Leadership and Crisis (32 page)

Our current therapeutic approach to national security is dangerous. I’m just not interested in empathizing with the “grievances” of our sworn enemies. Let’s figure out where they’re vulnerable and destroy them. FDR didn’t agonize over what we may have done to provoke the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He just developed a plan to defeat them. Likewise, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan didn’t wring their
hands wondering what we’d done to anger the Soviets; they simply figured out a strategy to beat them.

To defeat Islamic terrorism, we should develop a practical strategy based on American ideals. First, we need to act as if we’re at war—because we are. It seems obvious that when networks of terrorists are trying to kill thousands of people by blowing up buildings and airplanes and cars in our homeland, this amounts to war. But the Obama administration prefers to handle terrorism mostly as a criminal matter. This is misguided. When a foreign enemy is trying to attack us on our own soil, we are facing a military situation and the armed forces, not law enforcement, should play the primary role in hunting down the terrorists, interrogating them, detaining them, and when necessary, killing them.

I don’t see any reason to continue giving Miranda rights to foreign terrorists, as we did to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of Flight 253. As Senators Collins and Lieberman wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder, the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal “almost certainly prevented the military and the intelligence community from obtaining information that would have been critical to learning more about how our enemy operates and to preventing future attacks.”
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This is just common sense; intelligence is our first line of defense in war. That’s why I voted in Congress to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) so the president and the attorney general could authorize electronic surveillance of foreign agents without a court order. Extending full legal protections to foreign terrorists will simply mean more dead Americans.

Our national security strategy should aim to achieve one thing: defeating our enemies. Some say this is an unrealistic goal, and that we can only hope to manage, not eliminate, problems like terrorism and rogue states. I think this attitude short-changes America’s abilities.
Winning World War II was so difficult that at the time many pessimists believed it would take us decades to win, if we ever could. And during the Cold War, most scholars and Washington experts assumed the Soviet bloc was a permanent fixture in global affairs. The simple fact is that history is moved and shaped by the actions of leaders and by the courage of nations. As Reagan said, “Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.”

Adopting a defensive strategy toward terrorism simply won’t work. Think about it: the terrorists are not going away. They are not going to abandon the fight because we try to reason with them or indulge their grievances. If we don’t hunt them down, destroy their networks, and kill their leaders, we will cede the field of battle to them. They will get to pick when and where to attack us. Sitting back passively and waiting for an attack is not a strategy. And relying on civilian passengers to restrain a terrorist on a plane, or alert passers-by to notice a car bomb in Times Square, is not a strategy. Eventually our luck will run out.

Instead of staying on the defensive, we need to put the terrorists on the defensive. We should relentlessly hunt them and kill them so they have to spend all their time just trying to stay alive. That strategy requires us to give our armed forces the leadership and financial and material resources they need to win. I’m not interested in parity; I want to guarantee U.S. military superiority. As the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson put it, “International peace and security depend not on a parity of power but on a preponderance of power in the peacekeepers over the peace-upsetters.”
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Above all else, our national security policy should aim to protect America. But that mission is clouded when President Obama and
others blur the lines between the United States and the rest of the world. They emphasize the need for “consensus” among the “international community.” Apparently finding his U.S. citizenship too limiting, then-Senator Obama in 2008 proclaimed in Berlin that he was “a proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.” Along the same lines, when asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, Obama replied that he believed in it “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
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Our president seems to think it would be intolerant to believe that America is more exceptional than any other country.

Consistent with its internationalist approach, the Obama administration puts far too much faith in the United Nations to solve problems and guarantee world security. The UN is simply a collection of governments—many of them tyrannical—that all pursue their own interests. So it made little sense, in the name of furthering international cooperation, for the Obama administration to join the discredited UN Human Rights Council, where paragons of civil rights such as Cuba and China deflect scrutiny of their own miserable human rights records by indulging in the Islamic world’s favorite pastime: denouncing Israel. In May 2010, a majority of UN members elected Libya—a country run by an oppressive, mentally unstable dictator whose government was implicated in the horrific Lockerbie plane bombing and other bloody terrorist activities—to the Human Rights Council. That vote came shortly after the misogynist, theocratic government of Iran was elected to the leading UN women’s rights agency, the Commission on the Status of Women.

Because UN membership is open to any two-bit despot, the organization has become corrupt and dysfunctional. So it’s quite disturbing
to see the Obama administration rely on the UN to take a leading role in tackling some of the major national security challenges of our time, such as keeping the Iranian mullahs from developing nuclear weapons. While I was in Congress I voted for the U.S.—which pays more of the UN budget than any other country—to withhold funding for the UN in order to encourage transparency, anti-corruption measures, and other reforms. But I’m not sure if any reforms could fix the UN’s dysfunctions.

We would do much better to put our faith in our allies rather than in some nebulous body filled with autocrats. Senator John McCain has proposed creating a League of Democracies. Comprising only democracies, it would better reflect our values and better protect U.S. security. Although such a league would present a valuable way to coordinate our actions with our allies, we also have to be prepared to go it alone. No one—no person, country, or international organization—should have veto power over American security. Ever.

History teaches that democracies are more peaceful than tyrannies and are extremely unlikely to wage war against other democracies. So, for our own benefit and for the international good, we should work to spread democracy. But we cannot be naïve about this undertaking. For democracy to flourish you need more than elections and the basic infrastructure of representative government. You need cultural values that reinforce democratic instincts. One thing we’ve learned in Iraq is that it takes a lot of effort to spread notions of individual rights and democratic norms in cultures that are less individualistic.

But I do know our ideals inspire people everywhere in the world. Perhaps some people want to live in oppressive societies—especially the people who are doing the oppressing—but the vast majority of people everywhere would live in freedom if given the opportunity.
And it is our duty to provide the world’s best example of a free society. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “[The authors of the Declaration of Independence] set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all peoples of all colors everywhere.”
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In light of the difficult battles we’ve faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new kind of isolationism has gained adherents in both parties. The thinking is that if America would stop standing up for dissidents, speaking out for human rights, and trying to spread freedom, we would become safer by making ourselves inconspicuous. This, of course, is a revival of the kind of thinking that became popular in America after World War I. But what we learned with the outbreak of World War II was that world events affect us and draw us in, whether we like it or not. This is especially true today in light of globalization and the spread of nuclear technology—any country capable of manufacturing or obtaining a nuclear device could directly threaten the United States. This suggests two possible approaches: we could “be nice” to regimes like the Iranian Ayatollahs and hope they’ll be nice back to us once they get nukes; or we could use all available means to keep them from getting nukes in the first place. I would opt for the second course—it’s never a good idea to leave your fate in the hands of your enemies.

Moreover, isolationism contradicts America’s national character. We have traditionally responded to threats by taking the offensive, by confronting and defeating our enemies head on. This tradition runs deep in our history. President Thomas Jefferson dispatched Americans to
North Africa more than 200 years ago to deal with Barbary pirates. As Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis points out, this tradition started with John Quincy Adams, who laid the foundations for the expansion of America, and it continues today.
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This does not mean America needs to maintain a modern day empire, as some critics claim we are doing. We do not have an empire, nor do we seek one. We are not called to be the world’s policeman or to necessarily engage in nation-building around the world. In countries where we fight, our goal is to attain freedom for the people living there and then to bring our troops home. We only keep troops long-term in places like Germany, Japan, and South Korea at the request of those governments. They are there to preserve those nations’ freedom and independence, not to enslave those peoples to any mythical American empire. Once again, this is a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of our nation. John Quincy Adams reminded us that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” If we did so, he warned, “she might become the dictatress of the world” and would “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
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We are threatened by murderous ideologies—namely radical Islam—which spring from evil in the human heart. But it’s hard to develop a sound national security strategy when the administration is too paralyzed by political correctness to even name the ideology that threatens us or to acknowledge the existence of evil. They instead want to focus on the “root causes” of terrorism, which are often identified as poverty and ignorance. With this view, fighting terrorism becomes less a military battle and more a grand attempt at international social work. As Barack Obama wrote in the
Hyde Park Herald
shortly after
the 9/11 attacks, terrorists suffer from an “absence of empathy” that “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”
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This view was again evident in 2008 when Obama, then a presidential candidate, called for increasing our security through a new Marshall Plan that would double our foreign aid for efforts such as fighting global poverty and eradicating diseases.
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