Bainbridge on Bacevich, and Barnett
Professor Stephen Bainbridge has a first-rate post on Dean Barnett’s response to Andrew Bacevich’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. (I wrote about the Bacevich piece at Comments from Left Field.)
First, Prof. Bainbridge quotes this section from Barnett’s post:
First of all, I don’t concede all of Bacevich’s points and consider some of them pretty darn obtuse. But just for the sake argument, let’s say that I agree with his list in its entirety (which once again, I don’t). Generally speaking, I’m the first to mention what is to me the inconvenient fact that the president and his minions have made oodles of errors. Okay, I’m not the first – with a lefty blogosphere constantly on outrage patrol, how could I be?
But even with the all the Bushie missteps, can we not acknowledge one accomplishment that is far from “entirely malignant?” Since 9/11, there has not been a terrorist attack on American soil. Surely Bacevich has noticed this. And surely he understands that it isn’t the kindness of the Jihadist soul that has made this happen.
Some on the left argue that the multiple Bush depredations to our civil liberties etc. haven’t been worth the increase in safety. At least this is an intellectually honest argument. I would even encourage the people making such an argument to bring it before the electorate in November. It wold [sic] be great if they quantify their thinking with some metrics, e.g., “I would be willing to allow x 9/11’s as a tradeoff for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.”
Bainbridge’s counterargument:
Anybody notice the problem with that argument?
Between the 1993 car bombing of the WTC and 9/11, there was no significant Islamofascist terrorist attack on US soil. If Bush deserves credit for the absence of attacks during the last 7 years, doesn’t Clinton deserve credit for the absence of attacks up to 9/11? Conversely, if we think Clinton deserves no credit because other factors can be cited to explain the hiatus under his administration, would we not likewise deny Bush credit?
[...]
The difficulty with [Barnett's civil liberties] argument, of course, is that we managed to win an 8 year hiatus between 1993 and 2001 without waging a preemptive war on Iraq, restricting civil liberties, torture, creating an American Gulag (Guantanamo, Baghram, renditions, etc….) and so on. If Barnett’s argument made any sense, the failure of the Clinton administration to take such steps after 1993 surely should have resulted in at least one Islamofascist attack on US soil pre-9/11.
As such, before anybody has to adopt Barnett’s metric, the 1993-2001 hiatus requires Barnett to explain why Guantanamo et al contributed anything to the 2001-2008 hiatus.
These points are so obvious and so logical that it amazes me no one ever makes them — which is why Prof. Bainbridge’s post is so rare and so welcome.
