More from the article Kerry’s Undeclared War in the NYT Magazine, which is dynamite that would help blow the lid off of the Bush mirage of strength and responsible action against terror.
Bada Bing! Republicans protecting bankers instead of America:
Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90’s, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don’t take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.
It keeps on coming:
Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating — nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops — who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn’t to govern states but to destabilize them.
Many of Bush’s advisers spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that they can — and should — be forced to exercise control over the violent groups that take root within their borders.
Intelligence and Covert Action against Intelligence and Covert Action; fighting fire with fire. The old guard, neocons can’t think outside the box of military might. Military , in this conflict, is a partner and support for “enforcement”, “investigation” , and pursuit of an “underworld”. eg. :
If Kerry’s foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin — and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.