Lessons Learned

Let me heartily endorse Ed Kilgore's analysis of the Democrats and national security policy, but then introduce one major quibble. Kilgore writes:

At an analytical level, John Kerry did a creditable job of handling national security issues, especially towards the end of the campaign when he consistently blasted the administration for an Iraq adventure that distracted from the war on terrorism, essentially adopting the Bob Graham-Wes Clark "right idea, wrong Arabs" approach of opposing the war on national security grounds. But he never achieved the simplicity of the Graham-Clark message, in part because of his own wandering views on Iraq, and in part because the other elements of his national security agenda sounded like a Foreign Service School master's thesis, which a lot of fine detail but little in the way of a clear overarching theme.

Now this is all correct, but it seems to me to call for a little 'fessing up on the part of Democratic Iraq War supporters, particularly those, like our friends at the DLC [NB: I got this wrong too, but I'm happy to admit I was wrong], who argued for the nomination of a pro-war candidate in part on national security grounds. I think Kerry may well have been the best nominee available, because Wes Clark and Howard Dean both had separate problems as candidates, but I think there can be no doubt that Kerry -- and, indeed, the Democratic Party as a whole -- would have been better served by taking the "unnecessary distraction" line from the get-go, looking prescient as the war started to go sour, rather than looking opportunistic. In part, Kerry has no one to blame for this but himself. No one had a brain-controlling chip in his head telling him "vote for the war but issue dissent about the administration's lack of UN authorization." At the same time, this kind of "yes, but..." stance on the war really was urged on Kerry and other Democratic leaders by, among others, the DLC along with other prominent political strategists. In the end, it proved to be a disaster.

Thoroughgoing support for the war combined with critique of its conduct might have worked, and the "national security critique" (as opposed to the "American imperialism is bad" critique) might have worked, but the "we could have gotten away with it, too, if only we'd had UN authorization" line was a logical, moral, and political fiasco. It not only fed perceptions of Kerry as a flip-flopper, but worse gave rise to the notion that Democrats would be making security policy by asking people for permission slips. It's one thing to say that any given war was unwise, but that given some actual threat we wouldn't hesitate to use force, and another thing entirely to say that our view on whether or not force should be used is crucially tied to whether or not France thinks it's okay. In retrospect, it would have been better in some ways for Bush to have gotten a second resolution, but fundamentally that wouldn't have changed the fact that the war was a strategic error. At the same time, faced with a bona fide could reason to invade, the opposition of, say, China isn't really relevant.