John Kerry Was Right

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry said that the U.S. should combat terrorism in the same manner that the RAND study and the new National Defense Strategy now advocate: with less military force and more intelligence, policing and cooperation with allies.


President Bush, however, smeared Kerry's strategy as "naive and dangerous" in 2004 and ran campaign ads that asked, "How can Kerry protect us if he doesn't even understand the threat?"

Yesterday, Kerry delivered a speech that reiterated his position from 2004: "We have to take our military-dominated 'war on terror' and remake it as the global counterinsurgency campaign that it always should have been." Quoting the RAND report, Kerry noted that "military action was the primary cause of a terrorist group meeting its final demise in just seven percent of the time." Kerry followed up his speech with an online discussion at TPM Cafe, where he outlined six key aspects of a successful global counterterrorism campaign and recommended that "everyone should read [CAPAF senior fellow] Brian Katulis' new book [The Prosperity Agenda] for a sense of how we win the war of ideas globally."

Katulis's book, co-authored with former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nancy Soderberg, argues that the Bush administration's so-called "Freedom Agenda" as a means to defeat terrorist groups has not worked, and the next U.S. administration needs to focus on a more comprehensive strategy focusing on the basic security needs of individuals.