The Democrats' War Against the War

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com

Two news items from last week speak volumes about the Democratic Party’s priorities on national security. First, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate -- including all the presidential aspirants -- voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which authorized military tribunals to try terrorist suspects and established guidelines for their aggressive interrogation. Then, late last Thursday, 177 House Democrats voted to thwart the passage of the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act, which expanded electronic surveillance of terrorists on foreign soil.

Civil liberties dogmatists like the ACLU applauded these obstructionist efforts, but they came to naught. Both pieces of legislation ended up passing -- though the latter act awaits approval by the Senate -- and the only political defeat was borne by the Democratic Party, which was left looking, not for the first time, like a calculating horde of anti-Bush partisans more concerned with frustrating the War on Terror for political gain than fighting it.

To suggest that many on the Democratic side are less than supportive of a tough-minded counterterrorism strategy is to arouse howls of self-righteous outrage. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was savaged by Democrats and their media sympathizers last month for making the commonsensical and seemingly innocuous suggestion that terrorists, like the Nazis before them, can never be appeased. Equally repugnant to Rumsfeld’s critics was his observation that a “‘blame America first’ mentality” imperiled the country’s ability vigorously to wage the war effort. Forget the fact that Rumsfeld was making only general remarks, and that he never once singled out the administration’s Democratic opponents. For Senators Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, among others in the Democratic camp, the speech hit too close to home: Nothing less that Rumsfeld’s immediate resignation would sate their ire.

But surely the Democrats do protest too much. Rumsfeld may be too politic to say so, but the fact is that the current Democratic Party has forfeited the tough-on-defense legacy of such Democratic standard-bearers as presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. It scarcely overstates the case to say that the Democratic establishment’s most notable contributions to the war against Islamic jihadism have come at its expense. Supporting this contention are the Democrats’ repeated attempts to quash critical counterterrorism legislation.

Read the Rest...