John Edwards' Terror Plan

The script for this writes itself: Critics on the right will call it “the hug-a-terrorist strategy.” Idealists on the left will applaud Edwards for striking at the “root causes” of terrorism.

Both will miss the point, just as the former Senator’s proposal for 10,000 volunteers to help people in underdeveloped countries misses the point about terrorism.

His re-treaded Peace Corps solution recalls the old Yiddish joke about the bystander who keeps yelling at those treating a heart-attack victim to give him an enema. When an exasperated doctor asks how an enema would help a dying man, the answer is “It couldn’t hoit.”

Investing in poverty-stricken areas “couldn’t hoit,” but it won’t make a dent, as Edwards hopes, in persuading millions of people “sitting on the fence” to become our friends instead of terrorist enemies.

This morning, I received an e-mail from Kiva about the status of my micro-loans to small-business owners in Togo, Ecuador, Samoa and the Ukraine. Reaching out to help others is an American tradition but, as a solution to terrorism, it’s a band-aid on a gaping wound.

Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a conference on Asian security last weekend, "One of the disturbing things about many of the terrorists... is that these are not ignorant, poor people. These are educated people, often from professional families. So dealing with poverty and those issues is not going to eliminate the problem, but it certainly can reduce the pool of people prepared to give their lives for this cause."

So all cynicism about political motives aside, give
Edwards an “A” for altruism but a “C” for coherence.

Gates Swinging Both Ways on Iraq

The man who replaced the unlamented Donald (Often-Wrong-But-Never-in-Doubt) Rumsfeld has seemed, by comparison, reasonable and realistic. Who wouldn’t? But the current Secretary of Defense’s ambivalence about Iraq is showing.

Commemorating the June 7, 1944 landings in Normandy, Gates said today, “We once again face enemies seeking to destroy our way of life, and we are once again engaged in an ideological struggle that may not find resolution for many years or even decades. Just (as) during World War II, free nations of the world are banding together--and dying together--to confront their common threat.”

Very Bush-Cheney, down to the basic untruths: Nations are not “banding together” but bailing out of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, and “the enemies seeking to destroy our way of life” are a collection of unpredictable fanatics rather than the organized armies we faced in World War II.

Gates knows better. Last weekend, he told a conference on Asian security that “we have not made enough progress in trying to address some of the root causes of terrorism in some of these societies, whether it is economic deprivation or despotism that leads to alienation."

In Iraq, Gates is not talking about “many years or even decades” to the parliament, setting late summer as a deadline for getting their act together if they expect us to extend the Surge.

His double-edged (or if you will, two-faced) talk may reflect, at long last, some unwelcome reality seeping into the White House. One thing is sure: If he were still running the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld would be railing against such defeatist talk.