Democrats Offer National Security “Plan”

If the Busheviks and the GOP have one winning card to play against the Democrats in November, it is the public’s belief that the Democrats are worse at national security than the Republicans. In an attempt to overtake the Republicans on this front, the Democratic Party put out its own “plan” for real security. Well, not really a plan, it’s more like a list of stuff that might help.

Plan, of course, would imply a strategy that in turn would imply identification of national security goals, an assessment of the needed resources to achieve those goals and a study of alternative approaches to the problems. The Democrats aren’t interested in that. What they want is to beat up on an incompetent Republican administration while at the same time convincing swing voters that they have something positive to offer.

On the plus side, the paper (offered in both English and Spanish – and thereby tacitly ignoring a significant national security debate) calls for adequate body armor for the troops, promises to prevent “outsourcing of critical components of our national security infrastructure – such as ports, airports and mass transit,” and vows to “provide firefighters, emergency medical workers, police officers, and other workers on the front lines with the training, staffing, equipment, and cutting edge technology they need.” These are things the GOP has failed to do. The Dems also want a GI Bill of Rights (which made America a middle-class nation after WWII) and to catch Usama bin Laden (remember him?).

On the negative side, the Dems are offering some ideas that lack seriousness. “Screen 100% of containers and cargo bound for the US in ships or airplanes at the point of origin” is not only expensive but impractical; the US can’t screen out Colombian cocaine, so how is it going to screen out anything else? “Insist that Iraqis make the political compromises necessary to unite their country and defeat the insurgency” suggests that the Democrats don’t understand the idea of Iraqi sovereignty – it means that can’t be told what to do. “Ensure our intelligence is free from political pressure” begs the question “how?”

However, the Democrats prove again that they are a party of collaboration rather than opposition. “Rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary” means that the Democrats will be just as happy to use the military (just not as incompetently) as the Busheviks. The US Defense Department already spends about as much as all the other countries in the world combined on weapons, but no one is asking why America needs more nuclear submarines to fight terrorists in landlocked deserts or why the US Navy has the second biggest air force in the world (the US Air Force is first). A real plan would either change these or explain why they were necessary. It would also be based on the understanding that security is relative, not absolute.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home