Nuisance and Nuance 

The New York Times Magazine has an article by Matt Bai called Kerry's Undeclared War in which he sat down with John Kerry for a rather lengthy interview. Some parts of it struck me as strange which I will point out here (all emphasis is mine):

Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should include a strong military option argue that the "war on terror" is a flawed construct. "We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense," says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's secretary of state. "The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers."

This is the key. This statement is where you have the general split between the hawkish neocons, and the dovish liberals. Do you believe that 9/11 was an act of war, that will forever change how we view terrorism in America, or was it more like a natural disaster to you.

When I asked Kerry's campaign advisers about these poll numbers, what I heard from some of them in response was that Kerry's theories on global affairs were just too complex for the electorate and would have been ignored -- or, worse yet, mangled -- by the press.

There are two problems with this statement. I'll mention the last one first. The media always mangles stuff. They want sound bites. They want headlines. But more importantly, so do the protestors and the get out the vote people. They want something to chant. They love taking one little statement and concentrating on that one thing. You either deal with it or don't.

The bigger issue is that Kerry thinks his theories are just too complex for us. I'm a pretty intelligent guy. You will never win points with me by saying that I won't get it. That says more about you than me. It says that you think that I'm stupid. It says that you think I need to be coddled. No thank you. What it means is that you don't know how to express yourself well enough for me to understand. Or worse yet, you just don't want to try. That's your problem, not mine.

If you've ever spent time in the business world, you're familiar with the vision statement. At the beginning of the project, it's usually the first thing you come up with. You define as succinctly as possible your goal for this project. Everything that happens after that in the project must mesh with that vision. If it doesn't, you need to rethink what you're doing. That's Kerry's biggest problem. He may have a lot of complex ideas, but he's never come up with a vision that all those ideas try to succeed in accomplishing. We never said that you have to use the exact same method everywhere, in fact that would be pretty bad. We're just saying that they should all attempt to accomplish the same overall goal. What's your goal John?

In our conversation, Kerry seemed unusually sensitive to these allegations, to the point where he seemed unwilling to admit to having evolved or grown in the way that politicians -- or human beings, for that matter -- generally do. When I asked Kerry how Sept. 11 had changed him, either personally or politically, he seemed to freeze for a moment.

"It accelerated -- " He paused. "I mean, it didn't change me much at all. It just sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing. I mean, to me, it wasn't as transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren't doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it."

If you can't answer that question honestly and pretty easily John, you shouldn't be our President. If you honestly think that Sept. 11 didn't change you, then you shouldn't be our President. How can you say that you are going to fight a "new kind of war" if you didn't change on that day?

Kerry told me he would stop terrorists by going after them ruthlessly with the military, and he faulted Bush, as he often does, for choosing to use Afghan militias, instead of American troops, to pursue Osama bin Laden into the mountains of Tora Bora, where he disappeared.

Of course then just a paragraph later he says:

"I think we can do a better job," Kerry said, "of cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working cooperatively across the globe, of improving our intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally, of training our military and deploying them differently, of specializing in special forces and special ops, of working with allies, and most importantly -- and I mean most importantly -- of restoring America's reputation as a country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in the war on terror, not to diminish us."

This always gets me. He complains all the time about our current partners in the war on terror, then talks about how he wants to work internationally more. He calls our current coalition the "Coalition of the Bribed and Coerced", yet he talks about gaining their respect. In one breath he complains about using troops from another country instead of our own, in the next he complains that we're handling too much of the load and need to get other countries involved. No wonder Bush always looks so frustrated during the debates. Which is it John? Are you going to work alone or work with other countries?

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

And that John Kerry is why we are where we are today. That was how we treated terrorists in the 80's and 90's. They were a nuisance. They were a problem somewhere else that we tried to deal with. For those of us who think differently after Sept. 11th, we realize that this is no longer the case, and can never again be the case. For if there is ever again a time where we view them in that way, that is the time when we will pay that high price again.

For more on this article... take a look at The Belmont Club... he's got some pretty good stuff.

Update: Thanks to the Blog Father (InstaPundit) and to Hell In a Handbasket for the linkage.