He'll Be Tough

When I rip on John Kerry for his perceived Neville-Chamberlain-y aspects, my lefty friends inevitably chime in "he'll fight the war on terror!"

Yeah, sure - but how?

Well, first of all, it never seems to occur to either Bai or Kerry that Kerry's model of international drug lords as the template for Al Qaeda is wrong. (We'll skip the prostitution analogy for now and try to deal with serious things.) Drug lords are businessmen trying to make money. They kill people and try to bring down Third World governments as a means of extending and protecting their business. They are driven by greed, which, in the end, can be satiated.

Islamic terrorists are driven by religion, not money. Their motives are not economic, which is exactly the problem. Poverty and misery are not the underlying cause. In fact, the major appeal of Islamic fundamentalism has been among the educated elite. (Engineering students seem to make the best recruits.) Exposure to Western culture usually makes Muslim fundamentalists more radical, which is why Samuel Huntington has called it a "Clash of Civilizations." Al Qaeda does not want to blow New York off the map because it wants to sell more heroin. It wants to destroy America because it hates it and believes Islam is destined to rule the world.

So here will come John Kerry, shuffling around Europe and the Middle East, signing treaties, accepting promises, and assuring the folks back home that everything is all right.

On top of this comes the argument that terror is really as "law enforcement problem." Liberals don't have a very good track record here, either. For more than 25 years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1960s decisions in criminal procedure and the academically driven "deprisonization movement," liberals rooted around the country looking for the "root causes" of crime, always promising they were just ahead and that the problem was about to be solved. Meanwhile, crime soared.

Add to that Kerry's myopia, expressed in the first debate, that the war is about Al Quaeda, as if Bin Laden is Public Enemy Number One, ignoring other terrorist groups (until they're an "imminent threat", something we're unlikely to know before a bomb goes off on Bleecker Street, or thugs storm a school in Los Angeles, or part of downtown Baltimore is blown to kingdom come.

Kerry wants to fight...wait for it...The wrong war, the wrong way, in the wrong place.

Posted by Mitch at October 13, 2004 05:56 AM | TrackBack