FRAMESHOP:FRAMESHOP: THE SMART AMERICAN

SMART STATESMAN: Jim Webb epitomizes a new voice of Democrats who frame security in terms of the "Smart Statesman."

What does it sound like when a Democrat frames the national security debate in terms of a "Smart America," versus a Republican framing the debate through a "Dumb American"?

To see the difference, we need only look as far as the race for Senate in Virginia. There we can see the Democrat, Jim Webb, framing national security as a "Smart Statesman" while the incumbent Republican, George Allen, continues to push the frame of the "Dumb Brute."

When Webb and Allen debated national security on Meet the Press (Sep 17, 2006), their answers epitomized the "Dumb" approach of Republicans vs. the "Smart" approach a new wave of Progressive Democrats.

First, a quote from George Allen:

Insofar as leading up to the military action in Iraq: The issues were before us on a resolution, a resolution that stated that Saddam had 17 times defied and violated U.N. resolutions. It wasn’t just the United States, it was Britain and indeed the entire world community. There was good evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction—in particular, chemical and biological weapons. The resolution wanted to get the, the whole world community to enforce that resolution, and ultimately the president, in the event that he felt that it was important for the security of our country, may need to act, and need to act as best as possible in coordination, in concert with other countries.

This idea that we had to attack Iraq because Hussein defied the security council is the epitome of the "Dumb Brute" approach to national security. Allen defines the danger as a defiant Saddam. The solution to that danger is force. Force is security--that is Allen's logic.

Now, let's take a look at a quote from Jim Webb in that same discussion:

With respect to going in [to Iraq], in, in this situation, we did have other options. This was not a war of necessity at the time. We had inspectors on the ground, as opposed to the situation in 1998 when there were no inspectors on the ground. And we had plenty of strong military advice, not just from people like me, people like Tony Zinni, and other strongly—people with strong backgrounds, military backgrounds, who have endorsed my campaign, who were saying the same thing. This was a case, as you—last week Vice President Cheney was on your show, and he even declined to comment about the Senate Intelligence Committee report that showed how this—the intelligence that would be—was being used had been cooked. A lot of people on the outside knew that. There was no urgency to go into this war at the time that we went into it. And if we had the right people in the Senate, there would have been more questions asked and a better policy in place in order to defeat international terrorism. That is the focus of our country. We didn’t go into Iraq because of terrorism, we have terrorists in Iraq because we went in there.

Rather than focusing on Saddam's defiance, Webb focuses attention on what we knew and the system we had in place to gather information. Webb defines the situation in pre-invasion Iraq as not being a danger based on what we knew. Knowledge is security--that is Webb's logic.

The contrast is very clear. The Republcan Allen frames the debate on Iraq in terms of brute strength in the face of defiance:

Will we or will we not use force to shut down this defiant enemy?

Whereas, the Democrat Webb frames the debate on Iraq in terms of smart statesmanship in the face of unanswered questions:

Based on what we know, what are our options other than force against this enemy?

With six years of unfortunate 20-20 hindsight, we can see the results of the Republican approach: our national security landscape is filled with more and more instances of enemies rising ot confront America--we appear to know even less about the threats out there when we started, and despite the Republicans having spent billions putting down America's enemies with force, the world is less safe.

© 2006 Jeffrey Feldman, Frameshop