As my sister
Sheba has documented in
this diary, my conservative father and my upstart nephew (still in grade school) have engaged in our ongoing family political dialogue.
Herewith, one of the recent exchanges, in which B--- and I engage my father directly on the key reasons for voting Kerry.
I hope you find some good ideas in here for convincing any leaners in your personal circle to vote for Kerry. Our future depends upon it.
B---, I'm really proud of you for joining in our family conversation about politics and the future of our country. You're intelligent, brave, and you write well.
Dad, I'm going to step in here and address your points, since it seems that your response may have been a bit much for B--- to handle all at once.
B--- wrote:
Hi, grandpa!
Of course the John Kerry people know about the terrorists and the 9/11 attack!
(Grand)Dad wrote:
No one says they don't. The question is whether they have the will and the intention to do the right thing about it. We believe they have neither.
The important point here is what the "right thing" is. Dad, as you and I have discussed before, reasonable people have differing views on what that is. I, and John Kerry, believe that a non-state actor cannot be defeated by the unilateral application of military force against a state in which operatives of that actor happen to exist. We believe that terrorists are a particularly dangerous form of mass murderer cult, and must be combated through arms, law enforcement, economic pressures, and intelligence. The Bush administration clearly believes that the best solution is militarily enforced regime change in nations that support (or might support, or appear to harbor) terrorists.
Rather than re-hash that argument, let us agree that the difference in candidates is a difference in the desired approach. Neither man wants the terrorists to win. Both men are patriots who wish America to win this conflict. The difference is in the strategy each means to apply.
Therefore, voting for Kerry is NOT a vote for retreat from the terrorists. It is a vote for a different, wider-reaching, multilateral approach to defeating them. Similarly, voting for Bush is NOT a vote for war; it is a vote for a strategy of using military power to transform other nations in order to remove support for the terrorists.
I recommend that we all step away from implying that either man is weak or evil. They are both demonstrably neither. They just disagree, as we do. We are free to say that we believe either of them is wrong; we are disingenuous if we suggest that either lacks the will to defend this country.
B--- wrote:
And John Kerry said that he was going to hunt the terrorists down and not just bomb whole countries.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Talk is cheap. Hunting down the terrorists is a long and tedious job, and we are already doing it. It will probably never be finished; we have to settle down and face that fact. The world has changed forever.
Let's read some of that cheap talk:
"The most urgent national security challenge we face is the war against those who attacked our country on September 11th, the war against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda," Kerry said. "As president, I will fight a tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror. My priority will be to find and capture or kill the terrorists before they get us - and I will never take my eye off the ball...George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority. As president, I will finish the job in Iraq and refocus our energies on the real war on terror." (John Kerry, 9/24/04)
To be fair, talk is all a challenger can offer, especially when he is in the minority party in Congress. We will see Kerry's actions plainly enough should he be elected. It is not in dispute that John Kerry has fought, bled, and killed for this country before (though he later exercised his right to free speech and disputed the value of the conflict in which he did so). I therefore believe him to be a man of action when presented with the opportunity.
As an example of when he applied his comprehensive approach to fighting terror groups, you need look no further than his leadership of the investigation into, and closure of, BCCI years ago. This bank was laundering and holding money for international terror groups, and John Kerry shut it down. Less money, less arms and fewer recruits; less arms and fewer recruits, less terrorism. Terrorism is a hydra -- we have to hack off all of its heads, and for that we need a broader view and the help of our allies.
I agree this conflict will never end. There is a "minimum conflict level" to be reached, however. In my opinion, we will reach this minimum conflict level with these terrorists sooner if Kerry is elected; my evidence for this is the increase in terror attacks worldwide since Bush's military move in Iraq began. When presented with two options, one of which has resulted in the opposite of the desired result and the other of which is untried, it's sensible to give the other option a go.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
We are not "just bombing whole countries". Bombs are part of war, but the hard part is and always will be the ground troops fighting it one door at a time, one hole in the ground at a time. That kind of war is also part of the war against terrorists.
The part you can't see is the part that has to be secret if we're ever going to get them, the spy work, the commando work and everything that goes with all that. It may not look as though we're doing those, and that's good, or we would fail.
Bombing is indeed part of war. There are always innocent victims in war, too. We have killed over 15,000 civilians in Iraq. That's 5 times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attack, and all 15,000 died in a nation that was not responsible for that attack, and which has been demonstrated to have posed a diminishing threat (see my comments on the Duelfer report below).
What would it take for these deaths to NOT be acceptable? What information would have to come to light? Or are all these deaths, and the ones to come, acceptable regardless of what we find out later?
We know for a fact that we are destroying a country. How do we know that it was worth it? How do we know that it wasn't? It's all conjecture at this point. But the evidence is not looking good, from where I sit. Increased attacks. Decreased stability. Decreased world support. No evidence of a threat needing pre-emption (beyond the ravings of the insane dictator Saddam Hussein, who was so deranged he didn't even know his own scientists were stealing from him and had no WMDs).
Secrets are also impossible to verify. There's no way we can know, for better or worse, that any of our clandestine operations are succeeding, failing, or even being conducted. Frankly, I must base my decisions on what I can see. I do no vote on faith.
B--- wrote:
Sure there are terrorists in Iraq. Just like there are in other countries. But that doesn't mean that we can just go bomb all the countries that have some terrorists in it.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
This is way too simple an argument. The point is not that there are terrorists in Iraq. In fact most of the "insurgents" there now are militant Islamists from other countries, brought in probably by Osama and others like him who want to make it look as though the Iraqis don't like the idea of being free from Saddam.
Actually, the Iraqis love being free of Saddam. Now they want to be free of us. Yep, they can hate the U.S. occupation and hate Saddam at the same time. Go figure.
Attacking Iraq was a pointless, horrifically costly move if one wants to defeat Al Qaeda. Besides the lack of any connection between the two (per the final inspection report by U.S. inspector Charles Duelfer), attacking a state is an utterly useless way to harm Al Qaeda.
According to conservative intelligence estimates quoted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Al Qaeda is present in more than 60 countries and has "18,000 potential terrorists at large". Al Qaeda is "more resilient than was previously understood and has sought to find replacements for operational commanders like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad, all of whom have been captured." (BBC, 5/25/04; New York Times, 8/10/04; Wall Street Journal, 8/16/04)
(Grand)Dad wrote:
We aren't bombing the country; the country is the Iraqi people, and we are avoiding them very carefully. Sure, in war some innocent people get killed, but we're doing a very good job of avoiding most of that. We have attacked and destroyed the evil regime of Saddam Hussein. (Evil is an OK word; it describes something contrary to the will of God, something bad, something with intent to wipe out something good.)
Saddam is gone from there, captured, and will stand trial. A new government of the Iraqi people is in place and is standing tall against the attacks of all these outsiders, terrorists who are trying to bring it down. It's a very scary thing to be president of Iraq right now; it's very likely he will be assassinated, but he is doing it anyhow because he believes in the work. There's a hero, and no question about it.
See my above comments regarding civilian casualties. And regarding the Iraqi people's opinion of Saddam.
We can dress this up in all the nice language we want, but the fact remains that we are killing and dying daily in Iraq. The CIA recently assessed the various possible outcomes of all that death and killing -- the likeliest were all rather bleak. The fact is that we did not prepare well for rebuilding the nation of Iraq after destroying it. The most likely result of all this killing and death, according to the CIA report, is...more killing and death. Extended insurgency or outright civil war.
B--- wrote:
Plus I thought that we were attacking Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Again, way too simple. That was one of the reasons, yes. They didn't have them yet, by the way, but just recently the commission investigating that (not Mr. Bush) decided that it was very clear Saddam was just laying low and would have begun developing them again just as soon as the UN sanctions were lifted.
Must we now undertake a global policy of killing based on intent? A legitimate war requires a concrete, demonstrable self-defense need. There are many, many nations that would develop WMDs if given the chance; after all, WMDs (nuclear weapons) are what cemented our position as a superpower. We continue to set the standard for nations...even in the ways we don't want to. Shall we engage in war with every nation on earth? This is akin to police arresting people who think bad thoughts. It's just not practicable.
We attacked Iraq because, in Bush's words, it represented a "grave and gathering threat." However, the Duelfer report showed "that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons," the Washington Post wrote. The report found no evidence that Iraq was using aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons, and "no evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium overseas after 1991." Weapons Inspector David Kay told the U.S. Senate that "... it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there... I think there are no large -- were no large stockpiles of WMD..." (Washington Post, 10/6/04; Knight Ridder, 10/7/04; Kay Testimony, 1/28/04)
I'll be the first to admit I thought Iraq had WMDs too. But they didn't. Integrity, to me, means owning up to my mistakes, repairing any resulting damage, and learning from them. The leader of the free world must demonstrate such integrity, or else he teaches the world only that might makes right. That is hardly the way to spread democracy and the rule of law.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
But more important is the purpose of freeing the Iraqi people to have their own government, a democracy where they can decide for themselves who runs the government. Once that is stable, other countries in the same trouble can be freed, one at a time, either from inside or from the outside, and that whole Middle East powder keg can settle down and become a reasonable part of the world community.
Make no mistake: these radical fundamentalist Islamists are on a mission to kill the rest of us. They believe that they can get to Heaven by doing that.
They are crazy, in other words. God is just not like that; He loves everyone and wants us all to work together, but there's no telling them that. They don't listen, and they just get madder. They want the whole world to be Muslim, and they will not stop until that happens. It's ironic, by the way, that they keep calling us Crusaders; that happened, what, a thousand years ago or so? And today THEY are the crusaders, only much worse. They are not just trying to free religious places; they are trying to take over the world. Like Hitler and Mussolini, only much worse.
And remember I'm not talking about all Muslims or even most of them. Just these few bad apples. But when there are so many, many Muslims worldwide, "a few" of them can still be a lot of people.
Actually, the problem is much larger and more complex than that. The problem is one of stateless terror groups attempting to destroy nation-states. As the New York Times reported:
"Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction.
"The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails." (NYT, 10/10/04)
This is made more obvious by now quickly these groups form and dissolve alliances with one another. It's not a monolithic Islamic enemy -- it's organized gangs of thugs who, like all organized criminals, sometimes work together against authority and sometimes have internecine wars. Some gangs use twisted visions of Islam as their recruitment pitch; others use other religions, or nationalism, or other attractive lies. It's the behavior that identifies them, not the beliefs.
B--- wrote:
You don't just change the reason why you do something once other people have found out that the previous reason isn't true. It's like a little kid trying to get out of trouble. He keeps making up reasons because his mom figures out that the other ones aren't true.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Nobody changed the reason. The reasons are still there: (1) to free the Iraqi people; (2) to stabilize the region by creating free peoples everywhere in it; (3) to prevent, by so doing, the placing in the hands of fanatics of long-range weapons which can deliver terrible payloads of nuclear or biological warheads which can destroy whole cities or more across the world. To me the most important thing is those people over there who have never had a chance at the free and productive life we have; but the protection of our side of the world is also a big one.
Whether or not Saddam happened to have WMD's at the time of the attack is interesting and relevant, but nowhere near a show stopper. We want to stop the process, not just its first fruits.
The process in Iraq was winding down, according to the Duelfer report. Contrary to what we all thought, sanctions were working. We have not stopped, or even retarded, the process of recruitment for the forces of chaos and death. We have accelerated it, as evidenced by the increase in global terror attacks since invading Iraq.
The central thesis of the Iraq invasion was pre-emption. We were pre-empting a "grave and gathering threat," according to the administration. One which would produce "mushroom clouds" and which was in league with terror groups including Al Qaeda.
We pre-empted nothing. Nothing. There were no WMDs. There were no WMD programs. There was no link to terror groups. Iraq was a secular state. The Baathists are NOT Islamists. They are secularists. Yes, Saddam was a dictator. Yes, he hated the U.S. But he was NOT a growing threat, and he had no WMDs, and he was NOT tied to Al Qaeda, and we therefore pre-empted NOTHING.
"The world is better off with Saddam in prison" is no defense of the invasion of Iraq. We would never have achieved Congressional and public consensus for the invasion if the administration had said "We need to invade Iraq because Saddam is a brutal dictator."
The world does not change. People do. Our fear has changed us. In our fear, we have lashed out at a nation in error. We must repair the damage, establish a democratic government in Iraq, admit our mistake and learn from it. We must be clear-headed, precise, and dispassionate in how we gather and interpret intelligence and apply force.
Faith and rage will not win this war -- that makes us just like the enemy. Reason and teamwork will be our deadliest weapons.
B--- wrote:
Since Bush lowered taxes, we've had to borrow money from other countries to pay for what we need to pay for.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Flat out wrong. We borrow from ourselves (in the form of bonds), not from other countries. No one else has anywhere near the money to loan us. We've always borrowed from ourselves. We are the ones who pay for most of the UN's budget, for example. We are also the ones who are spending the money, borrowed from ourselves, yes, to reconstruct Iraq. The lights are back on over there, you know, more so than ever before.
Wars do cost money, and WWII saw a huge increase in the national debt. But it's the free-spending liberals who usually raise that debt the most, and so they have to raise taxes so high that it stops businesses from being able to invest in more tools and more locations and more jobs. That means fewer people are earning money and fewer taxes come in, even when the tax RATE is higher.
The structure of the debt is interesting from an economic standpoint, but the fact of the matter remains that our government must repay its debts, including interest. The more we borrow today, the less we can do tomorrow.
No president in our history has cut taxes during the conduct of a war...until this president. If you want to vote on fiscal conservatism standards, I recommend you put Kerry in office. While he voted 98 times to raise taxes, he voted over 600 times to cut them. And nothing limits government spending like divided government. A Democrat in the White House and a Republican Congress will limit the deficit hemorrhaging.
Let me give you a quick rundown on what has happened to our economy on Bush's watch:
- This year the budget deficit will break a new record coming in at above $400 billion. This breaks last year's record of $375 billion. (source: Congressional Budget Office; Office of Management and the Budget)
- In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office estimated a budget surplus of $397 billion in FY2004. Instead, the Bush Administration has run the country on a budget deficit of $420 billion -- $800 billion worse than four years than was predicted four years ago (source: Congressional Budget Office; OMB)
- Since George Bush took office, the economy has lost 1.8 million private sector jobs. Interestingly, this "champion of smaller government" has expanded the public sector by some 800,000. (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics) Small government? Not under this administration.
- After 9/11, the tech bubble, and the recession, the Bush Administration predicted nearly 6 million new jobs would be created between January 2001 and May 2004. Instead, we lost more than 1 million jobs -- seven million jobs short. (BLS; Economic Report of the President, 2002)
- On average, jobs in growing industries pay $9,160 less -- or 21 percent less -- than jobs in industries that are shrinking. (Economic Policy Institute, "Jobs Shift From Higher Paying to Lower Paying Industries," 1/21/04)
B--- wrote:
And taxes can pay for good things.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Sometimes. Sometimes they pay for silly things too, and the point is that it's not you and I who get to decide, it's the government workers, not even people we elect, but people hired by other government workers. Phooey. ;-)
Keep in mind that the people we do elect make appointments. Those appointees make further appointments. And so on. So our votes do affect how government works.
Also, some government workers do what they do as a public service. Let's not tar all of them with such a broad brush.
B--- wrote:
My mom gets her pay from taxes, my school gets paid from taxes and I'm sure lots of other schools get paid from taxes.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Right, and there are certain services, like fire and police, which make more sense as government operations. But as a matter of fact, there is right now a serious debate over whether government schools can even do a good job at all, especially in the inner cities, and folks are saying that it would be better to increase competition between schools by giving some of this tax money back to the people in the form of vouchers which permit families to pay for their kids' education at whatever school they choose.
None of which makes it a bad idea to use taxation to pool public funds in order to pay for education.
B--- wrote:
Sure rich people pay more taxes. They also keep a bunch of money since they have so much.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Right again, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact it's their reward for using their brains and their brawn to provide goods and services which people are willing to pay for. If you tax something, you get less of it, and too many taxes take away the reward for people to work and create wealth. If you subsidize something, you get more of it, and paying people not to work is just nuts.
B--- wrote:
I don't get that part. Do you mean we should tax poor people because they're poor?
(Grand)Dad wrote:
No. I mean we should not pay them not to get jobs. The "poor" pay no taxes. And by the way, the "poor" who pay no taxes are far better off than the rich were a couple of hundred years ago, and better off than the vast majority of ordinary people in the rest of the world.
Really poor people, who can't afford food or shelter, are nowadays called "homeless". They are a problem, because you can't always tell which ones are lazy and which just haven't found a job yet. I frankly don't know how to decide whether to give anything to a homeless person. I think the idea that some churches and businesses have had, of printing and selling coupons that folks like me can give, which are good for food, is a good one. That way the money has to go for what the person says he wants it for.
"As you do to the least of these, so you do unto me." A wise man said that. At some level, we have a moral obligation to care for the indigent. We can disagree on how much help to give, and the form of the help, but the ethical thing to do is give help if I can. I am willing to write, and vote for, laws that force the citizenry to meet a minimum standard in this regard. That's how I view the tax code.
B--- wrote:
What the heck did John Kerry lie about?!?
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Oh, let's start with his patriotism. I believe he actually has lied, told falsehoods, about his dedication to his country. Between his supposed heroism in Vietnam and his supposed dedication to country today, there was a time when he worked very hard to discredit everything our troops were doing over there, going around with Jane Fonda and saying our soldiers were committing atrocities right and left. Sure, I bet there were a few; there always are, even in the best-disciplined armies, in time of war when everything is happening at once and things are not exactly orderly. But he was bad-mouthing us to the point of flat out lying, I believe.
To call man a liar means not only that he has lied, but that he is the kind of person who lies as a matter of habit, as a part of his daily life. I may be wrong, but I believe John Kerry is such a man.
If John Kerry is a liar, so is the Navy. John Kerry was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. You can review his military records for yourself, including the medal citations, if you like:
Review John Kerry's military records
That man fought bravely for his country. That is the very heart of patriotism. His honorable service is only disputed by one group of veterans, who did not even serve on the missions in question, who were funded by Kerry's political opponents, and whose accusations directly contradict the official record.
John Kerry never bad-mouthed our country. He testified against the POLICY of this country in going to war in Vietnam. He testified against what he believed was unethical behavior on the part of some of his fellow soldiers. John Kerry believed what he was saying. That's not lying. He might have been wrong or mistaken, but he was not lying.
Patriotism is not silence in the face of wrongdoing, or mute obedience to the policies of those running the nation. Patriotism is working tirelessly for the benefit and improvement of your country.
During the Vietnam war, and afterwards, many opponents of the war wrongly attacked those who fought in it. As a result of that, many people confused criticism of the war with criticism of the nation and its veterans. Not so. John Kerry attacked those who started the war, those who furthered it, and those who fought it dishonorably. He has always been an advocate for veterans, as his voting record shows. His outspoken criticism of America's Vietnam policies was in the service of improving his country.
B--- wrote:
John Kerry isn't the person who changed the reasons about why we started a war in Iraq.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Again: Nobody is. No one did.
B--- wrote:
And John Kerry fought in a war and has a piece of metal in his leg because of an explosion! You call that a wimp?!
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Anybody can be in the wrong place and get shrapnel in his leg. And that Kerry was in a war means only that he wasn't a conscientious objector getting out of the draft. Whether he "fought" or not is the subject of a current book I haven't read yet. They believe he didn't.
See my above comments regarding the reasons for war, and John Kerry's record. The man fought. Unless you want to believe a book published by clearly partisan authors decades after the period in question over the official Navy account of events and the word of those who were actually there.
B--- wrote:
Oh, and he does too have a backbone.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
If he had a backbone he wouldn't change his position every time he goes to a new place to speak.
He doesn't. The world is a complex place, and John Kerry has a deep understanding of that complexity. Any paragraph can be snipped into fragments that appear to contradict each other.
I find it interesting that he is simultaneously painted as "inconsistent" and "consistently liberal" by his opponents. Which is it?
B--- wrote:
From,
B---
(Grand)Dad wrote:
And there's a lot more I wrote below which you haven't answered yet. Still, it's great to have the opportunity to chat with you. I'm proud of you for taking me on.
Love ya!
.. Grandpa
I hope I have covered some of the gaps B--- left. My apologies for the great length of this email; it's been quite a bit of work to put together, and this is just too important to do halfway.
Love to you both,
Kyle
P.S. Dad, if you have some spare time after reading all of this, I've provided links below to three articles by conservative authors that you may find interesting. I apologize in advance that some of them use the "neocon" word you find to be so distracting. I hope that their conservative credentials serve to clear up any perceived bias you may detect from the use of this term.
Ballard Morton
Bob Barr
Henry J Watters, editor, The Columbia Tribune