s infamous triangulation to a higher level, to practice quadrangulation, the art of taking at various times and in various places all four sides of every vital issue, depending solely upon what works to Kerry’s immediate advantage. But his abysmal record on matters of national defense, intelligence and terrorism are remarkably consistent throughout the entire period of his twenty year Senate career. He has consistently opposed virtually every weapon system that has proved crucial to our military success against terrorists after 9/11. He has rigorously and vigorously opposed every successful strategy for American victory against our sworn enemies, from his advocacy of the insane nuclear freeze while Reagan was crushing the life out of the Soviet’s evil empire, to his current conviction that the war against FascIslam is “primarily a matter of law enforcement.” Throughout the decade of the 90s he repeatedly sought to gut America’s intelligence capabilities—so radically that some of his proposed slashes couldn’t secure the support of even a single other Democratic senator, no matter how far to the left their inclination.

Consider carefully the implications of this point: Kerry began his Senate career in the final decade of the Cold War by vociferously advocating a ‘nuclear freeze,’ a policy which would have prevented Ronald Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles to Western Europe—a measure so crucial to our eventual triumph in the Cold War that even Socialist President Francois Mitterand of France grasped its necessity. But not John Kerry.

What does this say for his strategic discernment?

The problem for John Kerry is that the American people aren’t so stupid as certain American elites believe. True believers will have no qualms pretending that ‘Vietnam’ is a magical incantation which automatically dispels and absolves the guilt of thirty successive years of irresponsibility. But the remainder of us are unlikely to be so complacent.

So, what would John Kerry, if he wished to be candid with the voters for just once in his career, tell us he would do in the war against FascIslam?

His policies are a prescription for defeat, and if we choose to adopt them, many more of us will perish needlessly.

If there have been deficiencies in the prosecution of the war in Iraq, they were precisely the sort which Kerry would exacerbate, not mitigate.

Yes, rather than dithering until the following March, we should have gone in during October. All that our delay accomplished was to allow Saddam five more months to plan his countermeasures, export his weapons of mass destruction to Syria, milk the hapless and corrupted UN of millions more to fund his impending ‘insurgency,’ and slaughter thousands more Iraqis with each passing week. But Kerry would have had us increase the delay, not move sooner. Does anyone really doubt that in a Kerry administration, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, torturing, murdering, extorting, aiding terrorists, and squeezing the UN for billions more?

So also, if there is any lesson that Vietnam could teach us and that Senator Kerry should share, it would be the extraordinary strategic disability of allowing sanctuary to hostile forces in neighboring countries, free to act against Americans with absolute impunity. There is no doubt the Bush administration has been far too slow to challenge the Syrians and Iranians for their egregious aid to terrorists and incendiaries in Iraq. But is anyone silly enough to believe that Senator Kerry would be bolder, more vigorous and aggressive in exploiting our strategic advantages and expunging our weaknesses? Of course not—the very notion is preposterous. If elected, a Kerry administration would be out of Iraq within six months, and the UN ‘Oil for Food’ crowd would be back in, sharing the triumph with jihadists and Baathists. We would ultimately, just as in Vietnam, have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory—though in Iraq, the penalties for defeat will be far more profound than the millions slaughtered and exiled in the aftermath of Vietnam.

Again, with respect to the looming explosion with Iran, two axioms should be self evident. The first is that it would be utterly insane to allow the world’s foremost terror-sponsoring state to possess nuclear weapons. a catastrophic nightmare that would dwarf 911 would be inevitable. The second is that there is only one solution acceptable to the United States: regime change in Iran. The murderous theocratic kleptocracy in Iran must go. These self evident truths have profound policy implications which ought to be debated seriously and forthrightly in our presidential contest. Yet despite the obvious bankruptcy of the European (and State Department) jabberwocky policy, the issue will remain unaddressed. Why? Because a Kerry administration can envision only ‘nuance,’ and a compelling need to insist upon more of the same. But failure begets failure—and the price of failure in this instance is far too high.

The fundamental policy question posed by the presidential election of 2004 is whether an active and aggressive prosecution of the War On Terror is the wiser course of action, or whether, on the contrary, passivity is prudence. But the proponents of passivity must be made to answer why the failed policies of a quarter century should be maintained. Do the majority of us, in the aftermath of 911, judge that policy to have been a success?

This campaign has many intense weeks to go, and its end cannot be foreseen. But the Democrats may well come to regret making war the crucial issue while nominating a candidate whose record of three decades is as an advocate of surrender, retreat and isolation.

–From the August 2004 Austin Review