Wimpy Rambos

Terrified of being called weaklings, the Democrats have only dared to nitpick Bush on Iraq. They need to address the real problem: His entire "war on terror."

Editor's note: This launches Gary Kamiya's new weekly column. Look for it every Tuesday in Salon.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Democratic Party, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War, 2006 Elections

Oct. 3, 2006 | At one time or another, it has caused every football fan in America to scream hysterically at the TV. Your team is ahead late in the game, and the other team has the ball and is driving. But instead of playing aggressively, your team goes into a prevent defense, so called because it's designed to prevent the opponent from making a big play. This tactic can be effective, but all too often, especially when used against a good offense, it ends up costing the team the game -- inspiring the crack, "The only thing the prevent defense prevents is winning."

Somebody should tell this to the Democrats. They're playing the prevent defense with such a vengeance, they should print up bold red-white-and-blue bumper stickers reading "Dems 2006: Groveling Our Way to Victory." They may win the midterms. But will any of us want to live in the country -- or the world -- that they're leaving us?

Sure, the Democrats appear to be fighting hard. Their little arms are flailing mightily, waving the rubber sword that Mr. Rove allowed them to play with. They're making noise about the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which reports -- duh -- that Bush's disastrous war in Iraq has increased global terrorism. They're continuing to hammer away on the lies that the Bush administration told to launch its war. They're criticizing the poor -- or, to be more accurate, nonexistent -- postwar planning.

But these are feeble and superficial criticisms. The Democrats are terrified to go anywhere near the real problem, which is not just Iraq, but Bush's "global war on terror." They should say unequivocally that Bush's entire approach to fighting terror -- not just the Iraq debacle, but the neoconservative and Cold War ideology behind it -- is completely misguided and has severely harmed America's national security.

They should point out that the fight against a few thousand Salafi jihadists is not a new Cold War, and that by turning it into one, Bush is creating enemies faster than we can kill them. They should say, as terrorism expert Louise Richardson does in her important new book, that purely military solutions to indigenously supported terrorism only work if you're prepared to destroy entire populations.

They should deride Bush's comic-book-like claim that groups as radically different as al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian and Syrian regimes and Sunni insurgents in Iraq are all part of the same monolithic "Islamofascist" menace that wants to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia." They should sound the alarm about Bush's criminal neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which polls repeatedly show is the single greatest source of anti-American feelings in the Middle East and the Muslim world.

The Democrats should put terrorism in perspective. They should acknowledge that we grossly overestimated al-Qaida's strength from the beginning, and that, as James Fallows argues in the Atlantic, they are far weaker now. They should point out what every expert on terrorism knows: that no country can ever be completely free of terrorism, and so any "war on terrorism" is doomed both to be endless and to fail.

The Democrats should urge us to implement a quiet but effective two-track tactic against terrorism, in which we use intelligence and law enforcement to hunt down existing terrorists, while we pursue a foreign policy that will decrease the number of future terrorists. And they should warn that a U.S. attack on Iran would be a blunder so vast that it would make the Iraq quagmire look like the cakewalk Bush's ignorant cheerleaders told us would be.

But the Democrats are not saying any of this. As a result, Bush has continued to intimidate them. And the consequences for America, at home and abroad, have been catastrophic.

The most egregious recent example is Bush's detainee bill, which was just approved by Congress. This bill denies terrorism suspects the right to habeas corpus, one of the cornerstones not just of our judicial system but of Western civilization. It also allows the use of torture, although it discreetly avoids using that unpleasant word. Legal scholars are already ranking it as one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history.

Yet some Democrats, fearful of being called "soft on terror," actually supported it. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Salon, "In my own caucus, people say, 'We can't oppose this, look what happened to Max Cleland.'" (The former Georgia senator, a Vietnam veteran confined to a wheelchair because of war wounds, was defeated in 2002 by GOP ads smearing him as soft on terror.) "We have to go along with it because we'll never be able to explain it back home.'" That prompted the Vermont senator to add, "Maybe one way to explain it is to say, 'I stood up for you and your rights.'"

As a result of Republican cynicism and thuggery, and Democratic weakness, what was formerly shameful and done in the dark is now the official law of the land. As Matthew Iglesias noted in the American Prospect, our acceptance of this bill essentially makes us a rogue nation. It is a black day in American history -- and the Democrats did not even filibuster.

Abroad, the Democrats' refusal to challenge Bush's radical ideology and force-addicted policies means that our unbalanced Mideast policies go unchanged, Muslim and Arab hate grows daily, our allies turn against us, the Iraq debacle goes on and on, and a catastrophic possible war with Iran looms.

By not raising these fundamental issues, the Democrats have ensured that Bush will be able to dictate the terms of the debate -- and that he'll always win. As long as both parties accept that we're facing an imminent and apocalyptic threat by a vast horde of evil "Islamofascist" zombies who have no grievances, no history, only the bloodthirsty desire to kill infidels and reestablish the Caliphate and who will forever spring up like malignant demons out of the earth regardless of what we do or don't do, little things like habeas corpus, the right to know what you've been charged with and the right not to be subjected to "extreme physical pain" really don't matter. When you're fighting Satan's minions, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Next page: Iraqis want us to leave. We should take them seriously