Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Supporters of the worst policy failure in history

Clifford May:

The terrorist attacks of September 11 — self-evidently — signaled the worst intelligence failure in American history. Less well understood: They also signaled the worst policy failure.
For more than two decades, extremist ideologies within the troubled Islamic world gathered strength. On campuses and in Washington think tanks, most "experts" either misunderstood radical Islamism or underestimated the terrorist threat it posed. "Experts" in the Foreign Service prescribed only weak broths as remedies.
Such failures should be prompting re-examinations within the foreign-policy community. Evidence that is not happening is the formation of a group calling itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change.
The name is misleading: First, only a few of the 26 signatories have military backgrounds and most of those long ago joined the civilian foreign-policy establishment. (For instance, Stansfield Turner, though a retired admiral, is best remembered as President Carter's CIA director.)
Second, these folks are not exactly in favor of policy change. They were among the architects of the policies that led to September 11. They seem furious that President Bush decided, following September 11, to change U.S. policy. They are outraged that Mr. Bush's new policies have "strained" relations with such "traditional allies" as France and Belgium.

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What were the "experts" thinking? Did they reason that the newly trained terrorists might attack Russians in Chechnya, Hindus in Kashmir or Jews in Israel — but surely not Americans at home and abroad? Or think back to 1979, when U.S. diplomats in Tehran were seized by militant Islamists and held for 444 days. Mr. Carter launched an abortive rescue mission. Such failures might have prompted Mr. Carter to dramatically strengthen U.S. military and covert capabilities.
But Mr. Carter — advised by Stansfield Turner as his intelligence chief — had significantly weakened those disciplines. He had fired 25 percent of U.S. intelligence operatives, including skilled covert operators. "I believe that emboldened terrorist groups," said one of those whom Mr. Carter dismissed. "You may remember that the government outlawed assassinations. So, the government did not need a group of espionage agents that were trained to operate in the field, in 'denied' areas, in official and non-official cover positions, to engage in active espionage warfare with communists, terrorists and left-wing governments."

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Even if members of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change cannot bring themselves to criticize their past efforts, one might expect them at least to offer some new ideas, strategies and policies. They have not.
They also missed the fact that the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, is advocating policies for Iraq and the broader war on terrorism that are nearly identical with those of President Bush. (In fairness to Mr. Kerry, Mr. Bush has moved closer to him on such issues as U.N. involvement.) The retired diplomats do not explicitly endorse Mr. Kerry, but they do call for "the defeat of the administration," which they apparently regard as a cleverly ambiguous turn of phrase.
One has to suspect that what these people really want is a return to policies that did not ruffle feathers in parts of the world where they have friends and summer homes, parts of the world that have rarely made a stand against despots but do boast superior food and wine. How disloyal, it must seem to them, to abandon long-held policies simply because those policies have failed.