Kerry's Victimless War

The New York Times has published a Kerry puff piece, but my hunch is that their piece will actually turn voters off of the candidate. There are a number of quotes in the piece that are really, really off-putting for any voter who cares about security. The extended entry has a few examples.

I remember feeling a rage, a huge anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war.'''

In the immediacy of the moment, Kerry actually gets it. He understands that this is not a law-enforcement problem, but rather a new form of assymetric warfare. And yet, 3 years later, he says:

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.''

Clearly, whatever power 9-11 had to penetrate the fog surrounding Kerry's mind, it has dissipated, and he's back to a pre-9-11 state now. War and terrorism are very different things from prostitution and illegal gambling, and they demand very different responses. The interviewer manages to spin this response as a positive (Kerry is "optimistic" compared to Bush's "dark vision of unending war"). But that's missing the point. Whatever transformative moment Kerry had on the capital steps on 9-11 is gone.

So how exactly are prostitution and illegal gambling different from terrorism? Well, the first and most glaring difference is probably what any Libertarian reading this has already realized: prostitution and illegal gambling are victimless crimes. Like the drug war, they criminalize consensual and basically harmless activities performed in private and without coercion. Yet no one consents to become a terrorist victim, and they are most certainly harmed.

One of the things that makes prostitution and gambling so difficult to eradicate is the fact that most people don't see anything fundamentally wrong with either. "Illegal" gambling is basically just gambling without taxes or regulations, and people do it around a Sunday football game all the time. Prostitution is fundamentally little different from taking out a date to an expensive restaurant and buying her gifts before expecting to spend the night; it's just making explicit what the implicit social understanding is.

And this is why Kerry's vision is so completely, absolutely wrong. Terrorism is not, and cannot be, an acceptable, grey-market means of advancing national policy. We may not be able to eliminate terrorism, just as we cannot eliminate other serious crimes, but we should be treating terrorism at a minimum on the same scale as murder -- and ideally, much higher. We do not permit "nuisance levels" of murder; we hunt down murderers and put them in jail, and in many states execute them.

Terrorism is at least that important, and when we are dealing with an elaborate terrorist network such as Al Qaeda, it becomes a national security issue. Events on the scale of 9-11 are acts of war and must be responded to as such.