Craig Crawford's Trail Mix

Separating the war against terrorism from the war in Iraq has always been tricky for Democrats up against George W. Bush’s insistence that the two are one and the same. Making a distinction between the “bad” occupation of Iraq and the “good” fight against terrorists can make the brain ache — for both the speaker and the listener.

Until lately, most Democrats seemed to forgo the distinction in favor of full-throated attacks on the president’s handling of Iraq and a downplaying of their fears of terrorism. Exclusively pressing the case against Iraq can lead to an impression that Democrats aren’t as serious as Republicans about the overall threat of terrorism.

It should be telling for Democrats that Rudolph Giuliani is widening his lead for the Republican presidential nomination largely on the strength of his increasingly harsh attacks against Democrats as weak on fighting terrorists. For now, it is the former New York City mayor’s way of rallying GOP voters with crowd-pleasing partisan assaults that distract conservatives from his liberal social views.

Giuliani’s stump speech is sprinkled with partisan jabs, such as when he chided Democrats last month for avoiding the phrase “Islamic terrorists” in their debates. “We are in a war with Islamic terrorists. No matter how much avoiding you do, it’s not going to go away,” he told a San Francisco audience to much applause.

His aides say such attacks rev up Giuliani’s poll numbers with Republican voters. He calls Democrats “pessimistic” and “defeatist,” repeatedly asserting that the party he would run against as the GOP nominee fails to understand the war against terrorism.

Of course, Giuliani treads lightly when it comes to specifics about the Iraq War, preferring to keep the focus on the global war.

There is danger for Giuliani in deploying these tactics so early. He is previewing the general-election message and the one-liners he would use against the Democratic ticket. And some who might oppose him are beginning to show that they are listening. Barack Obama opened a front last week in his presidential campaign that, although aimed at Democratic rivals, also served to preview how he might handle Giuliani’s weak-on-terror charge.

The Illinois senator’s move came in two parts. First, he proposed U.S. military action against terrorists in Pakistan if its leader, Pervez Musharraf, did not get tougher. “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” Obama said. “They are plotting to strike again. . . . If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.”

Along with that attempt to shore up a message of strength to use against Giuliani-style arguments, Obama launched a not-so-veiled hit on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and others among his rivals who backed the war at the start. “Congress rubber-stamped the rush to war, giving the president the broad and open-ended authority he uses to this day,” Obama said. “With that vote, Congress became co-author of a catastrophic war. And we went off to fight on the wrong battlefield, with no appreciation of how many enemies we would create, and no plan for how to get out.”

Obama went on to assert that because of the Iraq invasion that Congress approved, “we are now less safe than before 9/11.”

Redrawing a Fine Distinction

Arguing that the war in Iraq actually endangers American lives is a clever retort to the Giuliani position, one that any Democratic nominee could potentially use next fall. Not only does that argument please anti-war liberals, but it also could play well among moderates who still want to see the United States better focused on the pandemic terrorist threat.

While on a policy level many experts criticized Obama’s saber-rattling toward Pakistan as a needless provoking of a nuclear power, it too was a politically savvy effort to redraw the distinction between the war on terrorists and the war in Iraq. Clinton apparently saw the political wisdom in it — hours after Obama’s speech, she almost exactly repeated his words about Pakistan. “If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan, I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured,” Clinton said in a radio interview.

Of course, the more dovish Democrats assailed both Obama and Clinton for their hawkish talk. Although talking about more military actions in other locations is a risky way to appeal to voters in Democratic primaries, it shows that the party’s two leading candidates are keeping their eye on the general election.

There is no telling what events might occur over the next 15 months that could suddenly put the public back on a war footing. It might seem to be a no-brainer for Democrats to continue railing against an unpopular war. But if in doing so they never develop an image as tough against global terror, then they could be quite vulnerable come Election Day 2008.