Barack Obama groups it under “Strengthening America Overseas” and concludes that the real threat is terrorists with WMD – not much different from what Bush has said. His solution?

The Lugar Obama bill that cracks down on weapons caches.

John Edwards focuses on America’s moral leadership around the world, including being proud of our “long history of using our strength to fight for the freedom of others,” even though this historic mission has been “tarnished” by our Iraq misadventure. This seems to get at the deeper issue of terrorist motive over the long haul.

Bill Richardson, who I think will emerge as a strong force by the end of 2007, says, “To become a respected international leader again, we need a national security policy that is tough and smart, a military second to none, a firm commitment to building diplomatic alliances, we need to defeat terrorism, and that’s our number one national security challenge, we need to promote freedom, alleviate poverty, and stop global warming.” It’s largely pro forma, if you ask me, but it isn’t evading the issue.

And then there’s Hillary, who presumably has her own plan. The fact is, all of these candidates have ideas about fighting terrorism and, more broadly, protecting American national security. You can reject their ideas as naive or weak. But just because the media doesn’t talk about thei plans for fighting terrorism doesn’t mean they don’t have ideas about how to fight terrorism or protect America.

What in the world does this have to do with Hillary Clinton or the War on Terrorism, you ask?

Basically, I think that old college saying is a metaphor for the way our politicians think about foreign policy. Little premium is spent on actually trying to understand other cultures and why they do the things that they do. Virtually the entire focus of our foreign policy is projecting “strength” and “toughness.”

Isolated from the rest of the world, our politicians develop ideas about the way the way works that often conflicts with reality. And when the reality of the world conflicts with their own “reality”, our politicians are instantly filled with surprise, fear, and anger. And like the 20-something-year old male who makes homophobic remarks in order to hide his own insecurity, the unscrupulous politician rattles his saber under the guise of patriotism in order to hide the fact that he is confused and ignorant and utterly afraid.

Ever since 9/11, there has been a pervasive belief on the part of our government that the best way to conduct our foreign policy is to react with righteous indignation and use violence to solve our problems. Our government was driven by the urge was to strike against those who hurt us on 9/11, and once this was done, our government moved to strike out against others who just happened to live a country or two away.

It didn’t matter that the residents of Baghdad had nothing to do with 9/11. The terrorists attacked us on 9/11, and therefore our government’s righteous indignation justified our “shock and awe” bombing campaign upon Baghdad. Yet four years later, the world remains a violent and scary place, and our government’s righteous anger has not yet been mollified. Even now, unable to quench its thirst in Baghdad, our government looks towards Tehran.

Toughness–a term so often used and yet so rarely defined. It is repeated ad nausea by politicians and the media, and yet to me, it is nothing more than empty word devoid of any real meaning. If, as a politician, you’re willing to strike out at the world, that’s toughness–or so I’ve been told.

This nation was founded on one basic principle–freedom, and in swearing an oath to defend the Constitution, it becomes the president’s job to protect the freedom of Americans–all Americans. And yet, as Democrats and Republicans jockey to become our nation’s next president, little attention is paid to who will best defend our freedoms. No, the focus is on who can be the “toughest.” Demonstrate any reticence about going to war with some third world country halfway around the world, and you’ve earned yourself the ultimate insult–you’re a wimp.

Listening to our politicians debate foreign policy is like watching a bunch of middle-schoolers. The obnoxious bully who vows to meet his classmate in the park after school is “tough” while the quiet student who chooses to ignore that taunts of his obnoxious classmate is a “wimp.”

Toughness–just an ongoing excuse for the politicians and the media to avoid debating real issues.

Elrod: Conservatives interpret refusal to offer conservative solutions to terrorism as refusal to recognize the terrorism problem in the first place.

Elrod,
I’ll concede that to some extent (and thanks for doing the same on the poverty issue). But why then don’t liberals/progressives talk more about their proposed solutions? It seems to me that they’re more likely to get angry at having been viewed as dovish and naive about the terrorist threat, and then change the subject to domestic issues.

If liberals/progressives want to talk about addressing root causes of terrorism, I think that would be a very helpful input to the discussion. I do feel that this has been lacking on the conservative side (though many conservatives agree it’s necessary, there is little in the way of concrete planning to do so).

And one point that I think is very important is that we can’t turn the tide on negative opinions of the US so quickly, so we’re STILL going to have to deal with terrorism and other threats that result from our reputation. Islamist extremists would not view the US backing out of a position of influence in the Middle East as a reason to lay down their arms; instead they’d view it as a show of weakness and they’d be more likely to go on the offensive to take advantage. In the long run, of course, moderates can be influenced to side more stridently against those extremists if they see the US taking a less intrusive role, but we still have to deal with the short term problems as they exist today.

And as for her popularity with black voters, I saw her talking to the NAACP. She was trying on this Hillary-from-the-block routine that was a far far cry from Bill’s smoothness in front of black crowds. It was actually painful to watch.

Liberal Democrats have said time and again that US policy itself has helped to make the existing problem of terrorism worse. They, like conservatives, believe that hard-core Islamist terrorists despise the Western way of life, however defined. But liberal Democrats believe that simplistic good-and-evil arguments only play right into the hands of Islamist terrorists. Howard Dean has said this multiple times. As has John Kerry and Russ Feingold and most pundits on the Left as well. The only reason conservatives don’t “hear” liberals castigating Islamist terrorism is because they only want to hear conservative solutions to it. Conservatives interpret refusal to offer conservative solutions to terrorism as refusal to recognize the terrorism problem in the first place.

And yes, it is very similar to saying that conservatives don’t care about the poor. They just have different approaches to dealing with the poor that liberals reject. So it becomes easy for liberals to say conservatives don’t care about the poor at all.

If this was a Sistah Soldjah moment, it was poorly delivered. At least Bill Clinton could respond to a real Sistah Soldjah who really said that blacks should take out a few white cops after the 1992 riots. If Hillary wants to bash Michael Moore for saying that terrorism is false then go right ahead. But at least say his name.

In the end, both of these forms of argument should be avoided at all costs! Conservatives really do care about the poor and liberals really do care about Islamist terrorism!

Elrod, it is not a “straw man” argument. Michael Moore, not a candidate but certainly a hero to many on the Left, has repeatedly stated:

“There is no terrorist threat.” This is not a slip of the tongue that can easily be dismissed (a la Kerry on “stuck in Iraq”). Moore has repeatedly made this assertion. Here in a speech from 2002:

“There is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we’ve been told.”

Hillary is using this as her “Sister Soljah” moment – taking a page out of Bill’s guide from when he shut down African American racism and asserted his independence – triangulating himself as a moderate.

Clearly, Hillary feels confident to take this step – and pissing off the MoveOn.org and DemocraticUnderground set – because she expects it to yield her benefits in the middle.

Pure calculation.

Better to make a couple of enemies with strong, bold statements

I completely agree. And Hillary happens to be right. Too many liberals fail to take the threat of islamic fascism and terrorism seriously.

You know, to me this is a bit the same as people on the left saying that conservatives don’t care about the poor. Or that those who believe in free market don’t care about them, etc.

I would say more than a bit…I’d say it’s exactly the same. Rove may have taken this strategy to new heights but he certainly didn’t invent it. And while I think the use of strawmen isn’t exactly laudable, the main reason that people who are on the receiving end don’t like it is because it forces them to take a more defined position. It may be disingenuous to say that “some people say this or that” when no one is actually saying this or that. But it’s equally disingenuous to create a fury over the use of strawmen instead of simply showing how your position isn’t the one that is being criticized. The problem for many candidates is that they’d prefer to be vague so that they can capture a broader constituency, so they focus their discussion strictly on the opponents use of a strawman argument to change the subject away from the actual issue at hand.

You know, to me this is a bit the same as people on the left saying that conservatives don’t care about the poor. Or that those who believe in free market don’t care about them, etc.

Edwards: “[I] went back to former Clinton administration officials who gave me sort of independent information about what they believed about what was happening with Saddam’s weapons programs. They were also wrong. And based on that, I made the wrong judgment.” (Fmr. Sen. John Edwards, “Meet The Press,” 2/4/07)

Edwards can say this but if Hillary were to say it, she’d be casting aspersions on her husband’s administration. I actually think that she doesn’t even believe that; in this particular case, I happen to think that Hillary is genuine in her hawkishness. I think she really believes that there is a substantial threat to US security that warrants more than a law enforcement stance (and that she believed that Saddam was conflated in this threat to some degree). But at the same time, she’s in the awkward position of trying to stake out a hawkish position that is different from the GOP/Bush position. She could, of course, say that the Iraq War was not inherently the wrong policy but that it was implemented improperly, but that doesn’t satisfy a substantial number of Democratic voters. So instead she seems to be saying “It seemed like the right thing at the time but in hindsight I now have a different opinion.” In my view this is inane; the POTUS has to make decisions based on what is known or believed to be true at the time, not with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t think that members of Congress necessarily need to apologize for their votes to authorize use of force in Iraq, but if they’re running for president I do think they owe us an explanation of what they believed at the time, and if they truly think that they were lied to then they should say so. It’s telling that instead of saying that, Edwards is simply admitting that the intel was wrong (not hyped, not ginned up, simply wrong), and Hillary isn’t really commenting on it one way or another except to make the point that the overall threat is substantial and must be taken seriously. It seems that the “Bush lied” meme has caught on among voters but the two main Dem frontrunners who actually sat in the Senate in ’03 are not saying that they were lied to.