Smart Bombs: Election quagmire

Neither U.S. Senate candidate in Washington state has a good answer on what needs to be done about Iraq. I can’t really fault them; I don’t have a satisfactory solution either. But they’re running for office and they supported the war initially, so they have to come up with something.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell says we need to push the Arab League and other international players to step up. That would’ve been a good idea three years ago, but no sane leader is going to sacrifice his troops so we can extricate ours.

Mike McGavick says we need to adapt to win and that we shouldn’t leave until we can do so victoriously. Our military leaders have the same goal, but the situation continues to deteriorate.

Both candidates say that if they could push the rewind button, they would not have supported the invasion so readily. This is where McGavick loses me.

He says that the United States has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001, because the terrorists are preoccupied with Iraq. (Never mind that this hasn’t worked so well for the British.) He reasons that it’s better to have terrorists fight our military there than civilians here. But if we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Absent an invasion, the terrorists would’ve been free to plot attacks on U.S. soil.

So, the invasion he’s against in hindsight has made us safer, right? If so … OK, I’m lost again.

Benefits claim rejected. Factcheck.org, a respected, nonpartisan Web site run by the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked at least 29 immigration-related ads that have aired across the country. Mike McGavick’s campaign is among those making the misleading claim that Democrats in Congress, including U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, voted to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants.

Here’s what happened: The Senate voted down an amendment to an immigration bill that would have barred legal citizens from getting credit for the Social Security taxes deducted from their paychecks when they were illegal immigrants. The McGavick ad makes this claim: “Sen. Cantwell voted to allow Social Security benefits to illegals – I’d have said no way.”

No “illegals” will be getting Social Security benefits because of this vote. It is still the law of the land that only legal citizens can collect those benefits. If I were a candidate and was asked to approve this ad, I’d have said no way.

The Scary Index. The following numbers are based on an article in Wednesday’s Washington Post:

5: Number of years since the attacks of Sept. 11.

33: Number of FBI agents who have at least limited proficiency in Arabic.

0: Number of agents with some Arabic proficiency who work in sections of the FBI related to international terrorism.

0: Number of heads that have rolled because of these frightening numbers.