What’s the difference?

Howard Dean caught a lot of flak last month for saying he didn’t particularly care where Osama bin Laden was tried. I raise this again because of something Wesley Clark said in James Traub’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Democrats and foreign policy (which, by the way, seemed to me to be ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

January 5, 2004, 6:25 AM

Howard Dean caught a lot of flak last month for saying he didn't particularly care where Osama bin Laden was tried. I raise this again because of something Wesley Clark said in James Traub's New York Times Magazine cover story on the Democrats and foreign policy (which, by the way, seemed to me to be a decent piece that was completely scrambled by Saddam's capture):

Howard Dean caught a lot of flak last month for saying he didn’t particularly care where Osama bin Laden was tried. I raise this again because of something Wesley Clark said in James Traub’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Democrats and foreign policy (which, by the way, seemed to me to be a decent piece that was completely scrambled by Saddam’s capture):

When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 — we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane — he said, ”You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,” thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ”You could then have gone to NATO and said: ‘O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.”’ NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war. (emphasis added)

Dean said he didn’t care where bin Laden was tried. In his comment, Clark seems to care a great deal — he wants/wanted bin Laden tried in an international tribunal. I have no polling data to back this up, but my gut instinct is that a majority of Americans would want to see Osama tried in the U.S. So here’s my question — why isn’t Clark catching the same hell as Dean? Possible answers:

1) What really attracted criticism of Dean was the equivocation about bin Laden’s guilt; 2) Dean’s the frontrunner, ergo he gets more flak; 3) Dean’s statement fits the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy neophyte, while Clark’s statement does not fit the dominant narrative of him being a foreign policy professional — therefore, the latter quote gets overlooked. 4) Whatever you think of Clark’s answer, it’s clear that he cares about the question, and thinks the answer has important foreign policy implications. Dean thought the question to be unimportant. 5) It’s early in the news cycle.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

Tag: Politics