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Journal js7a's Journal: Hawks Flock to Kerry 22

Journal by js7a
About now is when the strange bedfellows start getting really uncomfortable. Can you believe that The New Republic just endorsed John Kerry? I would have bet 10-to-1 odds against a few minutes ago, before I saw it with my own eyes. But of course I agree. Full text follows:

John Kerry for President by the Editors
The New Republic
Post date: 10.21.04
Issue date: 11.01.04 [cutting it a little close?]

There was a time, in the aftermath of September 11, when this magazine liked what it heard from George W. Bush. He said America was at war--not merely with an organization, but with a totalitarian ideology. And he pledged to defeat Islamist totalitarianism the same way we defeated European totalitarianism, by spreading democracy. For a publication that has long believed in the marriage of liberalism and American power, this was the right analysis. And its correctness mattered more than the limitations of the man from which it came.

Three years later, it has become tragically clear that the two cannot be separated. The president's war on terrorism, which initially offered a striking contrast to his special interest-driven domestic agenda, has come to resemble it. The common thread is ideological certainty untroubled by empirical evidence, intellectual curiosity, or open debate. The ideology that guides this president's war on terrorism is more appealing than the corporate cronyism that guides his domestic policy. But it has been pursued with the same sectarian, thuggish, and ultimately self-defeating spirit. You cannot lead the world without listening to it. You cannot make the Middle East more democratic while making it more anti-American. You cannot make the United States more secure while using security as a partisan weapon. And you cannot demand accountable government abroad while undermining it at home.

And so a president who promised to make America safer by making the Muslim world more free has failed on both counts. This magazine has had its differences with John Kerry during his career and during this campaign. But he would be a far better president than George W. Bush.

On domestic policy, Bush has been Newt Gingrich without the candor. Like Gingrich, he envisions stripping away many of the welfare-state protections that shield economically vulnerable Americans from the vagaries of the free market (while insulating corporations ever more from those same forces). But, rather than explicitly opposing popular government programs, as Gingrich did, Bush has pursued a more duplicitous strategy: He is eviscerating the government's ability to pay for them. His tax cuts, while sold as short-term measures to revive the economy, actually represent long-term assaults on the progressive tax code. If allowed to fully take effect, they will substantially shift the tax burden from unearned wealth to income, dramatically increasing inequality. And they will produce what Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, has privately called a "fiscal crisis"--a collapse in government revenue just as the baby-boom retirement sends Medicare and Social Security costs skyrocketing. This crisis will sap America's ability to wage the war on terrorism--since government will lack the funds to adequately safeguard homeland security or expand the military. It will create enormous pressure to eviscerate the government protections that guarantee poor and middle-class Americans even the meager economic security they enjoy today. And it will be entirely by design.

The tax cuts are typical of a president who cloaks a relentlessly ideological domestic agenda in moderate, problem-solving language--and gets away with it by distorting the facts. In 2001, Bush presented his policy on stem cells as a pragmatic compromise--in which research on preexisting stem-cell lines would be funded but research on new ones would not. But the supposed compromise was based on a falsehood. Bush vastly exaggerated the number of viable preexisting stem-cell lines, thus pretending he was facilitating the medical research most Americans support while actually crippling it in obeisance to his conservative Christian base.

On prescription drugs, the story is similar. With elderly Americans demanding that the government cover their prescription-drug costs, Bush endorsed a bill that administered such coverage not through Medicare but through the private sector in which his administration harbors a near-theological faith. Since private insurers had to be lured into the market with large subsidies, Bush's plan offered less coverage, at greater cost, than it would have under Medicare. But, when Medicare's chief actuary tried to estimate the bill's true cost, his superiors threatened to fire him. Only after the legislation passed did the Bush administration admit that it would cost $134 billion more than it had previously acknowledged.

By contrast, John Kerry has a record of fiscal honesty and responsibility that continues the tradition of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Unlike most Democrats, he supported the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction plan. Unlike most Republicans, he supported Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction package. And, unlike President Bush, he supports the "pay as you go" rules that, in the 1990s, helped produce a budget surplus.

It is true that, in this campaign, Kerry has proposed more spending than his partial repeal of the Bush tax cut will fund. But he has also said that, if the repeal does not bring in enough revenue, he will scale back his proposals. In fact, one of the virtues of Kerry's health plan is that, unlike Clinton's, it can easily be broken down into modest reforms. Even if Kerry merely makes good on his pledge to dramatically expand Medicaid and schip, programs that offer health coverage to poor children and adults, he will have done more to help struggling Americans than Bush has in his four years.

On foreign policy, Kerry's record is less impressive. His vote against the 1991 Gulf war suggested a tendency to see all American military action through the distorting prism of Vietnam. And his behavior in the current Iraq debate has not been exemplary. To be fair, his position has been more consistent than his detractors give him credit for. Republicans mock him for "voting for the war" before opposing it. But Bush himself urged congressional authorization for war as a way to force U.N. inspectors back into Iraq and to disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully. It was reasonable to believe that only a credible U.S. threat of force would produce an intrusive new inspections regime (which it did). And Kerry is right that, if Bush had allowed those inspections to continue, they would have eventually revealed that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and eviscerated the rationale for war.

Kerry's greater failure was his vote against the $87 billion supplemental to equip American troops and rebuild Iraq. He was right to support funding the supplemental by repealing part of the tax cut (particularly since Bush officials like Paul Wolfowitz had shamelessly suggested that the war would cost America virtually nothing). But, once that effort failed, he should have supported the legislation anyway, as Senator Joseph Biden did. Building "firehouses in Baghdad"--a notion Kerry has repeatedly mocked--is not only something we owe the Iraqi people, it stems from the fundamentally liberal premise that social development can help defeat fanaticism. Abandoning that principle under pressure from Howard Dean is the most disturbing thing Kerry has done in this campaign.

But Kerry's critics are wrong to cite his opposition to the Gulf war--and his criticism of the current Iraq war--as evidence of his supposed reluctance to forcefully wage the war on terrorism. It is conceivable that, in the coming years, the United States might need to launch military action against another Muslim regime (though, given how greatly Bush has overextended the military, it is hard to see how we would do so). But the war on terrorism is far more likely to require military action within states, to secure lawless areas that terrorists have exploited.

The Bush administration's misguided tendency to see Al Qaeda as the instrument of rogue governments made it more willing to use force against Iraq but less willing to use force in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. Kerry, by contrast, seems inclined to use American power where it could genuinely damage Al Qaeda. Even during the Democratic primaries, he attacked the Bush administration for not sending U.S. troops into Tora Bora to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the waning days of the Afghan war. He has proposed doubling U.S. Special Forces for operations just like that. And he has proposed strengthening America's capacity to act--including even militarily--to prevent nuclear proliferation, an issue on which the Bush administration has proved astonishingly passive.

Kerry's apparent willingness to act within states is particularly important because the U.N.'s obsession with sovereignty renders it impotent in such circumstances. His support for the Kosovo war, waged without U.N. approval, is encouraging in this regard, as is his openness to using U.S. troops--presumably without the Security Council's blessing--in Darfur, Sudan. These encouraging signs counterbalance his worrying tendency to describe multilateralism--and U.N. support--as an end in itself rather than instrument of American power. If elected, this tension will likely be a theme of his presidency, as it was of Clinton's.

Critics also call Kerry a narrow realist uninterested in battling Al Qaeda in the realm of ideas. But he has suggested an ambitious effort to support democratic civil society in the Muslim world. And, while we don't know whether Kerry would actually carry out such a campaign, we know that Bush--for all his grand rhetoric--has not. The administration's Greater Middle East Initiative, supposedly its signature effort to promote democracy in the Muslim world, was gutted after protests from the very autocracies President Bush pledged to reform. And, while the Iraq war was supposed to inspire liberals throughout the region, it may be doing the opposite. Anti-Americanism has reached such toxic levels that dissidents in Muslim countries seem increasingly fearful of any association with the United States. This is the bitter fruit of an occupation conducted with such shocking arrogance and carelessness that it calls into question whether the Bush administration's pledge to turn Iraq into a model democracy was ever really sincere.

But the war against Islamist totalitarianism is not merely a struggle for Muslim minds; it is a struggle for American ones as well. In the weeks after September 11, Bush presided over a country more united--with more faith in its government--than at any other time in recent memory. He has squandered that unity and trust for the cheapest of reasons. His administration has used the war on terrorism as a bludgeon against congressional Democrats and has implied that its critics are aiding the enemy. And it has repeatedly misled the public--touting supposed evidence of Iraq's nuclear program that American intelligence analysts knew was highly dubious, rebuking General Eric Shinseki for telling the truth about how many troops it would take to occupy Iraq successfully, and firing Lawrence Lindsey for saying how much it would cost.

The result is a country bitterly divided, distrustful of its government, and weaker as a result. The next time an American president tries to use force in the war on terrorism, he will not merely lack the world's trust, he will lack much of the American people's as well. That may be Bush's most damning legacy of all. He has failed the challenge of these momentous times. John Kerry deserves a chance to do better.

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Hawks Flock to Kerry More

Hawks Flock to Kerry

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  • hell international airport: (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    planes grounded, wings iced
    • The coffers must be re-stocked. So in eight years the military-industrial-fundamentalist complex can pull another stunt such as their 2001 increase in the amount of uranium dust being burned in the commons?
  • The common thread is ideological certainty untroubled by empirical evidence, intellectual curiosity, or open debate.

    Perhaps the authors of this piece also read the NY Times Magazine [nytimes.com]?
  • So New Republic isn't exactly a left-leaning publication, but looking at the articles posted on their homepage, they endorsed Clinton in 1992, Dukakis in 1988, and Mondale in 1984. It looks like this isn't their first time endorsing a Democrat.
    • They endorsed Mondale in '84? I didn't know that. Thank you.

      I'm strongly against 64 and weakly against 69.

  • The endorsement of the New Republic is something that should worry anti-war Kerry supporters, not enthuse them. This editorial cheers Kerry's neoconservative politics, including his willingness to defy all international laws and further militarize national policy. It is disgusting to read.

    Marty Peretz and his pirate crew are totally implicated in the crimes of the Bush administration, their opinion ought to count for zero in progressive circles.

    • I dunno, I thought it had some good points: there's a subtext that would seem to be in favor of turning Iraq over to the Iraqis and their neighbors (Why not just the Iraqis? That seems improbable in a four-year time frame based on ethnic divisions.) under some kind of a modern Marshall Plan, which is the impression I've been getting is Kerry's exit strategy. Sure that might cost us a lot of money, but it would be worth it, wouldn't it? It might get our credit rating restored in Europe, for one thing.

      • there's a subtext that would seem to be in favor of turning Iraq over to the Iraqis and their neighbors

        What? Where does it say anything like that? The whole piece oozes contempt for the Arab and Muslim world and repeatedly suggests that their nations be open grounds for US military operations. The only "neighbor" the New Republic crew would consider turning Iraq over to is Israel.

        some kind of a modern Marshall Plan, which is the impression I've been getting is Kerry's exit strategy.

        Kerry doesn't have

        • Where does it say anything like that?

          The part about spreading democracy. I think Kerry will stand up to Israel more than Clinton did, but there's only one way to find out.

          • Where does it say anything like that?

            The part about spreading democracy.

            Come on, you're a politically sophisticated person. You know very well that all this talk about "spreading democracy" is code for spreading US control. That's the neocons' favorite catchphrase.
            I think Kerry will stand up to Israel more than Clinton did...
            My god, I will be really impressed if you show me a recent Kerry quote that substantiates that belief.
            • Well, if you claim to be able to interpret political "code," which I admit to usually getting wrong when I try, then what do you make of this Krauthammer column [chron.com]?

              • [W]hat do you make of this Krauthammer column?

                Krauthammer is a complete lunatic on the Middle East. He defines anti-Zionism as the belief that Arabs may perhaps be human beings. The column was a hack job to stir up American Zionists.

                It's easy to see what Kerry really thinks by reading his Israel position paper [johnkerry.com]. He's for the apartheid wall, against negotiating with Arafat, for Israeli regional military superiority (backed by huge US aid), against the right of return for Palestinian refugees, for the ext

                • The wall in itself isn't bad, it's the implementation. Israel has to have military superiority if it's going to survive. The right of return would, with cause the jews to get voted out of their country. It simply can't happen. Paying compensation to those people makes more sense, though I don't expect that to happen either. By international law Israel is guilty of many things. Create a Palestinian State and then consider pulling out.
          • Israel owns Kerry's ass - and Edwards.

            With Kerry, we're out the window, on a ledge. With Bush... take away the ledge!

            • I hope we have chance to find out. Israel would be stronger if they took a few reparition lumps and re-integrated, back to their calm 1960 stablity. The Arab Israeli citizens will reach a majority in 10 to 15 years, so it's hard for me to feel strongly about it.
              • The demographics are what is fueling the hyper-fascism right now. Wall-building and aquifer-theft, etc...
                • The Arab-Israeli citizens, for the most part, are inside the fence and very well integrated and assimilated, right? I've heard worse stories about protistant/catholic surname-based discrimination in Ireland than what goes on in the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem business district. I want to know more. Am I off base here?
                  • Integrated and assimilated? To some degree. In Israel, the Oriental Jews are poorly assimilated themselves. Unless they are from educated or military backgrounds (as are many Iranian Jews)then they face pretty ugly discrimination. The Iranians have a good social network, and have broken a good deal of this. Moroccans and Yemenis, pretty much not.

                    When Christian and Muslim Arabs are prevented by law from holding certain offices, or owning certain property, assimilation is always relative.

                  • The Arab-Israeli citizens, for the most part, are inside the fence and very well integrated and assimilated, right?
                    Not really, no. Arab-Israelis are subject to all sorts of de facto and de jure discrimination. For instance, they can be stripped of citizenship if they marry Palestinians [bbc.co.uk]. Arab-Israeli solidarity with the current Intifada is considered a pretty big deal.

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