How Big a Threat? 

How Big a Threat?

Peter Beinart's article in TNR has started a discussion, in which Kevin Drum plays a leading role, about how liberals and Democrats can and should talk about national security. I take it Beinart's main point is that if they want to win national elections, liberals shouldn't take the Michael Moore position that almost anything is better than for U.S. forces to fight an aggressive war, arguably pre-emptive or not, anywhere, anytime.

Drum has said there at least has to be an intelligent debate about that, and among the issues are: is any Arab government any threat to anyone outside the Middle East?; and is any Islamic organization, no matter how radical, actually expansionist, like Communism or Nazism, in any way at all? He makes the observation that 9/11 still seems to have been an isolated attack by a small group that burned up all their agents in the West with this one operation.

Jonah Goldberg has contributed from the right, mostly posting e-mails that say: this all proves again that liberals are out of it, of course there are terrible global threats, the war in Iraq is pre-emptive or even defensive, etc.

Goldberg approvingly posts a strange e-mail.

Dave Kopel posts a correction:

Jonah, approvingly quoting a reader, posts:"Germany and Japan had no major victories after Pearl Harbor." Actually, in the months after Pearl Harbor, Japan conquered Malaya, Singapore, Burma, British North Borneo, Java, Wake Island, some Aleutian Islands, and all the Philippines. The German offensives in Egypt and Russia were, by the end of the year, unsuccessful, but there were major victories along the way, including capturing the Black Sea fortified port of Sevastapol, and capturing 32,000 British prisoners at Tobruk. Later in 1942, the Americans invaded French North Africa, but thanks to failures in the Allied plan, the Germans were able to occupy Tunisia quickly, and the Americans were eventually forced to pay a very high price to force them out.