The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Is CW changing to encompass the idea that Bush has made us less secure?
I believe that the Democratic candidates have to recast the debate on foreign policy and national security so that the American public comes to understand that we are less secure now and the situation is getting worse.
I think it is almost past time to be arguing about conducting a war in Iraq -- it happened. People who supported the war for reasons that were false (the imminent threat of WMDs) are mostly now just interested in seeing us succeed and get out.
But if they have a belief that preemptive war may be necessary in some drastic situations then they should be outraged that in the future when there may be a real risk to the U.S. it will be much harder to get anybody to believe us.
I find the analysis in the following article from the Washington Post fascinating:
Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility
By Glenn Kessler
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Within the United States, Bush does not appear to have suffered much political damage from the failure to find weapons, with polls showing high ratings for his handling of the war and little concern that he misrepresented the threat.
But a range of foreign policy experts, including supporters of the war, said the long-term consequences of the administration's rhetoric could be severe overseas -- especially because the war was waged without the backing of the United Nations and was opposed by large majorities, even in countries run by leaders that supported the invasion.
"The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.
The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid."
Already, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, China has rejected U.S. intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons. China is a key player in resolving the North Korean standoff, but its refusal to embrace the U.S. intelligence has disappointed U.S. officials and could complicate negotiations to eliminate North Korea's weapons programs.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the same problem could occur if the United States presses for action against alleged weapons programs in Iran and Syria. The solution, he said, is to let international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency take the lead in making the case, as has happened thus far in Iran, and also to be willing to share more of the intelligence with other countries.
The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future.
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If you now have Republicans making this argument I certainly think it could be effectively made by Democrats also.