At least Mickey Kaus is honest:
[W]e survived Carter and we'd survive Kerry (though it will be a long, hard slog!). I plan to vote for him because I think a) we need to take a time out from Bush's strident public global terror war in order to prevent it from becoming a damaging, lifelong West vs. Islam clash--in order to "rebrand" America and digest the hard-won gains we've made in Iraq and Afghanistan (if they even remain gains by next January). Plus, b) it would be nice to make some progress on national health care, even if it's only dialectical "try a solution and find out it doesn't work" progress. I could change my mind--if, for example, I thought Kerry would actually sell out an incipient Iraqi democracy in a fit of "realistic" Scowcroftian stability-seeking.
It's no wonder Peggy Noonan wrote what she did just days ago. I've heard this "take a break" line before, and reading it from Kaus indicates that the soft left has made their case for the war on terror: stop it, reassign terrorism to its pre-9/11 status as an inconspicuous problem for law enforcement, return to matters of greater consequence like socialized medicine. It's as frank an admission as we're likely to get. With Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry having flip-flopped less on his statements corroborating this view — from his attacks on the White House's "ideological" foreign policy to his lack of support for postwar Iraq, to his echo of Kaus' opinion that the war is in fact "not primarily" a military war — this sentiment may become the centerpiece of his national security platform.
This is an argument Bush should relish, dangerous as the left's lethargy is, because the "time out" argument is an emotional and flimsy one; really nothing more than a relativist bid to drop out. Kaus' worry of a "damaging, life-long" clash is a peculiar aversion to what already is — Islamism can trace its roots to the early part of the last century, its hijackings and assassinations four decades back, its global designs as old as I am. That's Kaus' life-long clash, having killed thousands before September 11th. Think back to when the increasingly Islamist Saddam Hussein still ruled in Baghdad, when Iraqis shown on television mouthed Ba'athist propaganda and we assumed they were our enemies — while we heard reports of the thousands dying under Saddam's misuse of his stipends. That particular "clash" ended abruptly, and in less than two years the West has an increasingly confident ally, fighting alongside us in the first "clash." Remember Afghanistan, once Osama bin Laden's inherited backyard, now on the verge of its first free and fair elections. We should seek the same potential in Iranian and Syrian democrats — democrats of all nations.
Marking time won't help: the authoritarian threat we face now came about precisely because the free West spent three generations trying to "digest" its gains after the Second World War, and again after the Cold War, all the while ignoring the Near East's festering culture. As with the Soviets, the left incorrectly assumes that our enemies are as lackluster and unfocused as they; it doesn't seem to register that democracy is a topic of discussion in Arab circles not only because Saddam Hussein was deposed but that the Near East's dictators can't be certain the same won't befall them. The region's reaction to a "hands-off" message from Washington is predictable, the resulting squelching of nascent democratic dissidents unsettling to think about.
Kaus' condition on a vote is a little bit of a fib, since he himself noted John Kerry's indifference to another strongman in Iraq. He should know what the Massachusetts senator thinks about individual liberties. What Kaus has signaled is that he's ready for another Jimmy Carter, which is difficult not to translate by any standard as an admission of defeat — and four deleterious years under an ineffectual loser. Is this what the rest of Kerry's supporters want? Defending such an aspiration would defeat John Kerry's bid for the White House, a killing blow President Bush could easily deliver.
