The Law Enforcement Non-Debate

My friend Julian Sanchez says Dick Cheney's being misquoted. Everyone's running with this:

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.

When what Cheney said was this:

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

Given the full quote it appears Cheney was saying that the risk of a Kerry win isn't that it would lead to a terrorist attack, but that if there was a terrorist attack, a president Kerry would treat it as a law enforcement matter.

That's a less nasty charge but, if anything, it's a falser one. This whole debate over whether or not we should treat terrorism as a purely law enforcement matter is just something the Republicans made up one day. Before 9-11 there weren't any prominent Republicans arguing that we needed a more military response to al-Qaeda. Do you remember George W. Bush's promise on the campaign trail in 2000 to invade Afghanistan? I don't. After 9-11 there weren't any prominent Democrats arguing against a military response to al-Qaeda. Do you remember John Kerry leading the opposition to the Afghan War from the floor of the Senate? I don't. We don't remember those things because they didn't happen. The only way to make any sense out of this pseudo-debate is if we treat we're "really at war" with al-Qaeda to mean something like: "since we're really at war with al-Qaeda is follows that our counterterrorism strategy should involve fighting a lot of conventional wars, so we'd better fight a conventional war with Iraq since that's the most plausible candidate for a conventional war even though it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda." There's a kind of logic to that claim, but it's not a very reasonable one.

The fact is that both parties agree that, on a day-to-day basis, counterterrorism will mostly involve law enforcement and intelligence. Both parties also agree that, sometimes, military action may be needed. The parties don't even really disagree as to when military action is needed. Instead, the Republicans persist in pretending that the Iraq War was about fighting al-Qaeda, while Democratic Iraq War supporters and Iraq War opponents both agree that it was about something else. Which is fine. That a given foreign policy initiative is not about directly combatting al-Qaeda does not, as such, invalidate it. It's okay to be against terrorism but also be in favor of doing some other stuff with our foreign policy. There are questions to be asked about both the timing and the planning of the Iraq War, but it's real motive -- to prevent the emergence of Saddam's Iraq as a hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf -- wasn't some kind of burst of insanity, one can mount a respectable, honest defense of the idea were one to be so inclined. But Bush and Cheney prefer to lie, so what can one do.