Bob Graham: Will the Grown-ups Come Home in 2005?
Ever since George Junior took over the White House in 2001, I've
been waiting for the grown-ups to come home. Many of you, I'm sure, know
exactly what I'm talking about. But for those who don't, I'll explain.
During their teen years, most people go through a know-it-all phase.
They read a magazine article about the environment, and suddenly they
are experts on pesticides (and won't eat the vegetables you buy at the
supermarket no matter how well you wash them). From watching Gladiator
three times, they know everything there is to know about the Roman
Empire. If you remind them that you have spent your life studying the
subject they're currently pontificating about, they roll their eyes.
The Bush Junior administration has been
like that. The CIA told them that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11,
but they were sure he did. Years of scientific study and international
negotiation culminated in the Kyoto Treaty, but they knew that all this
global warming stuff was overblown. Economists predicted that adding a
huge tax cut and a war to a large deficit would produce a truly whopping
big deficit but those economists, what do they know? Countless folks,
including a bunch from the Bush Senior administration, warned them that
governing Iraq would be harder than conquering it. But hey, you pop
Saddam, sign some contracts with Halliburton and Exxon, hold some
elections, and off you go. How hard is that? Don Rumsfeld in particular
has me wondering if Freaky Friday is more than just a movie.
He's flippant, moody, and never admits a mistake. Are you sure there's
not a teen-ager in there somewhere?
Meanwhile, the lower levels of
government are full of people who have spent their lives learning how
some part of the world works soldiers, diplomats, educators,
scientists ... the list goes on and on. They're the grown-ups in the
American government, and they're not in charge any more.
More
than any other candidate I have seen so far, Bob Graham strikes me as a
grown-up. He has served two terms as governor of Florida and is just
finishing his third term in the Senate. (Think about that: a Democrat
who has won five statewide elections in Florida.) He was chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee until the Democrats lost the Senate in
2002. After 9/11, he got together with the Republican head of the House
Intelligence Committee so that they could produce a bipartisan report
on what went wrong. (That's the report that the administration sat on
for seven months and then censored heavily before making it public.)
He has lived for years now in the murky
world of intelligence, thinking about disasters that could happen and
sometimes do. He sees the ugly side of the world, and knows that we need
to take action if we don't want the ugliness to take over. But he also
knows we need to act wisely, thoughtfully, and prudently like
grown-ups.
A Nifty Talk in Keene
I've been curious about Bob Graham for months, but I've had a hard
time getting to see him. He hasn't campaigned much in New Hampshire yet,
and when he has I've been out of town. I've been puzzled by him: He is
the only Senator in the race who voted against the resolution to
authorize the invasion of Iraq (Dennis Kucinich voted against it in the
House), and yet I've seen some very hawkish quotes from him in the
newspapers. In the South Carolina debate that I watched on C-SPAN,
Graham's whole message seemed to be that he could win because he could
carry Florida.
I finally got to see Senator Graham at Keene State College in Keene,
New Hampshire on Tuesday, August 19 the day the UN headquarters in
Baghdad blew up. (Graham told us that there had been a car-bombing in
Baghdad, but I didn't find out the details until I turned on the radio
while driving home.) The talk drew about 120 people, sixty seated in six
rows of chairs, and about the same number standing around the edges of
the room. It was an academic audience; before Graham arrived the room
was loud with serious-sounding conversations, and after his prepared
remarks the questions were articulate and well-researched. The tone of
the crowd was strongly liberal. We enthusiastically applauded any
statement against the war in Iraq, and we showed more concern for civil
liberties and more sympathy for the Palestinian people than I have seen
in any TV studio audience.
The talk was
scheduled for noon, and Graham arrived about half an hour late par for
the course. His staff had pizza and coke for us, so there wasn't much
to complain about. Graham was introduced by 2002 gubernatorial
candidate Mark Fernald, who had also introduced John Kerry in
Peterborough in April. (I have no idea what that means.) The Senator
talked for a half hour and then took questions, which also seems to be
about par.
The event had been billed as a symposium on foreign policy, and
Graham treated it that way. (When we came into the room we had been
given a one-page handout that had a paragraph describing his domestic
policies. They seem fairly standard for a Democratic candidate. He wants
to balance the budget and create more jobs.) He occasionally reminded us
that he was running for president, but he did it with a mischievous smile, as if he really shouldn't be
talking about that here.
The particular type of grown-up Graham most resembles is a
high-school history teacher. He has the hokey, self-deprecating sense of
humor, and the low-key-but-interesting classroom manner. He asked the
audience questions from time to time, and shifted his glance around the
room to make sure everyone was paying attention. I was glad I wasn't
chewing gum.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Senator Graham began his remarks by talking about respect. Until
recently, he said, America was not just the richest and most powerful
nation on the planet, it was also the most respected. Perhaps the most
serious mistake that the Bush administration has made, he charged, has
been to dissipate that respect.
"It didn't start with Iraq," he said. "It started in the first days
of this administration." One of the first things President Bush did
after taking office was to reject the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.
Bush said that the treaty was flawed and that his administration would
make a better proposal, "but no alternative to Kyoto has ever come
forth." This has produced a lot of resentment among our European allies,
most of whom are strong supporters of the Kyoto Treaty.
A second blow to America's international respect came when we pulled
out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia so that we could
pursue a missile defense system. Graham was merciless in satirizing the
missile defense system, saying that "even a smart second-grader" would
know that a missile is the worst possible way to attack the United
States. "Why send a missile with your markings and fingerprints all over
it, when you could do what was done in Baghdad this morning?" But "in
order to protect ourselves from the stupid second-graders" the
administration has committed us to build a missile defense system, which
required us to cancel the ABM Treaty "to the great
embarrassment of President Putin of Russia".
During his 2000 campaign, Bush made much of his friendship with
Mexican President Fox. But since taking office, Graham claimed, the
Western hemisphere has gotten little attention from the White House.
"Poor old Vincente Fox has been abandoned. I doubt he'll be telling his
relatives in the United States to re-elect President Bush."
And so, when we needed the cooperation of France, Germany, Mexico,
and Russia to get UN authorization to attack Iraq, they were not
inclined to cooperate with us. And they're not inclined to bail us out,
now that we're running into trouble. "International relations are like
interpersonal relations. To get respect you have to give respect."
Fighting Mussolini
Senator Graham got a thunderous round of applause when he announced
that he was the only senator in the presidential race who voted against
the resolution to authorize an invasion of Iraq. "Wait a minute," he
warned. "You may want to withdraw your applause when you hear what else
I have to say."
Graham is a hawk on the War on Terror. "The war against the Taliban
was a just war and related to what was our greatest threat." That threat
was Bin Laden's terrorist training program in Afghanistan. "The CIA
estimates that 75,000-120,000 potential terrorists were trained in
those camps." He compared them to liberal arts colleges, and then said
that graduate school in the more esoteric aspects of terrorism is
currently being taught at Hezbollah camps in Syria and Lebanon. Those
camps, he said, have to go also.
In the question period I followed up on this. Did Graham want to go
to war with Syria and Lebanon? His answer boiled down to: I hope it
won't come to that. He said that as president he would pressure Syria to
close the camps itself. If it won't, the United States should be
prepared to attack the camps. What he was describing was more of a raid
than a war; it wouldn't involve changing the government of Syria.
Graham's main objection to the invasion of Iraq is: "We lost our
focus on the War on Terror." Key people were shifted from Afghanistan to
Iraq. The international coalition that was helping us track down Al
Qaeda got fractured. He is no fan of Saddam Hussein, but by invading
Iraq "we have dealt with the lesser evil."
He confronted head-on one of the major arguments of war supporters:
the Munich analogy. Letting Saddam continue to rule Iraq, according to
this argument, would be like the British letting Hitler expand in Europe
in the 1930's. The culmination of this policy was the Munich Agreement
of 1938, which allowed Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia. British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came out of the Munich conference
with the famously incorrect assessment that "peace for our time" had
been achieved. Whenever you hear some commentator or politician talk
dismissively about "appeasement", he's making the Munich analogy.
Invading Iraq, Graham claimed, was not like stopping Hitler in 1938.
It was "like making war against Mussolini and letting Hitler go
untouched". In Graham's version of the analogy, it is Al Qaeda that
corresponds to Hitler, not Saddam.
What to do with Iraq?
All the candidates I have heard even Kucinich recognize that if
we just pull out of Iraq now, we'll have recreated in Iraq precisely the
situation we invaded Afghanistan to remedy: Iraq will be a lawless
region where gangs of terrorists can hide out unmolested by any kind of
policing power.
At this point Graham went back into history-teacher mode, and
reminded us of the great statesmen of the past. Lincoln, he claimed,
gave a series of speeches around the country to prepare the public for
the Civil War. Winston Churchill went on the radio to tell the British
people exactly how serious the war with Germany might get. ("We will
fight them on the beaches," he said. "We will fight them in the
hedgerows.")
Graham wondered why Bush had not followed these examples. He gave an
example of the kind of speech Bush could have given: "We may have to
stay in Iraq for as long as five years. During that time we will
probably average about one dead American soldier a day, and spend about
a billion dollars a week."
He turned to the room and asked: "Did any of you hear that speech?"
We responded with a very loud "No!"
Graham's plan for dealing with the occupation of Iraq is practically
identical to every other Democratic candidate's. He wants to turn the
country over to the UN, and he wants to get more Iraqis into
decision-making positions.
The Elephant in the Room
When psychologists describe the concept of denial, they often talk
about "the elephant in the room". The image is of a group of people
having a conversation in a small room that also contains an elephant.
Everyone sees the elephant and maneuvers around it, but no one mentions
it.
When any of the Democratic candidates talks about foreign policy,
Israel is the elephant in the room. They want to talk about the Middle
East and about the terrorist threat from Arabs and Moslems, but they
don't want to talk about Israel. For about a week after 9/11, Americans
of all stripes were asking the question "Why do they hate us?" It's
pretty simple, really. They hate us because we're helping Israel drive
Arabs off of the land where they've lived all their lives. But no one
wants to say that, because no one wants to hear it.
One of Graham's questioners had the bad taste to point at this
elephant. He asked Graham to comment about the wall Israel is building
to separate itself from the Palestinians. Now, I have to say that when I
first heard about the wall, I thought it was a good idea. I thought
that if Israel believed it could defend itself from infiltration by
suicide bombers, maybe it would be able to loosen its hold on the
occupied territories. However, Israel decided to build the wall on
Palestinian land rather than its own. The wall is going to encompass all
of Jerusalem, for example, putting Arab East Jerusalem on the Israeli
side of the wall. Some Arab villages outside of Jerusalem are being
bulldozed to make space for the wall. So the wall, which was pitched as
a defense against the Arabs, has instead become part of Israel's
offense.
The Bush administration is of two minds about this. On the one hand
they don't like the wall because they recognize that it screws up their
peace plan. (Colin Powell's State Department one of the few grown-up
bastions inside the Bush administration
suggested that we might cancel some loan guarantees to Israel if they
didn't stop. Senator Lieberman immediately objected.) On the other hand,
Bush's political base in the fundamentalist Christian community is
intensely pro-Israel (more so than even the Jewish community in the
Democratic base), so when push comes to shove Bush will always back down
to Sharon.
(Those of you who do your best not to pay attention to the Jerry
Falwells of this world may need an explanation of the
Israel/Christian-fundamentalist link. Believe it or not, it comes down
to an interpretation of the Book of Revelations. Armageddon begins when
the rest of the world unites against Israel, and then Jesus comes back
to save the Jews. So if you want more time to convert the heathen before
the world ends, you need to put this off as long as possible. When the
Quartet the United States, European Union, Russia, and somebody else
whose name escapes me presented the Road Map for Peace,
fundamentalists interpreted this as a sign of the End Times: The world
was starting to gang up on Israel. I am not making this up.)
Despite being drawn back to this subject repeatedly by the
questioner, Graham would not comment on the wall or say anything else
about Israel. He recommended that the questioner read a book called In
the Age of Secret Terror. I have no idea why.
Staying Out of Jail
The Bush administration classified one
whole chapter of Graham's committee's bipartisan report on 9/11. If he
discusses it in too much detail, he's breaking the law. The censored
chapter considers the question of whether the 9/11 hijackers had help
from foreign governments.
Graham clearly thinks they did. He puts it this way: 19 guys with no
experience in the West, most of whom don't speak English, manage to
survive in the US for more than a year, plan their attack, practice
parts of it, get training for other parts, and carry it out all
without drawing attention to themselves. Graham pointed to the first
four rows of chairs on the right side of the room. "If I parachuted all
19 of you into Yemen, could you do something like that without help?"
Graham believes that the network that supported the 9/11 hijackers is
still functioning in the United States.
The words Graham can't say without going to jail are: "Saudi Arabia".
The Patriot Act
I had my hand up when someone else asked my Patriot Act question:
"Did you vote for it, and what do you think of it now?"
Graham did vote for the Patriot Act. (In the Senate, only Russ
Feingold of Wisconsin voted against it. It passed 98-1. If you want to
run for president, Russ, let me know.) He thinks it has been abused, and
promised to fire John Ashcroft as soon as he gets the chance. (See my Gephardt report for what I think of that
answer.) But he also said that the Act expires in 2005, and that he has
opposed proposals to make it permanent. He promised that the Patriot Act
would get a much more thorough review if he is president in 2005 than
if George Bush is.
My Take
After seeing Graham, I still don't know what to think of him. I like
him, but he scares me.
And I have to respect a guy who votes against a popular war at a
time when he's thinking about running for president. (John Kerry, whom I
also like, failed that test of character.) I think his hawkish position
on Al Qaeda will give him adequate cover even if the Iraq War starts to
look like a good idea not that I think it will. I think he's very
likely to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Gore almost
picked him in 2000, and in hindsight probably should have.
In short, I haven't seen anything here to make me rethink my support
of Howard Dean. (I told an AP reporter as much after the talk.) But I'll
support Graham enthusiastically if he's nominated, and I even fantasize
a little about a Dean/Graham ticket.
There Are No Stupid Questions
in My Classroom
Graham asked Mark Fernald to choose the
last questioner, explaining that politicians hate to make choices that
create more losers than winners. Fernald chose a man, which created
protest that no women had gotten to ask a questions (which I don't think
was true). So Graham allowed one more question, and Fernald had the
woman standing next to him choose the questioner. She chose a
grandmotherly woman with a weak voice, who asked what I at first thought
was a stupid question: Could Graham tell us how many American soldiers
have been wounded in Iraq?
It was obvious to me that a younger
person would have known to stick this question into Google, and not
waste the time of the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee with it. And then I heard Graham's answer: No.
Not "No, I don't happen to know that
number off the top of my head." Not even "No, I'm not at liberty to tell
you." Senator Bob Graham, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, would like to know how many American soldiers have been
wounded in Iraq, but he can't find out. The administration does not
release information about our wounded in Iraq. They pretty much have to
tell us when somebody dies (at least so far), but if they can send a
guy to the hospital and have him patched up, they don't have to tell
us.
Getting American soldiers wounded makes
the administration look bad, so "don't hafta" equals "not gonna". You
know how teen-agers hate to be embarrassed.
But maybe, someday soon, the grown-ups
will come home.
Doug Muder
August 22, 2003
Return to Doug Muders Politics page