By Brigitte L. Nacos
During last Sunday’s CNN debate between the eight Democratic
contenders for their party’s presidential nomination, Senator Clinton echoed
one of President Bush’s [and Vice President Cheney’s] favorite talking
points, as Paul Krugman points out, namely, that the U.S. is safer today than it was when the 9/11 terrorists
struck. “I believe we are safer than we were,” Hillary Clinton said. “We are
not yet safe enough, and I have proposed over the last year a number of
policies that I think we should be following.” This was in sharp contrast to John
Edward’s contention that the administration’s “war on terrorism” is more of
a bumper sticker and sound bite misused to pursue policies like the Iraq war that has actually increased the number of terrorists. As for the
administration officials, they claim that the evidence for a safer homeland is
the fact that there has not been another major international terrorism attack
in the close to 6 years since 9/11. However, there was no such attack in the 6 years
before 9/11 either.
Senator Schumer has said that “America's first responders have worked tirelessly over the last six years to make the nation's cities and towns safer." But the question is whether their efforts have received enough support from the administration and Congress.
In late 2005, when the 9/11 Commission released its final grades, predominantly Cs, Ds, and Fs--for the implementation of measures to prevent terrorism (and prepare for the case of another attack), Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean warned: “Our leadership has been distracted in this country. Some of the failures are shocking.” According to Kean, a former Republican Governor of New Jersey, some failures were outright “scandalous,” for example the fact that “we still allocate scarce Homeland Security dollars on the basis of pork barrel spending and not on risk.” While security has been tightened in some areas, especially with respect to airports and aviation, this is a far cry from assuming that we are safer today than we were a few years ago.
Before leaving office in January 2005, the departing Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, who had assured Americans during his tenure of the government’s efforts to protect them from terrorism, said in interviews that he had “accepted the inevitability of another attack or attacks” and that it was not a question of “if” but a matter of “when” another devastating terrorist strike would occur.
Moreover, the Iraq War diverted attention and resources away from homeland security and motivated a significant number of angry Muslims to join terrorist groups active in Iraq and elsewhere. In that respect, John Edwards is right—Iraq has increased the terrorism problem and threat.
In his alarming recent book The Edge of Disaster, security expert Stephen Flynn criticizes Washington's post-9/11 strategy sharply. He writes,
Rather than address the myriad soft targets within the U.S., the White House has defined the war on terrorism as something to be managed by actions beyond our shores. The rallying cry of the Bush administration and its allies on Capitol Hill has been “We must fight terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” What this ignores is that terrorists can still come here—and, worse yet, are being made here…The most compelling lesson we should have learned on 9/11 is that our borders are unable to provide a barrier against the modern terrorist threat.
Fighting wars will not defeat global terrorism and not make the homeland safer. While the time restrictions during campaign debates encourage sound bite and talking point answers, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and the other Democratic candidates need to address homeland security and in the context of the so-called “war on terrorism” and Iraq war far more comprehensively than they have bothered so far. This would set them clearly apart from their viable Republican counterparts who are strong and unequivocal supporters of the Iraq war as central part what is the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism”–whether Senator McCain likes it or not.
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