ROBERT Kuttner is an important American liberal. He’s the editor of The American Prospect, a fortnightly magazine supported by millions in foundation grants. He’s a columnist for The Boston Globe, a onetime columnist for The Washington Post and former chief economics writer for The New Republic.
And here’s what he said in his Boston Globe column on Wednesday: “Whether it is an ill-specified axis of evil, or a decision to make tactical nuclear war thinkable, or a domestic ‘shadow government,’ or deliberately leaked plans to attack Iraq, George W. Bush in his own way is as frightening as al Qaeda.”
Kuttner is not Ted Rall, the far-left cartoonist so full of hate for America that he loathes even those whose grief reminds us all of the loss suffered on Sept. 11 – the Twin Towers widows and firefighters whom he feels free to accuse of abject greed.
No, Kuttner is in the mainstream of American southpaw opinion (though it must be said that people who know him, both friend and foe, call him “Crazy Bob”). So what are we to make of Kuttner’s decision to liken the policies, rhetoric and contingency plans designed by the U.S. executive branch to the actions of America’s most deadly attacker?
Kuttner made it clear he knew how provocative his analogy is: He immediately added, “We are not supposed to say so.” Which means he’s congratulating himself for his own bravery even as he’s suggesting that his views reflect the opinions of many others, who are not as brave as he.
Judging from the hysterical response to last weekend’s stories about Pentagon scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons against the rogue nations in the “axis of evil,” Kuttner is right.
After The Los Angeles Times published the first story on the Pentagon report, several liberal groups immediately began comparing the Bush administration to “Dr. Strangelove.”
Robert McNamara and Thomas Graham Jr. declared that “the Bush administration has moved to a new nuclear doctrine described by one commentator as ‘unilateral assured destruction.’ “
The New York Times editorial board actually said that the United States was in danger of becoming an international outlaw: “If another country were . . . contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations.”
This overheated language is not surprising. But as everyone from Condi Rice to the president made clear, the new Pentagon document represents no change whatever in American policy.
The Times got it wrong: The countries discussed in the news leak are all nations outside the bounds of the civilized world that are actively seeking to develop and deploy nuclear weapons – and, at least in the case of North Korea, to do so with the express purpose of targeting the United States.
It has been U.S. policy since the dawn of the atomic age that we will not forswear the first use of nuclear weapons. The threat of an American strike has been deemed necessary for almost 60 years as a preventative against other nations targeting us.
The Pentagon would have been remiss in the extreme not to make plans for nuclear exchanges with the axis of evil. Indeed, the leaking of the document itself might be considered part of the strategy to make clear to the evil men running these countries how seriously the United States considers the threat they pose not only to their neighbors, but to us.
McNamara and Graham point out that the countries in question are all signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Well, whoopee! Guess that treaty is doing one hell of a job!
The Times says the U.S. stance will encourage more proliferation – when in fact the U.S. stance is an effort to come to grips with the consequences of the proliferation that seems on the verge of becoming a reality.
Conservatives who say there’s no reason to fear an ideological rift in the new consensus on the need for forceful U.S. action after 9/11 shouldn’t dismiss Kuttner out of hand. His comparison of Bush to bin Laden has been de facto endorsed this week by major- domos of the foreign-policy establishment and the so-called “newspaper of record” as well.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com