Dissing Howard Dean, part 94: the Wall Street Journal

Via the Dean blog comments, I find an article in the Wall Street Journal slagging off Howard Dean for saying outrageous things and then retreating from them.

The problem is, a great number of the things he’s saying aren’t actually outrageous at all, and it’s a sign of how far-right US politics has shifted that you get this sort of criticism. Or perhaps it’s a sign of muddle-headed journalism. Let’s have a look at a couple of them.

Capturing Saddam Hussein hasn’t made the US safer

The strangest part of Mr. Dean’s comment isn’t that he believes nabbing Saddam hasn’t made America safer, but that he seems to think the well-being of America’s soldiers has nothing to do with the nation’s safety.

Of course it doesn’t, and I’m really curious as to why the author of this opinion piece thinks there could be a causal relation. Suppose US troops capture and disarm a large number of insurgents in Iraq, and the number, or efficiency, of attacks against US troops goes down, and fewer soldiers die or are wounded as a result. How can that possibly affect the likelihood of someone launching a ballistic or terrorist attack against the US? Are the troops in Iraq the only people that can defend the US’s interests? Are all the US’s enemies in Iraq, and directly affiliated with Saddam Hussein? Of course not. It is such an amazing fallacy to suppose that the casualty rate in one field of operations directly and significantly influences world geopolitics that I have no idea where the author got this idea from.

It goes on.

But that’s not a theme he is still repeating.

Actually, it is. The Washington Post, on the same day as the Wall Street Journal published this editorial, wrote:

In Midwest campaign stops and an interview, the former Vermont governor said developments both abroad and at home give credence to his assertion two weeks ago that the United States is “no safer” with the capture of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“If we are safer, how come we lost 10 more troops and raised the safety alert” to the orange level, Dean said Sunday night in Ankeny, Iowa.

“All the other Democrats pounced on me and beat me up and said how ignorant I was about foreign affairs,” he said. “I think most people in America agree with me today and it’s only two weeks later.”

The WSJ then bizarrely goes on to say:

Quite a few people fell for the idea that Saddam couldn’t run a terror campaign from a spider hole. The reality on the ground, however, proved otherwise. Coalition forces have arrested hundreds of insurgents in Iraq based on information found in Saddam’s briefcase and reportedly from information “gleaned” from interrogations with the tyrant himself.

I’m not quite sure what the WSJ is trying to say here. Howard Dean never said he didn’t think Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks against US troops, so quite why the WSJ is bringing this up I don’t know.

Anyway, it only doesn’t make sense for Saddam Hussein to have contacts with the insurgents, and to be able to disclose information about hundreds of them, if he’d been in the spider hole for ages. Even if you don’t believe the story about Saddam Hussein having been captured by the Kurds and handed over to the US subsequently, there’s still no evidence on how long he was hiding in such a way.

And finally, of course, the fact that he knows a number of people who are fighting against the US occupation doesn’t mean that he’s in charge of them, or that they’ll necessarily surrender after his capture.

How to judge Osama bin Laden

Mr. Bush wants bin Laden “dead or alive,” leaving clear his preference. But apparently Mr. Dean sees the war on terror not as a military imperative to chase al Qaeda members to remote corners of the world, but as a police action in which infamous terrorists are given all presumptions of innocence even while they’re still at large, presumably planning new attacks on American civilians.

And Dean is quite right. The war on terror should be a police campaign, not a military campaign, because terrorist attacks aren’t coming from a traditional military. (I wrote about this a while ago.)

And there’s no point killing terrorists in Iraq if a whole bunch more keep on popping up in other countries. Al-Qaeda and similar terrorist groups are fighting for religious and political reasons, and you can’t fight a religion or a political movement with an army either.

The war on Terror will only ever be finally won (assuming it can be won at all) when the root causes are removed. Terrorism in Northern Ireland is slowly, painfully, but ineluctably being defeated by the rise, in fits and bursts, of a political solution to an issue that had previously been settled by arms. Terrorism in the Middle East will only be brought to a standstill if we can settle the Israel / Palestine issue. (Remember that the Intifada stopped for a while when political negotiations were going well.)

More generally, if you have generations of people who “know” that the US is their enemy, and is evil, cruel and relentless, then capturing Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and making a martyr out of them isn’t going to help. The US has a fantastic opportunity to turn Saddam Hussein over to a proper Truth and Reconciliation style committee, to have a proper, internationalised trial, and to show the rest of the world that this is how the civilised world deals with its enemies: fairly, according to the rule of law.

I’d like to add one other thing about the last part of that paragraph:

[…] infamous terrorists are given all presumptions of innocence even while they’re still at large, presumably planning new attacks on American civilians.

Why the hell should it matter whether we’ve decided beforehand that they’re guilty or not, before a proper investigation and a trial, if we haven’t captured them? What difference does it make to them what we think? If they’re planning new terrorist attacks against the US, their mortal enemy, why does anyone think they will they be dissuaded by the news that they’re not going to get a fair trial?

The article ends as follows:

For months Mr. Dean has been pounding President Bush for being distracted from the war on terror by pursuing Saddam Hussein. […]

Osama is out there as a campaign issue even if Mr. Dean can’t decide exactly where he stands on catching or killing the terror lord. Mr. Dean has made himself out to be a snarling and possibly even rabid junkyard dog with a reputation of wanting to bite everyone. But good old Backsliding Dean appears not to want to bite the one man nearly every American wants to see get bit.

There’s a weasel “where he stands on catching” bin Laden bit there, which appears to have snuck with absolutely no justification in an attempt to bolster the argument. As far as I’m aware, Howard Dean has only said one thing about capturing bin Laden - that it’s more important than the war on Iraq - and he’s said that consistently.

Once you remove that distraction, you get left with the following two statements:

1. Howard Dean says Bush should focus on Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein.
2. But Dean doesn’t want to kill him as badly as everyone else.

Let me get this straight. Because Dean is prepared to say that he wouldn’t necessarily string Osama bin Laden from the nearest lamppost as soon as he was captured, that makes him unfit to criticise Bush’s failure to capture him? How on Earth does that follow?