War torn: why Democrats can't think straight about national security.

• Author: Hurlburt, Heather
• Position: Cover Story

LATE IN 2000, WITH ONE EYE ON THE presidential campaign and the other on history, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger called a group of staffers into his office. He wanted to give a major speech laying out the essence of the Clinton administration's national security doctrine and the challenge of transformation that lay ahead. We had a good story to tell, he said. Though the administration had not garnered high marks for security savvy in its early years, we had, as they say, grown in office. In the last five years, we had fought--and won--two wars under trying circumstances, deploying cutting-edge weaponry in Bosnia and Kosovo. We had not merely held NATO together but boosted its size and sense of purpose. We had stitched together a new web of agreements and alliances to constrain potential enemies and control weapons of mass destruction. We had seen the future of war: smaller-scale, higher-tech, faster and more diffuse. Now Berger wanted to formalize our thinking about the next challenge: modernizing the military, and American thinking about the military, to meet the new threats.

It would have been a great speech, and this former speechwriter has a file of drafts six inches thick to prove it. But Berger never gave it. White House staff convened meetings, prepared papers, and debated drafts with Berger, from whom we had full interest and engagement (the kind that drives speechwriters to hide under the desk). What we lacked was the kind of intense policy debate that usually characterizes White House life. No fevered arguments among staffers and Cabinet officials, just prolonged discussions agonizing over how best to present our record. Through the next month, while the Berger draft gathered dust on my desk, I wrote speeches on welfare, trade with China, women in American history, and why Middle East politics are like golf. Meanwhile, the security speech-that-never-was became an office joke. As quickly as Berger would slot it into his schedule, something else would knock it out. None of the White House political staff took any interest in it. Eyes didn't just glaze over; they rolled when I mentioned it. Why did I want to work on something so dull, when I could be writing about the budget battle?

In recent months, I've been thinking a lot about that speech and the indifference to military matters that killed it. As the debate over Iraq unfolded, I was dismayed, like most Democrats, to watch the Bush administration hawks nearly destroy the trust of our allies, whom we desperately need in our fight against al Qaeda, by pushing militarily insane plans to overthrow Saddam's regime unilaterally. Nor could I shake the suspicion that the White House timed the drumbeat to influence the November elections. But I was equally dismayed at the feckless, equivocal way in which the Democrats handled the debate. For months, they contented themselves with asking "tough questions" about the invasion plans--clearly hoping the whole issue would go away so that they could get back to talking about the economy. But it didn't go away. In the end, Bush won plaudits for shifting (apparently) to an approach that emphasized the need for U.N. approval and the involvement of our allies--one more in line with Democratic thinking. But Democrats didn't lead Bush to that position. They were instead dragged to it, and looked weak and craven as a result.

Since then, there's been plenty of hand-wringing among the leadership and rank-and-file Democrats about how politically inept the party appeared in the face of Bush's saber rattling. But that's the problem. Democrats are in this position precisely because we respond to matters of war politically, tactically. We worry about how to position ourselves so as not to look weak, rather than thinking through realistic, sensible Democratic principles on how and when to employ military force, and arguing particular cases, such as Iraq, from those principles. There are a lot of reasons for this failure, including the long-time split within the party between hawks and doves. But we will never resolve that split, nor regain credibility with voters on national security, until we learn to think straight about war. And we will never learn to think straight about war until this generation of professional Democrats overcomes its ignorance of and indifference to military affairs.

Reactionary Jerks

The reasons for this apathy aren't hard to discern. Many Democrats who came of age during the Vietnam War retain a gut-level distrust of the military. Younger staffers, who may not carry the same psychological baggage, have few mentors urging them toward military or security issues. I speak from experience: My main qualification for my first Washington job--covering European security for Congress--was that I could locate the Warsaw Pact countries on a map and correctly identify the acronyms of...