Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

In the most recent bloggingheads, Garance Franke-Ruta says some very sensible things about the proper procedure in responding to a terrorist attack, “Bush had more leeway to wait before decking the enemy…it was a situation where we needed a couple months to deliberate on how to respond properly and I felt that we did respond well in Afghanistan…and I think a Democratic president would not be given the leeway to deliberate and plan in a way that was necessary” (emphasis mine).

If Hillary were president, she would probably face even more pressure to quickly do something after an attack because people’s sexist assumptions about women in wartime would kick in. The problem for Garnace, who’s a Hillary supporter, is that Clinton has gone on record as supporting immediate military retaliation in face of a terrorist attack, in direct oppositions to what Garance herself supports. What follows is a long quote from a previous post where I discussed Clinton’s favored response to a terrorist attack at greater length:

Krauthammer’s column highlights another distinction which he thinks make Obama look inexperienced and naive, and Hillary “serious” (remember, that same epithet was used for those who opposed the Iraq war from the start, they weren’t “serious”) – the matter of what to do immediately following a hypothetical terrorist attack on two American cities.

Obama’s answer: “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response — something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.”

…

When the same question came to Clinton, she again pounced: “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.” Retaliatory attack did not come up in Obama’s 200-word meander into multilateralism and intelligence gathering.

So immediately following a terrorist attack Hillary just wants to retaliate. Now I imagine that in an Obama administration, some relation would be in order. But why does such retaliation have to be so fast? Even the Bush administration waited nearly a month to strike Afghanistan. Also, in their minds, the war in Iraq was retaliatory.

The point is, reflexive hawkishness is the natural bias leaders have in crisis situations. It’s a bias that must be checked against for prudent policy to be made. And Obama’s emphasis on multilateral intelligence gathering to ascertain who actually would have committed the attack and the focus on emergency relief is exactly the type of mental and positional check against reflexive hawkishness that a post-Bush presidency means. Hillary, on the other hand, has it mentally blocked out that retaliation is immediately necessary and the first thing to think about in a post attack environment. This makes the subsequent retaliation less likely to be accurate and more likely to be a continuation of the last 6 years of “retaliation.” Is “Bush-Cheney Lite” all that inappropriate to describe her foreign policy outlook?

Hillary’s defenders could claim that “swiftly as is prudent” actually means “take a few months to figure out what’s going on and retaliate as necessary” but the fact that Hillary was trying to draw a distinction between her position and Obama’s, which explicitly advocated delay and prudence, indicates that she really is in favor of rapid retaliation for the sake of rapid retaliation.