— Failure to extend the temporary federal tax cuts scheduled to expire toward the end of this decade.
— To borrow from Virginia’s Senator-elect Jim Webb, new emphasis on “economic fairness” and “social justice,” and a corresponding de-emphasis on national security powers for the administration.
And what is in store regarding Iraq and the broader War on Terror? That is harder to visualize, and must be done in the context of commendable Democratic performance in key wars past.
The jihadists are not out there playing Parcheesi. They want to kill us, as non-believers in Islam, and establish a worldwide caliphate. And they mean business. Last week a Washington Post report datelined London noted: “British spies are watching 1,600 people in 200 cells believed to be plotting terrorist acts in Britain or overseas, according to the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency. ‘More and more people are moving from passive sympathy toward active terrorism,’ said Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the MI5 intelligence agency.”
Whatever the American course, two points:
(1) America must continue prizing its military, as opposed to regarding it — in John Kerry’s late-campaign idiocy — as a cohort of the incompetent and the dumb.
And (2) George Will offers this from Dick Cheney as secretary of defense in the first Gulf War — arguing with eerie prescience against driving on to Baghdad:
“Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?”
The Republican Congress proved incapable of helping expand the sense of national sacrifice or helping expand the participation of Americans in the war effort. It also proved incapable of helping produce answers to Cheney’s questions that would not deliver Iraq into chaos — and would not deliver to the world messages of America as unreliable in the long haul and an unfaithful ally.
Will the Democrats redux prove any more capable of contributing to such answers in an hour when national sacrifice and broadened participation are emphatically not their cries?