Crime fighters

You can't tell me that Gen. Pace hasn't been hoping for a chance to say this for months.

“We have to give ourselves a good honest scrub about what is working and what is not working, what are the impediments to progress and what should we change about the way we are doing it to make sure that we get to the objective that we set for ourselves,” Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview on the CBS “Early Show.”

He said Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, head of the United States Central Command, were working on the review.

General Pace said the impending departure of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, announced a day after Congressional elections that have been widely viewed as a repudiation of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, will not have a direct bearing on changes.

Asked in another interview, on MSNBC, if the United States was winning in Iraq, the general replied: “You have to define winning. I don’t mean to be glib about that. Winning to me is simply having each of the nations that we’re trying to help have a secure environment inside of which their government and their people can function.”

General Pace likened the fight against terrorism to fighting crime. “Example: Here in Washington, D.C., there’s crime, but there’s a police force,” he said. “And the police force keeps the level of crime below the level at which the government can function. That’s really what winning in the war on terrorism is.”

I believe I've heard similar sentiments elsewhere.

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts.

And I remember the predictable response.

Bush campaign Chairman Marc Racicot, in an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition," interpreted Kerry's remarks as saying "that the war on terrorism is like a nuisance. He equated it to prostitution and gambling, a nuisance activity. You know, quite frankly, I just don't think he has the right view of the world. It's a pre-9/11 view of the world."

Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie, on CBS' "Face the Nation," used similar language.

"Terrorism is not a law enforcement matter, as John Kerry repeatedly says. Terrorist activities are not like gambling. Terrorist activities are not like prostitution. And this demonstrates a disconcerting pre-September 11 mindset that will not make our country safer. And that is what we see relative to winning the war on terror and relative to Iraq."

The Bush-Cheney campaign also announced it was releasing an ad highlighting Kerry's comment.

Reuters reported that the new Bush commercial's script asks "How can Kerry protect us when he doesn't understand the threat?"

So, anyway, who's gonna tell this guy?

''Just this weekend, Senator Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to -- quote -- 'nuisance' -- end quote -- and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling,'' Mr. Bush said. ''See, I couldn't disagree more. Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world.''

Two years on and we're still spreading something, but it ain't freedom and liberty.

Elections really do have consequences. We've seen the bad ones; we may be beginning to see the good ones.

UPDATE: Indeed, they do.