Demos need a better plan?
In his recent letter, “Demos need a better plan”, Bryan Hickman made some assertions that I feel obliged to answer. As a 22 year veteran of the Air Force and someone who voted Republican for more years than most of the readers of this paper have been alive, I feel at least somewhat qualified to make a comment about national security and the GOP.
I wasn’t a big Bill Clinton fan, but to say he did nothing about North Korea and Al Qaeda is just nonsense. He negotiated a treaty with North Korea that he thought would bring an end to their nuclear ambitions. He had no way of knowing they would violate that treaty. And to say he did nothing about Al Qaeda ignores the intelligence emphasis on terrorism, the assassination order for bin Laden, and the cruise missle attacks on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The last two actions were resoundingly criticized by the GOP.
How about all that flip-flopping by the Democrats while President Bush has remained resolutely consistent? It is certainly true that Dean and Clark have expressed more contradictory statements than one of the street-corner preachers in SLC. However, if you take the time to review what Kerry said when he voted “yes” for the Iraq war, he qualified his support with actions he expected from the President. Bush failed to take those actions, so Kerry is not changing his position by criticizing the President. (Besides, if you want to talk military qualifications, just compare Kerry’s service record in Vietnam with Bush’s.) Kucinich’s “Department of Peace” proposal also isn’t as wacky as it sounds. He’s just suggesting that we put a fraction of the effort we put into preparing to fight wars to try to prevent the need for going to war.
As for President Bush’s consistency, first he insisted we had to declare war on Iraq immediately, even though they hadn’t attacked us and there was no credible evidence linking Saddam to 9/11 or Al Qaeda, because Iraq had massive stockpiles of WMDs ready for immediate use against their neighbors and us. When the WMD stockpiles failed to materialize, the President started emphasizing that it was a humanitarian effort. And now that even David Kay, who was convinced he would find WMDs, has given up, the President says “Who cares? Saddam was a bad guy!”. A consistent position? Hardly! The worst part is that Iraq and Afghanistan have left us spread too thin to react to the more grave threats facing us: North Korean nukes, potential Iranian nukes, Pakistan’s nukes falling into the hands of extremists or being sold to other nations, and continued support for Islamic extremism from the breeding ground for Al Qaeda: Saudi Arabia. I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling a whole lot safer.
Dan StormontGraduate Student, ECE