I was a little disappointed in the chapter on "National Security" in James Carville and Paul Begala's Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future (copyright 2006).
The chapter had strengths: its argument (based on the concerns and
actions of Al Gore and the Clinton Administration) that a President Al
Gore would have prevented 9/11; its argument that the Bush
Administration did not address certain vulnerabilities even after 9/11;
its critique of George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq War; and its
explanation of how the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent put
people's lives at risk and damaged certain U.S. intelligence projects
throughout the world (i.e., if Valerie Plame is pretending to represent a
company, and that company is revealed to be fake through her outing,
what happens to the other agents who are pretending to represent that
company, or the foreigners who act as if they are working with it?). My problem with this chapter was that it did not adequately detail what should be done instead.
On
some level, this is understandable. If a number of Democrats were not
too crazy about the Iraq War, then expecting them to come up with a
solution to win it may be too much to ask. As Bush asked about
John Kerry in 2004, how would Kerry convince other nations to help the
U.S. in Iraq, if Kerry publicly believes that the Iraq War was the wrong
war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time? Or, as Carville
and Begala say on pages 118-119: "Democrats should set the bar for Bush
in Iraq: victory. They should support any request for funding for our
troops in the field. But they need not be shamed into silence merely
because they don't have a silver bullet for a problem that has no
obvious solution."
The thing is, Carville and Begala (at least in
this book) don't seem to have a silver bullet for the War on Terror,
period. They offer good insights, but (as far as I can see) they
provide no proposals as to how to utilize those insights to meet a
coherent goal. They mock Bush's simplistic view that radical Islamic
terrorists hate us because they abhor the American way of life (which,
in my opinion, is part of the reason that they hate us, but not the
whole reason), and they refer to Michael Scheuer's statement that the
Royal Family in Saudi Arabia steals a lot of oil revenues from its
citizens. But what do Carville and Begala want us to do with Scheuer's
analysis? How would they use that analysis in a coherent plan of
action?
On pages 124-126, Carville and Begala advance good reasons
for multilateralism: that our allies (even France) have helped us in
catching terrorists, and that we need other countries in order to defeat
Al-Qaeda, which is a global network. But then Carville and Begala go
on to say that "Democrats cannot be the party of the permission slip",
that is, asking the rest of the world for permission to defend our
country's security. But what if we want to undertake a project to
defend our security and other countries won't back us up? Should we go
it alone, or abandon the project altogether? Carville and
Begala probably don't believe that the Iraq War was necessary for the
United States' security, but do they think that unilateralism would ever
be justified? They don't adequately address this. They say that Bush
lacks clear thinking on the War on Terror, but I wish that their
thinking had been clearer in this chapter.
Overall, though, I'd say that the Democrats have recovered from any perception that they are inept on the War on Terror.
President Barack Obama was part of the capture of Osama Bin-Laden, he
has authorized drones to take out Al-Qaeda members, and he has continued
some of President Bush's surveillance policies, even while pursuing a
policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan. President Obama has also rebuilt
relationships with other countries, such as Russia. Detractors can
argue that there are weaknesses to Obama's foreign policy, such as the
disappointment that the Arab Spring has wrought, as well as the disaster
in Benghazi. And many leftists are concerned that drones have taken
the lives of innocent people. But, overall, Obama has had a strategy of
fighting the War on Terror, something that Democrats seemed to lack for
many years (or such is my impression).