Rudy Didn't Fail

Matt Yglesias gets a fair amount of respect from conservative bloggers.

He's frequently called "one of the good ones".

As this piece shows, it's all relative.

He starts out all right:

As the mayor of a large city, one that had been the target of terrorist attacks before, Giuliani does have some experience with homeland security. But it's not a very good record.

After the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center, Giuliani decided that the city needed an emergency-management-command center and so he had one built -- in the World Trade Center. Critics suggested that locating the facility in a building that was likely to come under attack wasn't a very good idea. [Those critics. Aren't they always right, in retrospect? - Ed.] The critics were right. The heroic work and sacrifice of so many members of New York's police and fire departments is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that they weren't even properly equipped for the mission with, for example, interoperable communications systems that would have let them coordinate their work. How much blame can we heap on Giuliani for these failings? Some, though he was no more caught unaware by the attacks than 95 percent of American politicians, so a reasonable person would forgive.

So far, so...good? Well, there've been no gross misstatements so far.

But, again, would a reasonable person make him the featured national-security spokesman for a major political party?

Apparently, Bush's political advisers would.

Here, Matt slips into the weeds.

Giuliani is no national security spokesman. He's a character witness.

After all, their entire security pitch is based on the notion that you should neglect issues of expertise in favor of the sort of strong, reassuring rhetoric that Giuliani offered in mid-September of 2001.

I had to read this sentence five or six times.

It still makes no sense.

The Bush Administration has been all about expertise - which is why you have the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell rather than hamsters like Richard Cohen and Mads Albright.

Bush is the leader. Unlike the likes of Clinton and Gore, he doesn't pretend to be able to micromanage the issues under his purview - just give them a direction, something Clinton never did, and Kerry shows no signs of being able to do.

This is the campaign of a president who didn't see fit after 9-11 to change up his security team and consider appointing someone with extensive experience in counterterrorism or Arab issues...Instead, he stuck with the same gang of missile-defense advocates and Iraq hawks who, shockingly enough, produced a response oriented around missile defense and invading Iraq rather than counterterrorism and engagement with the realities of the Arab world.

So Matt Yglesias proposes replacing alleged myopia about missiles - in the face of a real threat from North Korea and China - with a new myopia focused on suicide bombers?

Yglesias would treat the symptoms. Bush is cutting to the root - imperfectly as such missions will always be in the real world.

The irony is that the left used to criticize the defense establishment for "preparing for the last war"; now, the likes of Yglesias want to institutionalize it.

And that's the best idea they have.

Posted by Mitch at September 1, 2004 05:21 AM | TrackBack