Centerfield: Partisan vs. Sensible

February 05, 2004

Partisan vs. Sensible

Predictably, the attempts to shred Kerry are starting to gain steam as his anointing comes neigh. Not to mention the attempts to shred Bush. What we've got now is the resumption of hostilities over a matter that I never thought was quite conclusively settled, namely the whole "Did Bush Do his National Guard Time" flap.

Bush supporters are right to point out that critics are placing a whole lot of emphasis on the fragmented memory of an old man regarding something he likely wasn't paying much attention to when it was or wasn't happening over 30 years ago. Then they go on to play the "Kerry is an unprincipled opportunist" card, even though Kerry has thus far steered clear of making direct comments.

Instapundit provides links that work as a mostly pro-Bush wrap-up of responses to the resurrection of this story.

What I find interesting is the difference in some of these links. Many are what I'd call "weak-sense" critical thinking responses, in other words, those that are assuming Bush didn't do anything wrong and focusing only on items that discredit the claims that Bush might have skipped out on some service, with a dash of insulting Kerry. Like this one by Bill Hobbs that rightfully calls out the least accurate and most partisan lefty smears, but then re-hashes the incomplete defense bush has given thus far instead of addressing what still seem to be unanswered questions.

Contrast that with the account you can find at Intel Dump, which takes the approach of pointing out what kinds of records would be the best evidence of what might have happened, one way or the other. And cheerfully admits that they may or may not exist.

So if I were a reporter sitting in the White House press room, asking questions of Scott McClellan, I'd start asking about his pay records, retirement records, and tax records from 1972. Even if the attendance records are gone -- there are still plenty of ways to document the President's service. It's entirely possible that these records exist, and that they will document the President's honorable service in the National Guard. But only the records can show that conclusively.

Ya know, my take is that I don't really care all that much if Bush might have gamed the system a little when he was in college, just like Clinton did. It makes him look a little bad compared to Kerry fighting and getting a few scratches, but whatever. The thing that steams me as a critical thinker is how few people are willing to take an approach like the one Carter does at Intel Dump, of trying to find the best evidence and then living with whatever uncertainty is left after you hunted it down.

Posted by Brian Keegan at February 5, 2004 01:19 PM

Comments

The cover up is always worse than the crime.

Posted by: Ara Rubyan at February 5, 2004 09:30 PM

The cover up is always worse than the crime.

Exactly.

They should have dealt with this in 2000, and just come clean. There would have been a flurry of discussion, and it would have been past. Of course, they'd made such a big deal of Clinton's "draft dodging" (which wasn't, any more than Cheney's deferment was) that maybe they felt they couldn't.... also, it might have exposed an earlier cover-up, which sounds like may have happened with that "exhaustive search of the records" that led to the torn page.

And even so, it wouldn't have really mattered had Bush not taken us into war with Iraq with all of the exaggerated claims of WMD, that scene of prancing around the carrier in the flight suit, and "bring it on." .... Another reason they should have come clean in 2000....

Posted by: Ducktape at February 6, 2004 07:21 PM

"prancing"? who are you, wesley clark? call the waiter; theres an ideology in your soup.

Posted by: dr at February 7, 2004 01:02 PM

If Bush wants to win the 2004 election, his strongest (and probably only reliable) suit is national security. The economy's doing a stutter-step recovery and probably won't help or hurt him too much on balance, but about the only area in which he'd have an edge over a Kerry, Edwards, or Clark is in demonstrated improvements in national security since these have that oh-so-presidential aura. And the key to that-- something that his handlers have gotta figure out ASAP-- lies *outside of Iraq altogether*. Three almost blindingly obvious no-brainer things that should be done:

(1) Airport and airplane security. I know the TSA has made many genuine improvements and in fairness they deserve credit for improved screening since 9/11. But, well, how to put this... it just seems awfully obvious that this zealous regimen of searching little old ladies and confiscating nail clippers and keychains isn't doing a whole lot to foil an al-Qaeda plot. It's window dressing. More efficient plastic explosives detectors at the gate, in a seat, or a lavatory could help to thwart Richard Reid-type shoe bombers, but even more important is the need to address an obvious, chasm-sized security gap that needs plugging: the servicing and cargo of the jumbo jets. Charles G. Slepian, an aviation security expert, has noted that cargo often goes wholly unscreened and, of even greater concern, the airport service workers and screeners themselves are often not subjected to the most routine background security checks. (Yes, I know I'm citing WorldNetDaily here, but I've heard of Slepian before and heard these same points uttered elsewhere; I'm just too tired to go Google-fishing for a different cite.) Obviously easy openings for al-Qaeda to cause problems. This is just outright sloppiness that could be easily corrected. Frankly, since airport screeners and TSA workers are doing such an essential job, they should probably also be granted significant wage increases, with financial incentives for above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty performance. If we can blow $87 billion in a year on Iraq and cut $1 trillion off of taxes, then providing a financial boost for TSA employees would be a drop in the fiscal bucket and pay high dividends. Bush could even slap a fancy acronym on it: the TSI, "Transportation Security Initiative," made all the more politically appealing by its overt orthographical and phonetic resemblance to the hyper-competent forensic masters of "CSI."

(2) Bush would boost his national-security credentials tremendously by actually, uh, like *translating all the intelligence that's been collected from the al-Qaeda safehouses and intercepts*. There have been numerous reports (e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3399087.stm and http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/20031010.asp) about how counterterrorist efforts have been severely hindered by the relative paucity of translators of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and other relevant languages. To be fair, much of the blame for this lies in the Clinton Administration, which should have implemented an intensive recruitment and training program for counterterrorism (including language instruction) after the canary in the coal mine of the 1993 WTC attacks. But Bush has diverted far too many of the intelligence agencies' best translators to Iraq while leaving reams of intelligence about al-Qaeda, a direct and undoubted threat, untranslated. There should be an effort underway today to *require* mastery of foreign languages, especially strategic ones, akin to the Advanced Placement system that was put into place following the launch of Sputnik in 1957. It would be several years before dividends were reaped, but this is a glaring and humiliating deficiency that is hampering efforts. In the meantime, there are plenty of loyal Arabic-speakers-- chiefly Muslim and Christian refugees from the Middle East-- who need to be more aggressively tapped. This isn't a challenge that should be relegated to the bottom of the to-do list. There could be active plots in the midst of that untranslated intelligence.

(3) Perhaps most importantly-- accept that Iraq has only a peripheral relation to US national security and refocus the fight *on al Qaida*. Saddam's been captured so there are not even any PR boosts to be gained from Iraq anymore. Redirect some of the special forces troops and intelligence officers from Iraq to the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and launch a more vigorous offensive to nab the top al-Qaeda leaders. Even more important than Osama bin Laden would be the big operational chiefs like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saif al-Adil, Midhat Mursi, and Shaikh Saiid. Such high-profile captures would probably do more than anything else to enhance Bush's image as a competent national security President. Moreover, if Bush demonstrates a grasp that the war against al-Qaeda type organizations is an *intelligence* one, and correspondingly invokes higher appropriations to recruit quality intelligence officers, he'll go a long way to showing that he knows how to fight this "new war." Cutting off al-Qaeda money supply, rounding up members of cells, making nice with France, Germany, and Syria to solicit their aid in intelligence-sharing-- all these things are poll-booster freebees.

Bush would get a lot more mileage out of this than pursuing some inane tirade-laden crusade against gay marriage or cutting another gazillion dollars out of tax revenues collected from plutocracy-loving execs. The nice thing about national security is that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents can all agree that it's important and merits augmentation, and it's the kind of thing that a commander-in-chief can most readily and rapidly address. If Bush fails to make such simple improvements, we'll have a President Kerry who can.

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Posted by: Wes Ulm at February 8, 2004 06:48 AM

Centerfield

A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics

February 05, 2004

Partisan vs. Sensible