The Myths of National Security Credibility (Dems-not GOP - have credibity)

[papau]

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=18904
The Myths of National Security Credibility by Eric Alterman

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Traub’s article takes the above to represent a sober-minded statement of traditional foreign policy realism. In fact, when carefully scrutinized, Rice’s distinction crumbles to dust. As Slate.com’s Robert Wright pointed out in examining this very paragraph “in drawing this one-dimensional spectrum - national interest at one end and humanitarianism/multilateralism at the other — Rice is conflating two separate questions: 1) When should you act for humanitarian reasons as opposed to reasons of national self interest, and 2) When should you act multilaterally as opposed to unilaterally? “There is no necessary connection between the two,” he notes, “a fact illustrated by Rice's former boss, the first President Bush. He justified the Persian Gulf War in terms of strict national interest — oil, jobs — but he fought it under U.N. auspices and with the help of troops from other nations.”

In other words, Rice’s formulation tells us nothing about when to use force; when to do so unilaterally or multilaterally; and when to hold back. Nevermind. She is a Republican conservative and so she is deemed to be “credible” on national security regardless of whether she makes any sense.

Citing the neoconservative analyst Robert Kagan, Traub concludes, “Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch.” But again, where is the evidence for this contention? Is it not just as likely that Europeans take a different attitude toward terrorism than that which Traub attributes to Americans because they have more experience dealing with it on their own soil? But as Spanish journalist Miguel Angel Aguilar, who helped found El País and now runs the Association for European Journalists in Madrid, explained to me in an interview, Europeans have learned that terrorists can be an enemy "against which sheer military might is not going to help you." Spain, he notes, has fought a home-grown terrorist movement for 30 years. "Using the army turned out to be a disaster," Aguilar observes. "We were trying to kill mosquitoes with bombs. Innocents were killed and democracy suffered and we were no safer."

To turn Traub’s formulation on its (proper) head, is it not the Bush administration’s impatience with a working multilateral solution to the problem of containing Iraq that "failed" America in the clutch? Are we not paying for that failure every day not only with hundreds of billions of dollars (and few genuine allies) but also with the lives of hundreds of brave men and women? Bush claimed to be protecting the nation from "terrorism" but launched a war against a nation that, according to his own CIA, played no role in any anti-American terrorism for more than a decade. In the meantime, we are, as I write this, on Orange alert and Osama bin Laden — the man who launched these horrific attacks - continues to mock us with his reconstituted minions. And yet even in the media’s most thoughtful and prestigious publications, reporters insist that it is the Democrats, rather than Bush, who must demonstrate their "credibility" on matters of national security