"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

I think it’s a fair question.

Between the 1993 car bombing of the WTC and 9/11, there was no significant Islamofascist terrorist attack on US soil. If Bush deserves credit for the absence of attacks during the last 7 years, doesn’t Clinton deserve credit for the absence of attacks up to 9/11? Conversely, if we think Clinton deserves no credit because other factors can be cited to explain the hiatus under his administration, would we not likewise deny Bush credit?
....

The difficulty with this argument, of course, is that we managed to win an 8 year hiatus between 1993 and 2001 without waging a preemptive war on Iraq, restricting civil liberties, torture, creating an American Gulag (Guantanamo, Baghram, renditions, etc....) and so on. If Barnett’s argument made any sense, the failure of the Clinton administration to take such steps after 1993 surely should have resulted in at least one Islamofascist attack on US soil pre-9/11.

This is the argument that the Bush Administration has made for defending its policies-there hasn’t been another attack, therefore we must be doing something right! But it’s a false sense of security, because it could be argued that our policies post-9-11 have in fact driven more Muslims towards Jihadism and created problems where there were none before (at least at the level we seem to be seeing). For all his scumbaggery as a person, I think Clinton was a fairly decent president when it came to foreign policy. Many say he did not do enough to go after Bin Laden, but I doubt that a President Dole or a second-term Bush Senior would have done much differently. There were attacks-Oklahoma City, the Embassy bombings, and the USS Cole-but the first was entirely domestic in nature and the next, while serious, weren’t seen as a declaration of war by most people in either party, and certainly not as an excuse to torture suspects or curtail civil liberties. As a peacetime president, I think Clinton reacted pretty much the same towards terrorism that Reagan and Bush 1 did, and for that matter Bush 2 did pre-9-11.

So, has Bush made us safer, or do his supporters just think we are? Like I said, I think it’s a fair question.