Sunday, September 9, 2007

Straw Horse in Rudy the Crusader Profile

Matt Bai in the September 9 New York Times magazine looks at Rudy Giuliani's appeal to voters as the anti-terrorism crusader. The piece is probing and perceptive, and asks the critical question whether the former New York mayor's reputation as the tough guy ready to take on Bin Laden is deserved (though it largely accepts the celebratory view of his campaign against crime in New York).

But at a key point in the article, Bai sets up a contrast between Democrats and Republicans on their approach to the terror threat for which he provides no solid evidence -- and it's a comparison that that works to the advantage of the GOP in arguing that it remains the US's daddy party. It's difficult to discern what led Bai to his paradism, and he really needs to flesh his thinking out in some reasonable degree of detail:

Democrats now openly question the entire premise of a “war on terror” (or, as Giuliani likes to call it, a “terrorists’ war on us”), and, privately, at least, they are increasingly willing to argue that Islamic radicals do not represent the same kind of existential threat that the Stalinists did, with their vast military machinery. There is a growing, though not unanimous, feeling in liberal policy circles that remaking the nation’s entire foreign policy around terrorism is an overreaction to what is, essentially, a serious but manageable threat. As one senior Democratic policy aide put it to me recently, the terrorist attacks that claimed some 3,000 innocent American lives were indescribably tragic, but if you had gone to sleep on Sept. 10, 2001, and woken up sometime in 2006, surely you would have thought, to hear the political rhetoric, that several American cities had been wiped off the map. In this view, Al Qaeda is not a defining ideological adversary so much as a stateless, lethal criminal enterprise without any real historical antecedent, and Bush’s war in Iraq has nothing to do with the campaign against organized terrorists — except perhaps to swell their ranks by recklessly throwing around America’s military might.

The Crusader, by Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine, September 9.

No comments: