Dan

Calabrese

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July 17, 2008

Why Obama and Peacenik Democrats Consider Afghanistan the Good War

Democrats, as a general rule, don’t support American military action anywhere. But if political gamesmanship requires them to choose in a good-war-bad-war debate, it’s useful to see how they reveal, by their choice, what they really think about the use of American power.

Since no argument against the Iraq War is too disingenuous for them, Democrats have been arguing for some time that Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terror, which they insist is in Afghanistan. This theme has gotten some serious love from Barack Obama in recent days, particularly in a July 15 op-ed where he lays out this week’s Obama Global Vision, with heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to put more resources in Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

So how did Afghanistan become the Democrats’ Good War as opposed to the Bad War in Iraq? Much of it is political salability, but wrapped around that is the way Democrats view America’s strategic place in the world – and it’s not a good view.

Most fundamentally, Democrats embrace the action in Afghanistan because – although this is not precisely accurate – “that’s who attacked us on 9/11.” Of course, Afghan military forces under the command of the Taliban didn’t attack us at all. We were attacked by 19 terrorists under the command of an international terrorist network whose leaders were being harbored, financed and provided with training facilities by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

To the extent that Democrats accept this as justification for attacking Afghanistan, we can all thank George W. Bush, because it was he who declared in the days after 9/11 that the U.S. would make no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that harbor them. It’s good to see that the Bush Doctrine remains popular among Democrats.

But as a matter of core philosophy, Democrats believe the U.S. should not use its Armed Forces in any aggressive action unless against an enemy who attacked us first. This is the primary basis of the Afghanistan-Good-Iraq-Bad notion, going hand-in-hand with the oft-repeated mantra that “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11!”

Democrats even managed to convince themselves – then tried to convince the rest of us – that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11. Of course, they did no such thing. They simply argued that in a post-9/11 world, it would be foolish to sit around waiting for threats to turn into attacks before taking action.

In a more basic sense, 9/11 convinced Bush that America’s old way of dealing with violent movements no longer would do. Trying to arrest individual terrorists, while responding to acts of aggression with “proportionate” cruise missile strikes and indignant UN resolutions had only led us to the worst attack ever on our homeland.

It’s not as if we didn’t know about Al Qaeda or the nature of the Taliban. Indeed, the Taliban’s jailing of American Christian missionaries was a big news story in the weeks before 9/11. But until terrorists under their protection landed a body blow against our nation, we did nothing. In essence, we waited until we could tell the teacher, “He hit me first!” Bush decided we would no longer play according to those rules – the very rules to which Obama would return us.

Obama also seems to believe that, because Al Qaeda’s leaders were being harbored in Afghanistan at the time they attacked us, Afghanistan must therefore be the place to go after them forever. His Iraq-as-distraction argument completely ignores the fact that we have killed many thousands of Al Qaeda fighters who took us on in Iraq – apparently understanding much better than Obama does that a democratic, prosperous Iraq, aligned with the United States, is big trouble for Islamist terror movements.

Obama also makes one of the most astoundingly unserious arguments imaginable when he says, “Al Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia. If another attack on our homeland comes, it will likely come from the same region where 9/11 was planned.” As my colleague Gregory D. Lee pointed out in a recent column, the Pakistani area where Bin Laden is likely holed up is a chaotic, prehistoric region in which electricity and running water are luxuries, if you can get them at all.

Everyone would prefer to see Bin Laden dead or captured, but if he has to be on the loose, he couldn’t be in a better place from our perspective. For Obama to suggest that he is somehow within easy reach of the resources to hit us again, just because he is within an arbitrarily chosen geographic distance of a place where he used to hide, is completely absurd.

While Bin Laden has been hiding in his cave, the U.S. has been slaughtering thousands of his people in Iraq, and no small number of them in Afghanistan either. And Al Qaeda has not hit the U.S. again.

All this is because Bush refused to accept the rules that we can do nothing to anyone unless they first do something to us. The U.S. has gone on the offensive, chosen our own strategic priorities and changed the dynamics of the world in which Al Qaeda operates.

Obama would prefer to let our enemies dictate our strategic priorities and our tactical maneuvers. Perhaps this is why a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Americans prefer John McCain by a wide margin in the role of commander-in-chief. People are starting to figure out that, contrary to what Obama thinks, you don’t ensure your security by letting your enemy make the rules.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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