As the mid-term elections approach one can hear the Democrats far and wide nearly all singing from the same hymnal, “The war in Iraq has not made the world safer!” The point of a statement like this is to, among other things, imply that for those who vote Republican over national security issues, that there vote would be wasted. The Democrats are attempting to sell voters on the premise that Republicans have lost sight of the main objectives in the War on Terror and if said Democrats are voted into power then they will essentially pull the troops out of Iraq and concentrate on solely the terror cells, thus making the world a safer place.
The Democrats are serving voters a fresh plate of hooey! First off, if you really believe that any American political party can make the world a safer place then I suggest you pause reading this column and set out a plate of milk and cookies because Santa Clause should be along shortly. But seriously folks, it’s this sort of juvenile, two-dimensional thinking about geopolitics that makes me a sad panda.
I haven’t a clue what people mean when they say they want to make the world a “safe” or “safer” place. Certainly since the Manhattan Project and the advent of nuclear missiles, most would say that the world is a decidedly unsafe place. Once it became relatively easy to make war half a world away and kill millions of people with just the push of a button, any sense of safety one might have had definitely evaporated. I suppose folks were lulled into a false sense of security once the Cold War ended, in thinking that once the Soviet Union broke apart, the potential threat of nuclear war fell into the dust bin of history. Some would say that 9/11 shattered the belief that we were safe in the world post-Soviet break-up. I am here to tell you that those people just weren’t paying attention.
People seem to limit their scope of the world to only those issues, which are reported in the major mainstream or elite news outlets. Contrary to popular opinion, the Soviet Union was not our only nuclear threat in the world. China first tested their own nuclear bomb in 1964 and their most recent test was in 1996. China has threatened to use their arsenal of ballistic missiles against the US if we intervene (by law) against any attempt by China to take Taiwan by force. And just so we are clear, China too can just press a button and send any number of missiles into the West Coast of America (more if we somehow manage not to see one of their submarines off of our coasts).
That is just one example of how we are not safe in this world have not been for quite some time. The Democrats have no plan to limit our exposure to another countries nuclear missiles; rather they just keep repeating the same old tired phrase that somehow if we ever catch Osama bin Laden (UBL), that will mark the end of the War on Terror.
Let me be clear about this fallacy. Even if we had committed all of our resources to eliminating the Taliban and finding UBL, not only would that have not made the world any safer, but in reality it would have been next to impossible.
I’ll deal with the former assertion first. Much like in Iraq, not too long after the US and coalition forces commenced with an attack on enemy forces, we were able to take control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul. As a matter of fact, for some time Hamid Karzai was sardonically referred to as the Mayor of Kabul because despite the coalitions best efforts, the reality was that greater Afghanistan was in the hands of war lords and local militias. In addition to which, shortly after the Taliban regime fell, poppy farms, the precursor to opium and heroin production, rose like a high tide. Also, you had absolutely no infrastructure to connect greater Afghanistan and thus no real way or reason for those outside of Kabul to buy into this new government. Lastly, members of the Taliban and those that supported it didn’t just disappear into the ether, they went into hiding only to regroup and attack coalition forces just as their brothers in Al Qaeda do.
Given all of the above, how exactly would the Democrats have gone about correcting those issues and make the world a safer place? Am I along with the rest of the American voters to assume that the Democrats had a plan for building Afghanistan’s infrastructure instantaneously? Did John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi have a plan to somehow woo the tribal leaders and war lords to adopt Karzai as their rightful ruler and join the infant Islamic democracy brewing in Kabul? And what about the War on Drugs? One hardly hears a peep from the Democrats about how they would have squared our current policy toward drug production and trafficking with Afghanistan’s right to farm a high demand cash crop. Maybe they would have advised the Afghani rural community to grow passion fruits like they tried in Colombia. I’m sure that would have worked just as well.
