The Yglesias-Lowry smackdown

The question I sought to raise, however, was not whether America’s pre-9-11 counterterrorism policy looks flawed in retrospect — it obviously was — but whether the editors of the National Review were urging that the Clinton administration do anything substantially different at the time. (emphasis in original)

Yglesias may or may not be correct on this point — off the cuff, I suspect he’s correct in nailing the National Review as fundamentally realist in orientation, and the realist recommendation during the 1990’s on dealing with terrorism was essentially to pull U.S. forces out of the Middle East. However, just because the National Review did not criticize the antiterrorism policies of the Clinton era during the Clinton era does not mean no conservative publication failed to do so. It’s worth re-reading Tom Donnelly’s prescient October 30, 2000 cover story in the Weekly Standard. It was written in the aftermath of the USS Cole bombing. The relevant highlights:

The immediate reaction to the bombing of the Cole was telling. President Clinton denounced a “cowardly act of terrorism.” An American president these days has difficulty recognizing an assault on a U.S. Navy vessel in a foreign port for what it obviously is: an act of war. Almost anything short of a conventional armored invasion across an international border is now regarded as terrorism, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide–something entirely irrational, as opposed to a calculated political act. And the proper response to today’s unconventional assaults is seen to be legal and moral: Terrorists should be “brought to justice” and ethnic cleansers made to stand trial in the Hague; our military forces should be employed in a disinterested, evenhanded way on “humanitarian” missions…. Not only are these anti-American warriors brave, they are increasingly well organized, well armed, and well trained. “Globalism,” it turns out, favors not only international businessmen, but also international drug lords and guerrillas. These may be “non-state actors,” but they benefit from state sponsorship, and they can form alliances of convenience with governments hostile to the United States or simply take advantage of weak or failing states. New information technologies, along with old-fashioned weapons proliferation, make the resort to violence both tempting and effective. Curiously, those most resistant to these lessons include the leaders of the U.S. armed forces, both in uniform and out. To them, constabulary duties are far less glamorous and honorable than the conventional wars they signed up for, and far more ambiguous. These missions do not take place on a well-defined battlefield and drive to a clear end. As a result, despite their frequency, the Pentagon has done almost nothing to adapt its operations, its forces, or its budgets to the new reality. As long as the unipolar moment lasts, then, unconventional attacks like that on the Cole or on the Khobar Towers or the ambush of the Rangers in Mogadishu will continue to punctuate the headlines. The American response to these acts of war should be to use the instruments of war–intelligence gathering and military force–not only to avenge them and deter similar acts, but also to frustrate the political aims of our enemies.

Note, by the way, that the uniformed services come in for as much criticism as Clinton’s foreign policy. Criticism that remains relevant today.