hilzoy

Osama bin Laden thinks that acquiring nuclear weapons is a religious duty. He has been trying to get them since 1993. Were he to acquire a nuclear weapon and detonate it in, say, Times Square on a weekday, somewhere around a million people would die, and a huge chunk of Manhattan would be completely destroyed. It is hard to imagine a worse development in the War on Terror than bin Laden getting a nuclear weapon.

The good news is that George W. Bush recognizes the gravity of this threat. In December 2001, for instance, he called the possibility that terrorists might gain weapons of mass destruction “the great threat to civilization.” The bad news is that he has not acted on this recognition. He did, of course, invade Iraq, where it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But even before the invasion, when many people (myself included) believed that Iraq did have WMD, most people did not believe that Iraq had the most dangerous weapons of all: nuclear weapons. There were, however, many other ways in which we knew that terrorists might be able to obtain nuclear weapons and/or fissile material. It would seem obvious, after 9/11, that dealing with these ought to be among our top priorities. Oddly enough, however, they were not. And the result is that we are considerably less safe now than we might have been.

While there is a broad consensus that we need to try to block every step on the path terrorists would need to follow in order to acquire nuclear weapons, transport them to this country, and detonate them, the most difficult step on this path seems to be the acquisition of fissile materials — highly enriched uranium or plutonium. I will therefore focus on how we have tried to stop terrorists from getting these materials in several of the most important areas.

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For as long as I can remember, Afghanistan has been, in one way or another, a failed state: one of those countries whose government is hateful to its own people, in dubious and intermittent control of its territory, and as a result liable to attract all sorts of really unpleasant people who plague not just the Afghans, but everyone else as well. Every so often, when I am thinking about one of these countries, I feel like throwing up my hands and saying: why don’t we just go in and fix it? Normally we can’t, since normally one is not supposed to go around invading other countries without some very compelling reason: having been attacked, facing a clear and imminent threat which can be met by no other means, stopping an ongoing humanitarian disaster.

However, if by some total misfortune one of these conditions is met, we can legitimately invade such a country. And then we have it in our power to transform it from an ongoing disaster into a normal country. A chance like this comes along only very rarely, and it should not, in my opinion, be squandered without some very good reason to do so. For countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, and the like are, as I said, a plague both to their own people and to those around them; a persistent source of significant problems that there is, normally, no good way to set right. When the opportunity to solve these problems once and for all comes our way, we would be fools to pass it up. This is all the more true in the case of Afghanistan, since in this case a second very rare condition existed: there was someone to run the country who both was decent and had popular legitimacy. (I am not saying that Karzai is perfect; just that it is very rare, under the circumstances, for there to be someone who is non-disastrous, and that this, too, was an opportunity that should not have been squandered.)

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In an effort to provide counterprogramming for the Republican National Convention, I will be writing a short series of posts on what I take to be the most important reasons not to vote for Bush. Three preliminary notes:

First, I am not reflexively anti-Republican. Until about a year ago, of all the Presidential candidates I’ve supported over the years, the one I was most excited about was a Republican (Anderson, 1980.) I try not to be reflexively anti-Bush, though he has long since worn out the benefit of the doubt that I gave him after the decision in Bush v. Gore, and again after 9/11. There are, I think, very good reasons to oppose him; thus this post.

Second, I describe myself as voting against Bush for a reason. I think John Kerry will make a perfectly good President. Nonetheless, he was not my first (or second, or third) choice in the Democratic primaries, and if he was running against someone else who I thought would make a perfectly good President, I might have to think seriously about who to vote for. But since, in my judgment, Bush has not been anywhere near a perfectly good President, I have no such difficult choice to make.

Third, I do not hold Bush responsible for every silly thing that anyone in his administration has ever said. But I do hold him responsible for his administration’s policies, and also for his response to things that members of his administration do, whether or not he himself has ever spoken about the topics in question. He is responsible for hiring and firing his people; for making sure that they do the job he wants them to do; and for exercising oversight over them. The buck stops with him.

That said, on to topic number one: the Constitution.

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Via Steve Clemons: Did you know that there is a sitting member of Congress who has:

Said the Congressional Leadership (in 1992) “ought to be lined up and shot”

Said, of protesters against the war in Vietnam, “I would have no hesitation about lining them up and shooting them,” he said. “Those people should be shot for what they did to us over there.”

Said that Bill Clinton was a KGB dupe

Said that some members of Congress “will tell you openly that they’re both Communist supporters and socialist supporters” who want “your kids and my kids … to fall under a socialist, Communist regime”

Said that a rectal procedure he had undergone was “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.”

Besides all this, this Representative — Randy Cunningham of California’s 50th District — was on the board of the Tailhook Association in 1991, the year of the Tailhook Symposium at which 83 women and 7 men were sexually assaulted. In the aftermath of the scandal, the armed forces undertook various efforts to combat sexual harassment; at a House Subcommittee hearing in which the acting Army Secretary described these efforts, “Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham called the efforts “B.S.” and asserted that “our kids don’t like . . . political correctness.”” What makes this particularly relevant now is that, as a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, one of the Committees that might investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib. As Steve Clemons asks, “How can a guy who thinks Tailhook was just all good fun be counted on to responsibly legislate or investigate matters related to Abu Ghraib?”

As I’ve said before, there are jerks and idiots in both parties, and we shouldn’t criticize either party for the views expressed by their more, um, peculiar members. That being said, however, we should also try to make sure that such people don’t end up as members of Congress. I have voted for Republicans with whom I deeply disagreed when their Democratic opponents seemed to me to be out to lunch, on the grounds that it was better to be represented by someone who was wrongheaded but sane than by someone who seemed to live in an alternate universe. If the universe you live in is not one in which it’s OK to line your opponents up and shoot them, and in which preventing sexual assault is not just “B.S.”, take heart: Cunningham is not running unopposed.

On the subject of the GOP’s fringe: Vernon Robinson, who put out the amusing Twilight Zone ad, lost his runoff in North Carolina. The Republican voters of North Carolina’s 5th District deserve our gratitude.

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I actually got out of the hospital several days ago (surgery went amazingly well), but I couldn’t bring myself to write anything until now. On the one hand, I didn’t see what I had to add to the Swift Boat Vets controversy: everything I had to say had already been said far more eloquently by other people. On the other hand, I couldn’t really write about anything else. On reflection, however, I think I have one thing to add to this topic.

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Matthew Yglesias has an article in The American Prospect about why George Bush’s intellect ought to be a serious political issue. The punchline:

“That the country should be secured against terrorist attacks, that deadly weapons should be kept out of the hands of our enemies, or that it would be good for a wide slice of the world to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy are hardly controversial propositions. But these things are easier said than done. Even a person of goodwill is by no means guaranteed to succeed. Yet succeed we must. And if we are to do so, the question of intelligence must be put back on the table. The issue is not “cleverness” — some kind of parlor trick or showy mastery of trivia — but a basic ability to make sense of a complicated, fast-changing world and decide how to confront it. Any leader will depend on the work of his subordinates, but counting on advisers to do the president’s heavy lifting for him simply will not do. Unless the chief executive can understand what people are telling him and follow the complicated arguments they may need to make, he will find himself paralyzed at every point of disagreement, or he will adopt the views of the slickest salesman rather than the one who’s gotten things right.

The price to be paid for such errors is a high one — it is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Already we’ve paid too much, and the problems confronting the country are growing harder with time. Unless the media, the electorate, and the political culture at large can shift their focus off of trivia and on to things that actually matter, it’s a price we may pay again and again.”

I think that Yglesias is right, not just in his basic point but in the examples he cites — e.g., US policy towards North Korea, trade policy, and the like. However, I have two minor quibbles. First, I am not sure that Bush’s problem is that he’s not intelligent. I don’t really know what to make of him in this regard; my best guess is that a lifetime of intellectual disengagement will produce the functional equivalent of stupidity, just as a lifetime of being a couch potato will produce the functional equivalent of a lack of athletic ability; and since Bush has led such a life, it may be impossible to tell how smart he is underneath it all. But the problem Yglesias is getting at is an apparently complete lack of intellectual curiosity, of interest in actually thinking through the implications of various policies, assessing their pros and cons, and deciding accordingly. Given some level of intellectual engagement, intelligence is of course an asset; but in its absence, intelligence in itself will get you nowhere. (To be fair, Yglesias sometimes describes the problem he’s getting at as a lack of intellectual curiosity and/or engagement; my point is that the lack of these things is distinct from a lack of intelligence, and that it, rather than a low IQ, is Bush’s problem.)

Second…

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In today’s New York Times, David Brooks complains that neither Bush nor Kerry really talks about the issues confronting us. Here’s his evidence:

“John Kerry and the Democrats spent their convention talking about broad values like unity and military service and almost no time talking about specific proposals. And if you peek in at a Bush campaign event, it’s like a traveling road show of proper emotions. Bush will remind the crowd of the feelings we all experienced on Sept. 11. Then there will be several paragraphs on the importance of loving thy neighbor, and several minutes spent reciting the accomplishments of Term 1.

No offense, but where’s the beef?”

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