Liberal Talk Radio

I watched a bit of Condi Rice’s confirmation hearings. I didn’t expect much of interest, and I didn’t get much. A couple things stood out, though.

First, when criticized (mostly by Sen. Boxer) for not owning up to any mistakes about the Iraq occupation, Rice said she’d rather “let history be the judge.” This reminded me of the famous quote in Ron Suskind’s NY Times article:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [emph. added]

Rice’s logic: History is our creation -> history will judge us -> we can only be judged by ourselves -> Go suck a lemon, Sen. Boxer.

The second thing that perturbed me was when Rice talked about how she defined success in the war against terror. She said something like, “one way you can defeat terrorists is to deny them safe havens, and that’s what we’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan.” This obsession with states, with physical land, represents the Bush administration’s most egregious flaw in understanding the War on Terror. This is not a state-based problem, and again and again, they come back to the idea of taking out “rogue states” and “nations that harbor terrorists.”

This is what John Kerry got and what Bush & Co. refuse to learn: this is not a state-based war. This is more amorphorous. You can fight this war on the supply side, by killing terrorists and their families and any innocent civilians that happen to be standing by, and lose, or you can fight it on the demand side, by creating conditions in the Middle East that reduce the demand for martyrs, and WIN.

But, of course, since our government is run by supply-siders, it’s no suprise which side they’re on. And it’s a dud.

You know, it occurs to me, in retrospect, that maybe there’s a new Cold War analogy waiting out there. Republicans (and “hawkish” Democrats like Peter Beinart and Joe Leiberman) like to argue that we won the Cold War because Kennedy and Reagan stood tough against Moscow. Take a hard line on the Islamic Fundamentalists, goes this argument, and they’ll crumble, just like Moscow crumbled.

But what if it wasn’t the hard line at all? What if instead, it was the fact that we created a compelling vision of “freedom,” which infected the Eastern Bloc nations and collapsed them from within? I think that’s the better analogy, isn’t it? We made Western freedom so desirable that we drove the demand for Communism down to essentially zero.

There’s proof for demand-side policies that even a Reagan Republican could (and should!) love. From Communism to Terrorism to the War on Drugs, fighting demand beats fighting supply every time.