SHOULD JOHN F. KERRY–war hero, four-term senator from Massachusetts–become the Democratic party’s nominee for president, he will likely appear to the nation about as thoughtful as the lines of his ponderously creased face, especially when his gently modulated utterances are compared to the staccato certainties of President Bush. One imagines him aiming to appear serious and, at least some of the time, succeeding.
But a reading of Kerry’s one effort to articulate in writing the sum of his thoughts on a major policy issue, his 1997 book “The New War: The Web of Crime that Threatens America’s Security,” suggests the senator’s chin-stroking is something of an air. “The New War” reads not (as it supposed to) like a policy professional’s distillation of years’ worth of investigation into a matter of grave importance (and whose attendant problems legislation has been loath to solve), but like a clip job glued together by a shop of research elves whose main priorities were to make the senator look good and give the story sizzle.
Kerry is too subtle, however, to go on and on about himself directly; rather he positions himself in relation to his material, whose shock value depends on the reader not being much of a student of the subject. Most of the book is taken up with the journalistic task of establishing what is already known and making it compelling; many newspaper articles were Xeroxed in the making of this book. Where the book is something beyond a primer, the reader learns little about crime and a lot about Kerry.
A host of venial sins show Kerry to be free from the leash of self-doubting irony, like the gritty photo of the author on the book’s cover and the headers on each page, reminding the reader not what chapter he is in, but that he is reading the words of “Senator John Kerry.” Pomposity too shines through, with Kerry’s many references to his own résumé as the high Democrat on the totem pole of the Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations.
LIKE A LOT OF JOURNALISM, Kerry’s writing (so to speak, a full bench of researchers and writers are mentioned in the acknowledgements) reveals a weakness for the melodramatic, as when Kerry approvingly cites a witness to the brutality of a Colombian drug cartel. The witness tells the senator that he would be amazed at the number of Western officials the cartel had bought off. This vague and subjectively-phrased claim, which appears without quotes, is reminiscent of the prostitute’s cliché that you’d be shocked by the number of judges and politicians in her clientele. In both cases, the claimant (whose virtue is hardly unquestionable) pretends to a secret knowledge to which the rest of us are supposedly and conveniently blind. Nor does Kerry bother to verify the claim of a hacker who says he can break the law with just “five strokes of a keyboard.” And so on. China is called “the most corrupt society on earth,” and uncheckably, uselessly, the reader is told Russian Mafia “will occupy Western Europe.” Kerry is a cynical reporter, happy to retail any quotes that make it sound like he’s got the real skinny, even if he has nothing hard.
Occasionally, Kerry’s strokes of cinematic storytelling run up against the constraints of fact. So on page 98, Kerry writes: “Easy proximity to the world’s largest consumer of drugs is a market advantage that Mexico’s criminals have only just begun to fully exploit.” The “have only just begun to” formulation is meant to get the blood going, as in “have only just begun to fight,” except that there is nothing “just beginning” about Mexico’s drug trade with the United States, so the adjective “fully” is inserted, making the sentence true, but ridiculous as a newsflash.
The other problem with statements of substance is that one can argue against substance, as opposed to self-congratulatory banality. Talking about NAFTA and GATT, Kerry says, “Unlike many free-trade supporters, I see that there are costs as well as benefits to global trade, and one of the biggest is that it literally brings crime and terrorism right to our doorstep.” One strawman, one abuse of “literally,” one overworked doorstep cliché, one bit of credit-mongering: Such are the bricks Kerry used to build his book.
Written in 1997, “The New War” has not aged well in the midst of the new war on terror. About the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Kerry wrote that “Western intelligence analysts immediately detected evidence that the [Taliban’s] public statements [calling for Islamic purity] were a sham to mask continued [drug] smuggling by the Taliban.” Of course the Taliban turned out to be quite serious about sharia and jihad. Subsequent events have also been unkind to Kerry’s characterization of the Islamofascists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center as a “motley assortment of nobodies.” These nobodies have been discovered to have had connections to nobodies like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
OF COURSE, Kerry’s book was written pre-9/11, so it can’t be expected to understand what is known now, to in effect, know the future. Perhaps, but “The New War” doesn’t even show a good understanding of the past. In particular its comments regarding the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War reek of after-the-fact complacency.
Trying to describe how the new criminal order has taken us beyond the Italian Mafia, Kerry writes: “Some experts have compared the Mafia to the old USSR–a single enemy, known, stable, and relatively predictable.” The latter of course was so stable that it had dissolved a few years before Kerry wrote this, so predictable that few saw its dissolution coming, and so well-known that liberals treated it as a permanent part of the political landscape. Here one might expect Kerry to step lightly. Back while the Soviet Union was a going concern, the senator’s work as a Cold Warrior was typified by such projects as arranging for eight members of Franklin Field’s Sportsmen’s Club in Dorchester to visit the Soviet Union for a bit of tennis.
Elsewhere, Kerry sounds almost nostalgic for the Communist system as he describes the criminal capitalism that has succeeded it. At least during the Soviet Union, he writes, “the criminals were marginal; exercising no power, they were mere servants of the power elite known as the nomenklatura, and forever at risk of incarceration or worse at the hands of the secret police.” Even the injustices of the Gulag, according to Kerry, seem to have been exaggerated: “Most of the people in Gulags were common criminals, not politicals or innocent victims of mass purges.” Not that the senator doesn’t realize that atrocities were committed under Communism; he calls the entire Soviet government “criminal.” Still, Kerry refers to Soviet society as a “democracy of poverty” in contrast to the criminal capitalism of 1997 where everyone’s much worse off. In this comparison, Kerry’s not just manipulating the background to strengthen his argument that Russia’s new criminal class is a world-class threat, he’s distorting reality.
NOR DOES the author come off like a statesman for all seasons when he describes an appropriate legal response to the growing threat of international rogue organizations. While he argues that the United States has the right to unilaterally counter any state that sponsors terrorism, he’s friendly to measures that would clearly restrict its ability to do so, like a system of overlapping legal jurisdictions that would allow any state with a fig leaf of standing to prosecute the United States for taking action. Also, “unilateral” is clearly a bad word in Kerry’s book, though he shows surprising interest in taking down the bureaucratic and legal barriers separating the FBI from the CIA, something Bush’s Patriot Act has helped bring about.
But it is the main thesis of “The New War” that has the most relevance to the current situation. “It is no accident that my subcommittee investigated crime and terrorism as parts of a single sinister assault on society.” In Greenville, South Carolina, last week, Kerry reiterated his commitment to the idea that the threat of international sub-state organizations is not primarily a military challenge: “It’s primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.”
So, if you believe that one of the great virtues of George W. Bush’s presidency since 9/11 has been its clarity and sense of overriding purpose–his willingness to call terror-sponsoring, anti-American states enemies and to oppose them–then John Kerry is obviously not the man for you. If, however, you believe everything that’s been accomplished since 9/11 could have been accomplished through a more legalistic and diplomatic approach, in which the good opinion of Western Europe was treated as important as the demise of rogue regimes and their friends in the terror sector, then John Kerry probably is the man for you.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
