War Debate Ducks The Real Question

Yeah, but Are We Safer?

By Gil Brady, 9-09-07

Some freely available news analysis

JACKSON, Wyo. – With the arrival of top military commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus’s and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s reports on Iraq, there’s one thing you can count on in Congress and on the homefront this month: more hype and hand-wringing over the war.

You can also bet there’ll be well-funded media blitzes to both sell the war and to end it as some in Congress clash, with Democrats offering a mostly symbolic fight, over what to do next.

Led by presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, some Democrats are already dismissing the general’s report. On the Right, for the most part, Republicans are calling for a continuation of the Iraq dilemma—seeing in the alleged success of President Bush’s “surge” a vindication of the overall correctness of our strategic posture there.

But neither of these two vociferous parties has so far as loudly explained whether America is “safer”.

Are we really “safer” or just “lucky,” because of the combination of the war, its continuation, the “surge” or the widespread assumption that “radical, militant Islamists,” or whatever the term du jour is, hate us for our “values”?

Hovering on the sidelines of the fray, 9/11 Commission members Thomas H. Kean and Lee Hamilton have weighed in on this largely ignored essential question with an OP/ED piece in today’s Washington Post.

While it’s debatable whether their response to the question “Are We Safer?” is correct, these two out-of-office senior statesmen are at the least offering reasons for what they think. By contrast, many supporters and critics of the war argue as if their judgments are based on something more cogent and rational than plain blind faith.

As the focus of the national debate this week turns on whether to continue our military campaign in Iraq, it might behoove Americans everywhere to not lose sight of whether the basic assumptions of our current foreign policy are indeed effectively securing the homeland.

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