Kudos to former Senator Bob Kerrey.

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The Nebraska Democrat has written a stirring opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, eloquently arguing that we must defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. Surely, it will win him no fans among the hard Left that today controls his party.

Kerrey boldly holds the mirror up to the surrender lobby. “Iraq,” he writes, “has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11.” He demands that we stand and fight them. The unilateral withdrawal demanded by leading Democrats is intolerable. It would, he correctly argues, grant al Qaeda a tremendous victory — even as it underscores that it is “no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power.”

In truth, Kerrey has said out loud the words Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party’s putative 2008 standard-bearer, would calculate she should say — and try to persuade Americans she actually believed — if we were in general-election season. After all, as Kerrey posits, the present military phase in Iraq represents the type of idealistic interventionism over which Democrats traditionally swoon: the use of force to defend humanitarian ideals. But alas, we are pre-primaries. Clinton would be toast if she dared defend (let alone embrace, as Kerrey does) the war she was for before she was against — her vote in favor of removing the dictator having come only five years after her husband made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States.

It is good, in any event, to be reminded that there are still Democrats like Kerrey and Joe Lieberman around. Would that they were at the wheel instead of in the wilderness.

Still, there are dots that Kerrey, a former 9/11 Commission member, can’t bring himself to connect. Dots that lead us to the crossroads of U.S. counterterrorism policy.

IN PRAISE OF DEMOCRACY
Most of Kerrey’s brief is a paean to democracy building. The righteous casus belli in Iraq, he asserts, was that the regime posed an intolerable threat in the post-9/11 reality. But now, “[t]he war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.” For Kerrey, that is a war we are equally obliged to fight — a war to defend nascent “democracy” against forces that would strangle it in the cradle.

Indeed, Kerrey, now dean at the New School in New York City, was moved to write this piece because he was disturbed at his students’ apparent historical ignorance about struggles for freedom. To his chagrin, they were palpably receptive, during graduation ceremonies, to a stark declaration by the courageous Iranian dissident, Shirin Ebadi: “Democracy cannot be imposed with military force.” Oh yes it can, Kerrey counters, despondent that we “seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently.” (Emphasis added.)

Tracing the arc from World War II to the Battle of Baghdad, Kerrey is the very echo of the Bush administration. Democracy is used interchangeably with self-government —though the two are far from the same thing. “The demand for self-government,” as he puts it, is what “remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it.” In Kerrey’s view, we are duty-bound to fight al Qaeda not just because it is our mortal enemy but because it “has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy[.]”

Yet, Kerrey’s focus on self-government — like the administration’s cognate emphasis on popular elections — is quintessentially about process. A process whose urging is so usefully high-minded that proponents are absolved of the burden to address deeper questions of substance: Can a resolutely Islamic culture reasonably be expected to become a democratic culture any time soon? What are we to make of Iraq, where the popular process has thus far elevated fundamentalists and enshrined the centrality of Sharia law in its new constitution? When one is on the side of the angels, there is evidently no need to tarry over such details.

When Kerrey does, at last, get around to the requirements of “a functioning democracy,” he tellingly mentions not only the architects — “school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government.” As for the architecture, he is mum. What about separation of mosque and state? Equal rights for non-Muslims and women? Freedom of conscience? What about the country’s peerlessly influential cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issuing fatwas calling for the murder of homosexuals? These, I suppose, are matters for another day … a day I’d be stunned ever to see.

Fine, then. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that Americans should be animated by an Iraqi self-determination process, not a substantive American vision of what freedom means. Does Kerrey really think such a “democracy” is worth Americans fighting for? Well, maybe not. For after singing its praises, he abruptly shifts course. “Finally,” he winds up,

Jim Webb [(D.-VA)] said something during his [successful] campaign for the Senate that should be emblazoned on the desks of all 535 members of Congress: You do not have to occupy a country in order to fight the terrorists who are inside it. Upon that truth I believe it is possible to build what doesn’t exist today in Washington: a bipartisan strategy to deal with the long-term threat of terrorism.

Hard to quarrel with that. If Iraq proves anything, it is that we Americans lack the patience for long, difficult occupations — especially if our leaders fail to convince us that our own security, as opposed to a better life for the occupied, is at stake. Barring a perception-altering reprise of 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism for the foreseeable future will have to be about suppressing radical Islam without sticking around to see that the swamps stay drained — something which, by the way, would call for a ruthlessness I frankly doubt we have the stomach for.