Mark Steyn: The man in the muddle

The Spectator (U.K.) | 10/16/04 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

Mark Steyn says that the nuanced John Kerry is a threat to peace. So it’s a good thing he’s going to lose the election

New Hampshire

These days the most devastating profiles of John Kerry are the puff pieces. Take, for example, last weekend’s New York Times magazine, in which Matt Bai attempted to argue that the Nuancy Boy is a kind of strategic genius who was on to this whole terror thing a decade before anybody else. That line of argument gets a little tiring, so midway through Mr Bai included this relaxing interlude:

A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.

‘Can we get any of my water?’ he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn’t like about Evian.

‘I hate that stuff,’ Kerry explained to me. ‘They pack it full of minerals.’

‘What kind of water do you drink?’ I asked, trying to make conversation.

‘Plain old American water,’ he said.

‘You mean tap water?’

‘No,’ Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I’m out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn’t demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French — important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

‘There are all kinds of waters,’ he said finally. Pause. ‘Saratoga Spring.’ This seemed to have exhausted his list. ‘Sometimes I drink tap water,’ he added.

You can lead a horse-face to water, but you can’t make him drink. Not in this election. Imagine the strain of being unable to answer a simple question of beverage preference without flipping through the old mental Rolodex to calibrate the least politically damaging answer. Water, water everywhere, but gotta stop to think, to quote The Rime Of The Ancient Swift Boat Mariner. If George W. Bush happened to enjoy Evian, I don’t think he’d be averse to telling us. I certainly wouldn’t. I dislike France for geopolitical reasons, but I like the wine and the food. I like the women. I especially like the cute little girl bellhops in the Ruritanian uniforms at the Plaza Athenée. But John Kerry has invested so much in his imaginary friend in the Elysée Palace you can’t even ask him, ‘Hey, bud, what’ll you drink?’ without him wondering whether you’re impugning his patriotism. So ask a simple question and get a lot of, as it were, tap dancing.

In the debates, it’s easier. He and John Edwards know they have to sound tough, so their writers generally provide them with a line pledging to ‘hunt down and kill the terrorists’. But it’s exhausting having to remember when to spit out the tough talk and not to get caught in some fake-o water-gate controversy, and so your concentration wanders and you get relaxed and then you say things like this:

‘We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. 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, organised crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise.’

So the Senator has now made what was hitherto just a cheap crack from his opponents into formal policy: the Democrats are the September 10 party.

The ‘I’ll hunt down and kill America’s enemies’ line was written for him and planted on his lips. The ‘It’s just a nuisance like prostitution’ line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist won’t take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidels’ sex industry, but the rest of us shouldn’t be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution, there’d still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere giving someone a ride for ten bucks. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a ‘law-enforcement person’, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for ‘escort services’. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, in which, if you could stay awake through the wet cement of the guy’s prose, the main beef was that I was not a ‘respectable commentator’ like David Brooks of the New York Times. ‘Respectability’ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an ‘alternative’ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a ‘managerial’ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: if some gal in your apartment building is working as a prostitute, that’s a nuisance — condoms in the elevator, dodgy johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ‘nuisance’ doesn’t quite cover it.

So the choice of analogy is revealing and, as Kerry says, we’ve been here before. Every so often, back in the Nineties, al-Qa’eda blew up some military housing, a ship, a couple of embassies, etc., and the Clinton team shrugged it off as a nuisance. No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and miniskirt he couldn’t catch the Administration’s eye. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the USS Cole, the defense secretary Bill Cohen said the attack ‘was not sufficiently provocative’ to warrant a response.

So Osama tried again, on September 11 2001. And this time, like the ads in the Boston Phoenix, he was very provocative. And that’s the point: even if you take the Kerry doctrine as seriously as the New York Times does, the nuance of nuisance depends largely on the terrorists. When all they could do was kill a few dozen here, a few hundred there, they were a ‘nuisance’ to Clinton, Cohen, Kerry and co; when they came up with a plan that killed thousands, they became something more than a nuisance. But that change in status was determined largely by them. They might go back to being a mere nuisance for 2005, just blowing up a US consulate hither and yon in places no one much cares about. But in 2006 they might loose a dirty bomb in Chicago and upgrade to über-nuisance again. The Kerry doctrine leaves it in their hands. And, in this kind of war, if you’re not on the offensive, you’re losing.

That’s what John Kerry means when he says ‘we have to get back to the place we were’ — back to the Nineties. Mem’ries light the corners of his mind, misty watercolour mem’ries of the way we were, but the reason they’re misty watercolours is that we didn’t see clearly what was going on. It wasn’t just the nuisance of the biennial embassy bombing, it was the terrorist annexation of flop states and the thousands upon thousands of young Muslim men graduating from al-Qa’eda’s training camps and then heading off wherever the jihad calls. The British Muslim discovered among the Beslan gang, for example: if you downgrade the war to a ‘nuisance’, is that the sort of cross-border trend you’re likely to spot?

‘It’s a different kind of war,’ says Kerry. ‘You have to understand it’s not the sands of Iwo Jima.’ That’s true. But Kerry’s mistake is in assuming that because it’s not Iwo Jima, it’s somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of ‘asymmetrical warfare’ as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power — Germany, Canada, Belgium — is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. That’s the lesson of 9/11.

So, for all that Bush is accused of being ‘stubborn’, it’s Kerry who refuses to change. He is, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer in their endorsement of the Senator this week, ‘alert to fresh global challenges, yet rooted in the approaches that made the 1990s so productive’. Well, they’re half right. He’s certainly rooted in the approaches of the Nineties, so rooted that he can’t pull himself up and move on, despite the fact that last week’s report of the Iraq Survey Group completely demolishes every prop of the Kerry world-view. When a man keeps telling you it doesn’t count unless the French and the UN are on board, he’s either a fool or a liar — because no serious person can spend 15 minutes on this issue without understanding that the French state at every level, and quasi-state pillars such as TotalFinaElf, were to all intents and purposes Saddam’s concubines, and that the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme had been transformed into the regime’s most reliable Weapon of Mass Destruction.

The attempt to talk the Senator up into a foreign-policy genius is sounding ever more loopy. ‘He was getting it,’ says Richard Clarke, the embittered Clinton-Bush terrorism ‘czar’ who now supports Kerry. ‘And the “it” here was that there was a new non-state-actor threat, and that non-state-actor threat was a blended threat that didn’t fit neatly into the box of organised criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism.’

Yes, but what does that mean? Even if he does get the ‘it’ that nobody else is getting, what difference does it make if he doesn’t do anything about it? The ‘blended threat’ may not fit neatly into the box, but Kerry fits in there perfectly neatly — the box of complacent assumptions about the Security Council, the EU, the G8 — and he’s so snug he has no intention of climbing out.

It seems to me that John Edwards has the right idea. In the gym of Newton High School in Iowa this week, he skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. ‘We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases,’ he assured the crowd and, warming to his theme, turned to the death last weekend of Christopher (Superman) Reeve. ‘When John Kerry is president, people like Chris Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.’ Read his lips: No new crutches. Now that’s a campaign promise. President Kerry may be paralysed by nuance, but no one else will be. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry’s speeches ever do. Just because he can’t choose his water doesn’t mean he can’t walk on it.

In its own way, this is easier to swallow than the Richard Clarke line. The notion that he can perform miracles on the wheelchair-bound requires no more of a suspension of disbelief than that he can turn back the clock to September 10.

This has been a very dispiriting election, mainly because one party simply refuses to make any intelligent contribution to the debate. John Howard’s splendid victory down under came about at least in part because of the laziness of the Left — Mark Latham’s Labor party offered a new face with not a single new idea. In the US, the Democrats have gone one further — peddling an old face with old ideas on the theory that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ‘get back to where they were’, back to September 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing Congressional interns. But all that going back to September 10 means is that you’ll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans — and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans — will die in terrorist ‘nuisances’.

But he won’t win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. You can’t put that world back together.

[Tax-chick]

Words fail me.

[lawgirl]

Exactly. I keep highlighting and hitting Ctrl-C, and then I move to the next paragraph and say Ooh-oohh no I'll highlight this one! And then by the time I get to the end I've chosen about 20 different things to say and just end up saying the same thing--

I LOVE STEYN!!

[Bahbah]

"I LOVE STEYN!!"

He always causes me to ask myself, can you learn to write this well, or are you just born that way?

[TASMANIANRED]

Another brilliant piece . He gets it the way we get it.

[mombrown1]

Because he can have more impact doing what he is doing. If he was connected to the GOP people could say he is just another GOP lacky.

[McGavin999]

I think the thing that amazes me most is that it's the liberal, who live in large cities, who want more than anything to pretend that terrorism is not the threat that it is. They will be the first targets, they are the ones who will die in their offices and restaurants with their Grande Latte' clutched in their hands.

I used to think it was because they hate America, I'm beginning to think it's because they hate themselves.

[shezza]

Ping-a-rooski!

[Darth Reagan]

This is awesome -- as usual.

[Dr.Deth]

Sweet mercy. At least a dozen grand-slam quotes to be had. Best Steyn Ever.

[zeugma]

Pokey,

I'd dearly love to be on a Steyn ping list if that's what you're runnning. :-)

amp

[NCSteve]

No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and miniskirt he couldn’t catch the Administration’s eye.

Absolutely brilliant, Mark.

[aruanan]

‘I hate that stuff,’ Kerry explained to me. ‘They pack it full of minerals.’

But water without minerals is not safe for human consumption. Hmmm....

[Rummyfan]

Water, water everywhere, but gotta stop to think, to quote The Rime Of The Ancient Swift Boat Mariner.

Hee hee! Thanks Pokey! So much in this article is dead-on I don't know what else to excerpt!

[gcruse]

His prose is as brilliant, if not as biting, as Ann Coulters.

It's the difference between a writer and a polemicist.

[proud American in Canada]

"Water, water everywhere, but gotta stop to think, to quote The Rime Of The Ancient Swift Boat Mariner."

LOL!

Thanks for posting the article. He is so good!

[gcruse]

This was one of his best columns of all time

I'm thinking the same thing.  You'd have to go back to some of the more outraged Whitewater columns to get this much bite.

[gcruse]

Because he can have more impact doing what he is doing.

I would agree with you, except he is a virtual unknown in the American press.  Steyn needs a bigger platform.  He has done television in the UK.  It may be that his writing is much richer than his speaking, given the ability to ponder the former before releasing it, but I'd sure like Fox to get him a shot at his own commentating.  We're hiding him under a bucket.

[Slip18]

Thank you, Mark. Your insight is inspirational, to say the least.

[knighthawk]

Ping!

[Lurker]

For later. And thanks for the whole thing Pokey.

L