Republicans’ terrifying jockeying

Republicans’ terrifying jockeying
By Edward Luce
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 27 2007 19:20 | Last updated: August 27 2007 19:20


Last week Hillary Clinton provoked howls of protest from her Democratic rivals when she suggested that she would be the best candidate to blunt any Republican response to a terrorist attack prior to the 2008 election.

Another incident would “automatically give the Republicans an advantage again no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world,” she said. “I’m the best of the Democrats to deal with that.” Mrs Clinton’s rivals understandably chose only to respond to her self-serving conclusion, albeit with cinematic outrage (“Why, you low-down, scheming, good-for-nothing ... ” or words to that effect). But her premise was hard to dispute.

Much has been made of the Bush administration’s ability to harness the post-September 11 trauma for partisan gain. Among the dozen or so homegrown plots the Federal Bureau of Investigation has uncovered since 2001, few, if any, were close to execution. Many were sting operations. But in each instance the White House linked the plot to a broader narrative that paints the Democratic party as half-hearted in its willingness to prosecute the “war on terror”. Secretaries of homeland security have also proved adept at raising terror alerts from yellow to orange and sometimes red at sensitive moments in the electoral calendar.

Leaving aside the “cry wolf” dangers of such an approach, the Bush administration’s rhetorical methods are subtle compared with the blood and guts vocabulary of the 2008 Republican candidates.

Given that the Democrats enjoy possibly unassailable opinion poll leads on virtually every domestic issue, it is no surprise that national security dominates much of the Republican message. But that does not excuse their largely fictional portrayal of the Democrats as being oblivious to the threat of terrorism and weak on national defence.

All of the leading Democratic candidates, including Barack Obama and John Edwards, have pledged large expansions in the US military both in terms of budgets and personnel. None has ruled out the military option against Iran. All would spend billions shoring up domestic homeland security.

The leading Republican candidates have apparently missed such pronouncements. “They [the Democrats] don’t think there’s a war on terror,” Mitt Romney, running third among the Republicans, said recently. At the same forum, Rudy Giuliani said: “The Republican party can unite around an offence against terrorism – unlike the Democrats, who are on defence against terrorism. They can’t even utter the words ‘Islamic terrorism’.” Mr Giuliani’s usual term is “Islamic fascism” – a variation on the “Islamofascism” that some of the other candidates use.

Meanwhile, Fred Thompson, who is likely to declare his candidacy in the next two weeks, argues that America is in denial about global terrorism. Of the four frontrunners, John McCain is probably the most circumspect. The most unrelenting is Mr Giuliani, who for the past seven months has led the Republican field. Almost no one in mainstream politics denies the US faces a serious threat from Islamist terrorist groups. But there are critical differences over how best to deal with it. The Giuliani school starts on the premise of a multi-generation war in which Americans will never sleep safely in their beds.

At a recent campaign stop the former mayor of New York took strident issue with an elderly questioner who asked whether he might be overstating things after he remarked that Islamic terrorism would “threaten your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s grandchildren” (which adds up to about a century).

Because of the importance of moral issues among Republican primary voters, Mr Giuliani is portrayed as a moderate. That might summarise his views on the right to choose, gay civil union and gun control compared with the rest of the field. But on national security Mr Giuliani sets the Republican tone and it is unremittingly hawkish. In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, he sketches out a world view that would put most neo-conservatives in the shade (Norman Podhoretz, one of the most hardline neo-conservatives, is an adviser). The world he describes is a bleak place in which America is still in the early stages of confronting “radical Islamic fascism” and other forces that aim to “destroy the existing international system”.

President Giuliani would inherit a global fight to the finish. That struggle would encompass Iran, against which Mr Giuliani has repeatedly declined to rule out the use of “bunker-busting” tactical nuclear weapons to reach its underground laboratories. Given the “multifaceted” threats it confronts, the US must urgently rebuild its military – adding at least 10 new combat brigades. It must install a national missile defence system to keep out foreign ballistic threats and create a “technological and intelligence shield that is effective against all delivery methods”.

In President Giuliani’s world there would be little place for the niceties of global institutions. Rather than rebuilding the United Nations, Mr Giuliani sees it as “irrelevant to almost every major dispute of the last 50 years”. The UN could be useful for “some humanitarian and peacekeeping functions, but we should not expect much more of it”.

Instead, Mr Giuliani would open up Nato to global membership and fuse US civil and military capabilities to create a nation-building corps that would be carved up along continental lines. Mr Giuliani’s America would recalibrate at every level to respond to the multiple threats it faces.

It is not a message of optimism. Nor is it one that addresses the legitimate fears that much of the world harbours towards an overweening America. Quite the reverse. For Mr Giuliani, neo-conservatism failed because it was not tried enough, not because it was tried too much.

“At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state,” he writes. “Americans believe that to the extent that nations recognise those rights within their own laws and customs peace with them is achievable [italics added].”

The events of September 11 catapulted Mr Giuliani to national stardom (though there are questions about what he did following the World Trade Center attacks to merit such adulation). The more nervous Americans feel, the better Mr Giuliani’s prospects will become and the more nervous everyone else should be. As the saying goes, people with hammers tend to look for nails.

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