The Terror Comeback

Part of the dynamics of the primary campaign has been a certain tendency of foreign policy issues to go into eclipse as the leading contenders from each side compete with one another for the affections of base voters who tend to be motivated by each coalition's core economic and cultural interests. But Tom Edsall wisely points out that even if the economic situation worsens, a general election campaign is bound to have a hefty focus on terrorism and security if for no other reason than that the GOP doesn't really have any other good options. Brian Katulis says some smart things about this deeper into the piece:

The most nuanced analysis of the politics of terror was provided by Brian Katulis, a less well known figure in the Democratic foreign policy establishment who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he is a Senior Advisor to the Center's Middle East Progress project.

"I wouldn't say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond 'Bush screwed things up.'....Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it's not dissimilar to Bush's narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it's kind of an easy story line....

"It's those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.

"So I think there's a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we're just not hearing it yet at that political communications level. We're seeing and hearing tick lists that make the broader public's eyes glaze over. On the conservative side, we hear a story line - a batshit crazy one for the most part that got us in the predicament that we're in now, but hey, it's a story. Most people would rather go to a movie that has a plot."

I would add that one thing I still don't see from Democrats on these issues is the correct atmospherics of confidence. When the candidates talk about most things, they talk about them with an apparent air that they believe everything they're saying. But when they talk about terrorism or Iraq they have a tendency, in my view, to often sound like they're stuck in 2002 -- nervous, defensive, cautious. They don't sound like a political party that believes that the evident failures of Bush's policies throughout 2005 and 2006 played a major role in boosting their party's political fortunes. And they don't sound to me as if they're eager to engage with these issues. But while confidence alone is no guarantee of success, going into a fight believing your going to lose is a recipe for trouble.

Comments

Is it too hard to say that the best method of terrorism prevention is to seek for residents of other countries the things we seek for ourselves in the U.S.A? That international problems require international solutions? According to the evidence, the answer is yes.

The lesson of the Bush years is that our nation is not omnipotent, and that the huge sums we spend on military power are hugely superfluous to the national interest. Alas, citizens of this country are too arrogant to believe A, and too frightened to believe B.

Posted by JMG | January 20, 2008 11:34 AM

I would add that one thing I still don't see from Democrats on these issues is the correct atmospherics of confidence. When the candidates talk about most things, they talk about them with an apparent air that they believe everything they're saying. But when they talk about terrorism or Iraq they have a tendency, in my view, to often sound like they're stuck in 2002 -- nervous, defensive, cautious.

You may be right. But both Clinton and Obama sound pretty good on the issue of terrorism/national security to me (not that I necessarily like the substance of what they're saying). They're both clear, confident, and articulate when discussing the subject. Too confident, if anything.

But it's pretty hard for a canddiate to escape a narrative frame. Especially when even progressive journalists are helping to construct it and confine them. Not to scold or anything. It's just that I think that neither of the (now two) top-tier Democratic candidates sound at all like it's 2002. Try listening again.

Posted by Ari | January 20, 2008 11:45 AM

In the meantime, I'll try to learn how to spell "candidate."

Posted by Ari | January 20, 2008 11:46 AM

And what will happen if there is a major terrorist incident between now and election day? The Republicans would accuse the Democrats of practically causing the incident because they were so "weak".. This is the Republican's greatest (and perhaps only) hope to win. Not that they would collaborate with any terrorists to arrange an incident, of course.... (fortunately Karl Rove is no longer in business).

Posted by wab | January 20, 2008 11:50 AM

And what will happen if there is a major terrorist incident between now and election day? The Republicans would accuse the Democrats of practically causing the incident because they were so "weak". This is the Republican's greatest (and perhaps only) hope to win. Not that they would collaborate with any terrorists to arrange an incident, of course.... (fortunately Karl Rove is no longer in business).

Posted by wab | January 20, 2008 11:50 AM

Alas, citizens of this country are too arrogant to believe A, and too frightened to believe B.

Bingo.

If John Kerry gave this speech in 2004, he'd have carried 43 states, and be cruising to a second term.

"Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow John Edwards and I are taking a rental truck full of ammonium nitrate and dragster fuel up to Tonawanda, NY, where with the help of an old cellphone, we'll be levelling the local Islamic center.

The media is invited to accompany us, but are advised to stay far back, lest they be injured by flying debris.

God bless the United States, and nobody else."

They'd have lost MA, NY, CA, ME, CT, VT, and RI. They'd have carried the rest. Bush would have lost by Landon-sized margins.

American politics for the foreseeable future is poker, played with the bodies of dead brown people who worship the wrong God.

You can point to polls showing low levels of support for the war in Iraq, or approval for the handling of 'terrorism' or 'national security', but half of the %-70% who 'disapprove' are as likely to have wanted more indiscriminate killing, more unilateral adventurism, than less. They're against the war because they're tired of the war, because it has gone on too long, and didn't finish with a bang, like a a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, not because it was illegal, immoral, stupid, pointless and futile.

The GOP is about to nominate as its candidate the candidate who's most up front about more wars, longer wars, deadlier -- to all parties-- wars. McCain can look at the camera and say "I will kill for you, to calm your fears, and stroke your ego'.

The GOP can point to real, extant hecatombs of infidel dead, and the Democrats can only promise.

Even absent another terrorist incident, I put the chances of a Democratic win at less than 20%.

You almost have to hope for a deep, deep recession, because this madness will rule American politics for a generation, until it burns itself out, until its major practitioners all die of old age, unless and until the major challenge confronting the national limbic-system-lizard-brain is hunger and not fear.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | January 20, 2008 12:09 PM

Matt, the issue here is terrorism specifically, not the broader national security debate. Developing a convincing line on terrorism is not the same thing as making the much easier case that Bush's overall foreign policy, including the Iraq fiasco, has been a disaster. The more specific terrorism issue was important in 2004, and it remains a challenging one for Democrats.

The reason it is challenging is that there have been no major terrorist attacks on US soil since 2001. That means that a lot of people will be very open to the suggestion that the Bush policy of "taking the gloves off" has kept us safer at home, even if that policy is morally disreputable and even if our fortunes abroad are now a mess.

And what is the Bush policy in the public's and the world's eyes? It's locking up and shaking down every young Muslim male in sight; rounding up jihadists around the world; interning a lot of them; torturing some of them in our own prisons; rendering others to foreign countries to be tortured there; sending in covert hit teams to assassinate key jihadist figures; spying on lots of innocent people in the effort to uncover the few needles in the haystack; aggressively pursuing greater presidential powers and bending or ignoring constitutional restrictions and prohibitions. Bush's defenders would claim that, even though some innocent people have been hurt in this effort, it has also succeeded in preventing or deterring a lot of bad actors from carrying out their plans.

The Democrats, as they should, are challenging a lot of this policy. Part of the challenge lies in an appeal to traditional American principles. This is effective for some people, but for those who elevate their personal safety, or the safety of their loved ones, above all other values the appeal to principle is not very effective. So another part of the challenge is that these policies are making us less safe. There is a good case to be made here, especially if one considers the loss in safety that comes from the erosion of friendships and alliances abroad. But it is a more complex case to make. And so long as there are no major attacks here in the "homeland", the claim that the Bush gloves-are-off policy is making us less safe remains in the realm of speculation.

Posted by Dan Kervick | January 20, 2008 12:13 PM

I have spent the past ten years thinking about what Giuliani is calling a new form of terrorism -Internet crime. I just wrote a book about it in fact.

http://dotcrimemanifesto.com/

I agree the Democrats need a plot: look at the techniques that were successful in defeating terrorism in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Copy the techniques that worked in practice not the ones that work on TV.

It is really unfashionable to say it but the best way to beat terrorism is just like any other form of crime. Bobby Sands starved himself to death demanding that the UK government give him political prisoner status. Al Qaeda was granted political prisoner status immediately, and their own political prison and political justice system.

The West German police was far more effective in stopping the RAF (Baader-Meinhof gang) using police methods than the UK was with internment, hooding and the rest. This was realized by the British government early on but the damage was done.

We need to stop fighting terror with slogans and fight with strategy. The slogan war on terror is counter-productive, it raises the terrorists to the status of a state. These people are criminals and bandits, drug dealers, hirabah not jihadis.

Devising ever more intrusive means of collecting data is pointless without the means to analyze. The most telling section in the 9/11 report was the part where they reported on the inadequacy of the FBI computer system, lacking the ability to perform binary keyword searches. Freeh had mounted a one man crusade to build wire tapping capabilities into the fabric of the Internet but neglected the vastly more important task of applying the data already collected.

We need to cut off the funds going to the terrorists. This is understood by the career civil service, FBI, secret service etc. But efforts in this area have taken place in spite of rather than as a result of the political appointees. Time spent chasing down false leads extracted through torture was time that could not be spent shutting down the funding networks.

Posted by Phillip Hallam Baker | January 20, 2008 1:01 PM

This is just a narrower version of the Democrat's fundamental problem--they lack a narrative that allows voters to identify with them, that pulls the different themes and policies they promote together, that provides an elevator speech the way "lower taxes, smaller government, stronger defence" did for the Republicans.

We're not going to win this on the Republican's mistakes, we're not going to win this by having the best policies, and we're absolutely not going to win this by "being stronger on terrorism"--whatever that means. The way we can win is by basing our campaigns on our values, and describing our values in narratives that people can identity with. Read Waldman's "Being Right is Not Enough" and Drew Westen's "Political Brain."

Posted by vorkosigan1 | January 20, 2008 1:32 PM

for all Bush's fuck-ups, one major point stands out: we still haven't had an al-Q attack in the US since 9/11. so, for many people, the idea that Bush is lousy at fighting terrorism is a strange one.

Posted by cleek | January 20, 2008 1:40 PM

a general election campaign is bound to have a hefty focus on terrorism and security if for no other reason than that the GOP doesn't really have any other good options

And that will hurt them with all except their base.

It's looking to me like it's going to be the economy stupid.

Both Hillary and Obama have already set themselves up as plenty hawkish enough, they don't have to do anymore then they already have. Even Iraq is poised to become mainly an economy question, with those who once supported trying to make it better before leaving, for anti-terror reasons, now starting to think that we can't afford it anymore.

I'm not so sure that even the GOP will play old anti-terror angle so strongly with "furiners buying up our country" to play with.

Posted by artappraiser | January 20, 2008 4:21 PM

I'm reminded of a data point from a Lou Harris poll around 1975 or so, when an Ohio mechanic said, "I hear the Russians have sent the Arabs all their latest planes and missiles. So we better do the same, or Israel will be wiped out, and Russia will take over the whole area."

That was an effective narrative, and one that easily fit into the popular understanding of superpower politics in the Middle East. But it was also 90 degrees off plumb: not only was the USSR on the ropes in the region (Sadat had opened back-channel negotiations with the US even before the October War to get rid of the Soviets, and of course the Egyptian-Soviet relationship was officially ended in 1976), but regional troubles in the Middle East were re-energized with every pump of the arms supply spiral (whether by the French, Germans, Soviets or Americans).

So the popular narrative, which was very logical and compelling, was pointing to the worst possible set of policies for the region -- the Soviets were extremely careful about what equipment they sent to the Middle East, and adding more arms into the spiral would have imbalanced the situation even more. The elite narrative, as understood by Kissinger, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, etc., proposed strategies directly counter to the popular narrative, and thus created a gap between foreign policies and domestic politics.

I don't believe that popular narratives must be facile; Americans are perfectly capable of holding nuanced views on complex policy situations. The problem is that, as MY states, no counter-narrative has been seriously developed in the popular sphere. As a result, American understanding of the Middle East remains appallingly poor, and politicians are therefore pressured to enact policies that run counter to the American interest.

Posted by tWB | January 20, 2008 4:44 PM

Democrats need to challenge the Republicans, today, to answer this question:

"You say that invading Iraq somehow prevented al-Qaida from hitting us again after 9/11. If al-Qaida does hit us again before we leave Iraq, what country will you want to invade next?"

-- TP

Posted by Tony P. | January 20, 2008 9:21 PM

Here's the reality: There aren't any Democrats who can change the rhetoric on the "WOT" because they are beholden to the same war profiteers who are running the "WOT".

There are only TWO ways to deal with terrorism:

1) Kill them all - only doable if the terrorists are a small local group with no local population support.

2) change your policies so you are not the target.

Period. End of story.

And no Democrat is prepared to argue for option 2.

None. Not Clinton, not Obama, none.

So the Democrats will not be able to win on terrorism and national security. They might win on how badly Bush has screwed the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's about it. Even there, they really have nothing to offer as an alternative except pull out of Iraq. With Afghanistan, most of them want to put MORE troops in there - and thus accelerate Afghanistan becoming Iraq.

An Afghanistan NGO just released a report saying that the war there is just BEGINNING. The Taliban are just NOW starting to engage seriously and the future is an almost certain Taliban victory. Nobody has defeated the Pashtun in centuries - and the US and NATO aren't going to start now.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 21, 2008 3:50 AM