Peter

Welcome to TPMCafe.

Your two main points above see right on the money. However, you are likely to take hits from many here who either reject any notion of American exceptionalism, and who largely want to leave the rest of the world alone.

You make a big point of refering to liberals. To me liberals include Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton. Do you make a distinction between liberals, progressives, leftists or socialists? You mention Roosevelt and Truman but other are you other models for liberalism?

Many at the Cafe take something of a pacificist perspective. This seems dangerous in this world How do you fit pacificism in your perspective?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Pacifists?

Find me one post of someone on this blog that thinks we shouldn't have gone into Afghanistan to bring al-Qaeda to justice for 9/11.

Anyone? Bueller?

Opposing the disaster in Iraq, and opposing it before it even became a disaster, does not make one a pacifist.

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

Any liberal security policy that buys into the Cheney/Rumsfeld "Long War" construction is doomed from the start. Here's Rumsfeld in a speech titled 'The Long War':

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," Rumsfeld said in a speech at the National Press Club.

If you are going to repeat the construct of a "Long War" you had better deal with the maximalist fantasies of "changing their way of life". Good luck.

As for my notecard policy "Don't Tread on Me" works for security and "Good Neighbor" works for diplomacy. FDR said it best:

"In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor — the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others — the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors."

How to convince average folks that Democrats are tough?

Don't spout nonsense like 'The Good Fight begins with a meta-argument: that reviving liberalism requires better understanding our intellectual history.' A good fight begins with a vicious counterpunch against anyone who dares attack the US (that would be Bin Laden, not Iraq), not meta-argument.

Mr Beinart,
Initially, your focus seemed to be calling for the left to return to anti-totalitarianism. Now, you emphasize Truman's preference for power through institutions and legitimacy. This new take, maybe chosen because of a desire to move on from the Iraq debate, seems virtually indistinguishable from the work of that other tpm blogger, and princeton professor, john ikenberry. How is your work different than his?

In his book, Peter forcefully argues that American liberals must embrace a fighting liberalism that confidently wages battle against Islamist totalitarianism just as Cold War liberals fought against Communist totalitarianism. Kate Cambor

While in his initial posting Peter has not emphasized this argument, it seems to me to be an unspoken given. And the proposition is questionable, problematic, and debatable.

We Democrats have been, post-World War II, responsible for more worldwide mayhem and killing, more death and maiming of our fellow citizens, than Republicans could, in their wildest imperial dreams, imagine.

Until we decide how it was that we became the "Party of Death" (and I'm not talking about abortion), admiring the history of how we conducted foreign affairs in the past is a prelude to more of the same in the future.

I agree with those posters who are uneasy with your characterization of a "long war," which sounds too much like the "war on terror" nonsense from this Administration. I agree with John Kerry's assessment, that this is criminal action which should be prosecuted with a combination of strategies, not an all out preemptive war on any country we feel is a threat to us (while first, of course, getting a whole bunch of other countries to go in on it with us!).

Your comments on liberalism and international institutions sound dated to me. This is not the same world as it was back then. The damage the Bush Administration has done to our standing in the world combined with the shifting geopolitical alliances and schisms as a result of that damage makes this a whole new ballgame. We no longer have the trust of the "free world" as we once did. Any kind of international institutions will not be what they were when we did have that imprimatur, rightly or wrongly, as a world leader who could be trusted. Given that, for you to suggest that we somehow be the "example" is, I think, unproductive. There's a lot of cleaning up internally in this country that has to be done before we could even think of being an "example." And that depends very much on the upcoming elections.

My chief impression of your post was of someone who is very much behind the times as far as understanding where Democrats and liberals stand today. I think you had better catch up to what is going on now before you offer advice to everyone else.

This reminds me of "some people say" straw man line often used by FOX "news" and Bush.

They build a straw man argument by saying "some people say Satan isn't such a bad guy" and link the opposition to their straw man.

This is what Peter Beinart is doing. Claiming "some people on the left" don't want to defeat terrorists. Who? Michael Moore? Last I heard Michael Moore was all for going after Al Qaeda. He was opposed to the Iraq war. And who knows if Michael Moore had been in charge of the "war on terror" we might have caught Osama Bin Laden by now and avoided the quagmire in Iraq. Howard Dean? He is another straw man. First of all Dean is not left wing. He is also not a pacifist. He supported the first Gulf War, the war in the Balkans as well as the war in Afghanistan. He opposed the war in Iraq.

So, Mr Beinart enough with the straw man arguments about "some people on the left".

Another thing; enough with comparing the "war on terror" with the Cold War. The cold war had a specific geographic location, a country, an enemy with a flag, nuclear weapons and an army.

Many at the Cafe take something of a pacificist perspective. This seems dangerous in this world How do you fit pacificism in your perspective?

If, by your seemingly perjorative comments Daniel, you mean people who oppose unilateral wars of aggression under false pretenses then I would be one of those "pacifists"...and damn proud of it!!!

Econimic despair more often than not results in vast population growth. Or, as poverty is eliminated, birth rates decrease. The resulting advantages to a country as a whole are obvious. Your discussion of admitting our fallibility to the world would definitely benefit our image and perhaps eliminate the hypocracy others see in our global policies. However, in this domestic climate of fear (played up ad nauseum by this administration) fallibility in a leader is a death sentence. Kind of puts any political party and its candidate on the horns of a dilemma.

Peter:

Thanks for participating on this forum. As I'm sure you've anticipated, you've come in for a lot of harsh criticism thus far, and I'm sure it's just the tip of the iceberg. For my part, I'm not looking for an abject apology about you being wrong in the lead-up to the disaster that is the Iraq occupation. I do hope however that you will engage in the comments section of the Book Club. I think if you really want your ideas to be taken seriously (and there's a lot to engage in what you've written) you do need, as Michael Tomasky has suggested, to answer some very specific questions about what you were thinking in 2002-2003, and does what you advocated as a course of action then really sit within the parameters of the values you've articulated above.

What I want to know is did you really believe Iraq posed a threat to U.S. security best met with invasion and occupation? And please don't use the elision that "all the other intelligence services thought X." The pillars of the imminent threat argument--the fantasy drones, aluminum tubes, yellowcake, the facile manner of the Bushies using the terms WMD and nuclear interchangeably, the "we'll be greeted with flowers," etc.--were either shredded prior to the start of hostilities or childishly absurd on their face.

In other words, if the sum total of bullshit in the discourse surrounding the lead up to war overwhelmed you, just say so. There's no shame in that. If you were just sucked up in the Rovian gambit to paint anyone who sought to forestall in the slightest this war as a limp-wristed Frenchie, I think you can admit that too. Because you were not alone in being gulled like that--the majority of the country was gulled too. I think understanding what went into that process can help prevent the country from being drowned in toxic bullshit again, so that then--and only then--we can move forward to your vision of a unified nation fostering international interdependence. What we really need is something akin to a Truth and Reconcilliation Commission--not to punish everyone who was so dreadfully and tragically wrong, but to see the truth that was so plainly evident three years ago but was somehow missed and make sure it never happens again.

PS I'll let others take you to task for the fatuous claim that liberals "don't know what they think, especially about foreign policy."

I am pretty sure I do not know what you mean. Are you quoting someone? Are these your thoughts? What do you sense is lying beneath placid surfaces?

Think Regionally. Act Regionally

Welcome Mr. Beinart...

On the first point you make on interdependence I couldn't agree more. We need to engage the rest of the world diplomatically and economically. Acting unilaterally from a "position of power" like Bush has done not only makes our power illegitimate it undermines the legitimacy we have. We can not force the world to follow our lead we need to lead by the example of our values.

On your second point I don't completely agree, unless I misinterpreted what you were saying in that section. I agree with the general premise that the US can be most effective fighting totalitarianism by spreading economic opportunity throughout the world. But I don't feel in the case of jihadists that is a key to defeating their ideology. They are not driven by material wealth. In fact the the opposition to the pursuit of material wealth is one of the ideologies that appeals to their adherents the most. The "our way of life is being attacked by the West" message can't be defeated by the spread of economic wealth. We need to have a nuanced view of the world and not get caught up in a "one solution can address all the problems" approach. That is why the neocon philosophy is bound to fail in promoting America's best interests abroad. They incorrectly feel they can deal with the Russians, Islamic jihadists and Latin American populism the same "spread economic wealth" policy when in reality it can hurt our cause in some cases.

On the last point I do agree with you. Our country's strength is due to our people, their economic condition and the condition of our infrastructure. Between health care costs, a crumbling infrastructure and the diminishing of economic health of the American people our country's strength is being undermined.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Fighting Faith [The Russians Are Coming! Redux]

"Obviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the same. The ussr was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had mercifully little access to the instruments of state power. Communism was more culturally familiar, which provided greater opportunities for domestic subversion but also meant that the United States could more easily mount an ideological response. The peoples of the contemporary Muslim world are far more cynical than the peoples of cold war Eastern Europe about U.S. intentions, though they still yearn for the freedoms the United States embodies.

But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star."

Today's word "EXTIRPATE"

"DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback — and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party....The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left — are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the McGovern era.

The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman and Co.

Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life."

Some of us are not at all amused -not amused at gratuitous swipes at the new Jane Fondas (Michael Moore and MoveOn) and not amused at the pre-pubescent grasp of national power.

My question to Peter Beinart is as follows: Cold War liberalism, the ideology he wants to revive, brought us the Vietnam War, 56,000 dead American servicemembers, 1 million dead Vietnamese, My Lai and other atrocities, and a country that fell to the Communists anyway. After Saigon fell, NONE of the bad things that were supposedly going to happen in terms of the advance of Communism happened.

Why is the ideology that produced the most atrocious American foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century something that we would want to revive now, especially after its adherents also gave Bush crucial bipartisan cover in killing another 2,400 American servicemembers and 30,000 Iraqis in the current war?

Haven't the opponents of Bienart's brand of liberalism, whom Bienart demonizes, been twice proven right?

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Neocons in the Democratic Party
by Jacob Heilbrunn (Los Angeles Times, 5/28)
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes180.html

I don't know if he is trying to appeal to liberals or trying to give some good advice about defining who we are instead of letting the GOP do it.

The truth of it is the average American has no idea of what liberals stand for except from what they have heard from the Repug noise machine. I completely agree with your critique of the diasterous consequences of GOP rule in this country. But by just saying that the Repugs are bad people and their policies are all wrong does not define what liberals are and liberalism is.

Peter,

Good points. I would make a couple of observations with regard to the economy. First, unemployment is remarkably low for a country the size of the United States. Despite job growth under Bush (which is perhaps not because of anything he has done, but being president he gets the credit--just as Clinton did for the Tech Boom which he had no hand in) many on the left point out that job stability is weaker as are wages, from say, the 1990's. These things may be true but when people are working, even if their annual wage is slightly less than in past years, they are still willing to consume. In fact, consumer spending has been trending upward for the last few years (http://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm#overview). Moreover, the long-term probability of Bush-style tax cuts are almost non-existent. Even moderate Republicas will, and already are, expressing some reluctance at making the tax cuts permanent. If the Democrats do well in the next few elections as predicted, I'm guessing we'll see taxation rise and take some pressure off of the deficit. Granted, the trade deficit with China is a serious matter that I'm not convinced the next president will be able to do much about.

My point, in general, is that other nations, like China and Japan, will continue to fund our debt spending as long as our economy remains fairly active and productive. Our stock market is nearing all-time highs, consumer spending is up (so businesses are profiting), and unemployment is down. These are good indicators that the international community will not bail on us anytime soon.

As far as the military scenario goes, that is far trickier. It is at once both a quantitative AND qualitative problem for those in power. Like the oil industry the military complex is so firmly established with lobbyists and contracts that it almost seems as if substantive reforms are impossible. Furthermore, any president or politician that votes to curtail military spending opens themselves to a myriad of criticism come election time--a factor which, in today's era of politics, cannot be merely dismissed out of hand.

In the end I would agree with you that the price of goods will rise simply because it is inevitible given the market forces which have been put into place. I am not of the philosophy, hoewver, that 8 years of Bush will inherently destroy what we, as a nation, have been building for the last 230 years. I actually believe that whomever replaces Bush has an incredibe opportunity to appear to the world as some sort of rational savior--who will be able to promote our collective agenda both diplomatically and economically.

Love your work in TNR, Mr. Beinart, and will likely read your book soon. Question for you, though: opposing totalitarianism means what, exactly? It can't always mean using military force, can it? If it does, or even if it means using military force a whole lot more often than we do now, I can't get behind it.

I'm no pacifist (I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, just wish it'd been done better) but I find myself breaking ranks with other liberals and Democrats on issues like Darfur. I don't want our volunteer troops getting torn apart in that Hellish seeming place. I don't think it's fair to ask our soldiers to die for that particular cause.

But there are other ways to fight totalitarianism, aren't there?

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Libertine said: "But by just saying that the Repugs are bad people and their policies are all wrong does not define what liberals are and liberalism is."

Well, it does define us if we are always in the mode of fixing their work. When trying to make sure everyone gets a fair shake becomes less of a habit with us, and more like an insurmountable goal. We have our hands full with their misbegotten litter.

I was born in mid 60's. No one told me what a Liberal is, nor what the secret handshake was.
I just took it to mean, Liberal with Justice, Liberal (you know, Plentiful) with thought, Liberal with wealth. Giving as freely as one takes.

There is no Dictionary definition that we use to help usher us into one party or the other (no one is standing by a poll or voter booth with the Standard Accepted Liberal Checklist), and certainly the great unwashed does not 'know' what Liberal stands for these days. They know it means left, and opposite of Decepticons and Conservatives. "Conservative" seems like some of the first DoubleSpeak....sounds like cautious and trustworthy but was really code language for Protectors of Money Grubbers and Agency of Intolerance (stuck in the old ways and damn sure to keep them that way!)

My point is that Conservatives have some cover stories, but in the end they are for MegaPower and MegaWealth.

Liberals stand for everything, everybody! That is why we don't have a cute, short answer or Liberal Checklist.

To answer Libertine...it is not just that the Rightwangers are "bad guys". Like the Wolf shapes the Moose, Like the Mouse shapes the Cat....The conservatives are shaping the liberals. We clean up their messes. We react to their inconcievably stupid actions. Liberals maybe are the perpetual RESPONDERS. Life is what it is. Trying to bind up the wounds and get us all through is the business of Lefty...at all times. Our shape and service is always shifting to accomodate the wounds caused by the Monied Ones. Maybe it is an inescapable fate...to always be the soother, the caregiver. Once we may have declared our objectives, now we are too consumed with trying to ward off Global doom and our own government/corporatocracy atrocities...too busy to be declaring High Faluting new ideas. Hell, the idea is to live...harmoniously.

Why is it Lefties problem, to come up with solutions....when the other side is always blowing things up? Shouldn't it be on the RightWings head?....their move. Stop trying to Ruin America. Stop Trying to Ruin the WOrld. Stop lobbing bombs and gutting america, and declaring war on your own citizens....and then maybe Lefty can start advancing ideas about what we will do when we are healed and able to move around again. If roughly half of our country is dead set on destroying itself, is Lefty's job to come up with Beautiful, Arching philosophies? Or to stop the bleeding?

Think Regionally. Act Regionally

Justin Raimondo's take on Beinart:

Our Terrorism, and Theirs
Liberal apologetics for American atrocities

Money quote:

"We expected Bill Kristol and the usual neocon suspects to dismiss the atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha as nothing to get too excited about. After all, these guys don't believe in any morality but that which comes out of the barrel of a gun. So what else is new? Yet there are, perhaps, a few among us – not me, however – who somehow expected a little less knee-jerk defensiveness from the likes of liberal Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic. Alas, no:

"This horrible story from Haditha powerfully underscores the liberal vision, which is this. We are not angels: without sufficient moral and legal restrictions, and under conditions of extreme stress, Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. What's makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That's how we show we are different from the jihadists. We don't just assert it. We prove it. That's the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it's what we need right now in response to this horror."

To begin with, all meaningful moral and legal restrictions on American behavior were swept aside with the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of a country that had never attacked the United States, and represented no threat to us. Having embarked on a war of aggression, it wasn't too long before we began to slide down the slippery slope all the way to the bottom, wherein dwelled the subterranean horrors of Abu Ghraib [pdf].

Now more monsters from the American id are uncoiling, and we stand, aghast, in horror. All except Beinart, who sees this as the perfect occasion for a little self-congratulation. Certainly his sense of timing is off. He comes off as almost a caricature of the archetypal Ugly American, a poster boy for the unselfconscious display of American arrogance.

Secondly, I see that we're running up against the "extreme stress" exculpatory syndrome again, one first given voice by Rep. John Murtha as he sought to explain – although not excuse – the Haditha massacre. What is it about the word "stress" that gives it – for Americans, at least – a magical power of absolution? A postal worker goes ballistic, kills a dozen people, and the whole thing is "explained" by "stress." A mother of five drowns her children in the bathtub, and, again, we hear about the debilitating effects of "stress" from her defense lawyer. I'm sure if Lee Harvey Oswald had survived to face trial, we would have heard the same B.S. – "stress" made me do it! I have news for the stress-ophobes – most of life in the rest of the world take place under extremely "stressful" conditions. Imagine having an income of a few hundred dollars a year, no access to medical care, and little prospect that your children will escape a legacy of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Now that's stressful!

But I digress. Let us get to the core argument of the liberal apologetics for American terrorism in Iraq: the loopy idea that American atrocities are somehow different in kind from those routinely committed by the Osama bin Ladens of this world. American bombers strafe the Iraqi countryside, killing hundreds of innocents in the course of the war; U.S. soldiers routinely fire on Iraqi civilians with little or no provocation, they drown them, they torture them – and yet, our atrocities are somehow different. Nobler. They even "underscore the liberal vision"!

Jeezy-peezy, you can't make this stuff up. What the heck is Beinart babbling about? He is wrong when it comes to the facts. His contention that the U.S. government is freely "acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again" is simply not true. If it weren't for Iraqi human rights activist Taher Thabet, who videotaped the immediate aftermath of the Haditha atrocities, the cover-up engineered by local commanders (and possibly others higher up the chain of command) would have succeeded. When Marine units arrived at Haditha in the wake of the massacre, they found women, children, and an old man, shot dead – not victims of a roadside bomb, which was and still is the official story. As Tom Ricks points out in the Washington Post,

"Despite what Marine witnesses saw when they arrived, that official version has been allowed to stand for six months. Who lied about the killings, who knew the truth and what, if anything, they did about it is at the core of one of the potentially most damaging events of the Iraq war, one that some say may surpass the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison."

And now we have these reports:

"Marine commanders in Iraq knew within two days of the killings in Haditha in November that gunfire, not a roadside bomb, had killed Iraqi civilians but they saw no reason to investigate further, The New York Times reported on Saturday."

The first response from U.S. military authorities was denial – and cover-up. And it was only by the grace of outside investigators – meaning outside the U.S. – that the horrors of Haditha came to light. And it isn't just Haditha. In Hamandiya, U.S. Marines stand accused of kidnapping and murdering an unarmed Iraqi civilian, and planting an AK-47 and a shovel near him to make it look like he was an insurgent planting a bomb: and in Ishaqi, 11 villagers were slaughtered after American troops packed them into a small room, burned three vehicles, killed a herd of livestock, and then ordered an air strike on the house so as to bury all evidence of their crime. The military has just announced their "exoneration." This "underscores the liberal vision," all right – but only in the Bizarro World of Beinart and his neocon buddies.

The big debate between Beinart and the neocons is over what constitutes the true "American exceptionalism." What "proves it," says Beinart, is that we move quickly to punish evildoers in uniform, and make sure that "justice" is done. Except when it isn't, in Ishaqi, for instance – and even if the eventual triumph of truth is made possible by non-American investigators, such as the heroic Mr. Thabet. For Kristol, however, all this is irrelevant:

"What makes us exceptional is that we stand for liberty, and that we are willing to fight for liberty. We don't need to 'prove' we are different from the jihadists by bringing our own soldiers, if they have done something wrong, to justice. Of course we must and will do this. But our doing this 'proves' nothing. Even if there were ten Hadithas, we would still not have to 'prove' that we are 'different from the jihadists.' The idea would be offensive if it were not ludicrous."

Here the essentially Soviet flavor of neocon ideology comes to the fore. According to the old Commie view, actions were to be judged not by some objective code of morality, but according to a "class-based" criteria. Mass murder committed by the evil capitalist top-hat-wearing West was "terrorism," whilst the "liquidation" of the kulaks and others by the millions was winked at. This "revolutionary morality" was defended by Leon Trotsky, in his mildly famous essay, "Their Morals, and Ours," who denounced as "moralizing Philistines" anyone who considered Lenin's crimes equivalent to the czar's. Then all is permitted?, asked the "petit bourgeois moralizers." We stand for liberty, brayed the founder of the Red Army – or, in his exact words, "That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation of mankind."

The Red Army didn't have to "prove" anything, according to the Trotskyists of old: the "proof" was in their sheer firepower. Today's neocons – who count, among their earliest intellectual ancestors, more than a few Trots – have merely transplanted their "revolutionary morality" to the "right" side of the political spectrum.

Our reaction to the recent revelations of widespread atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq must not – I quite agree with Kristol on this – lead to a bout of what he calls "liberal hand-wringing." Beinart's sappy ode to "American exceptionalism" is a conceit that will soon be dissipated by the sheer brutality of the shocking details, as the story of what happened one bloody day in Haditha comes out. It will shortly become readily apparent that that we don't need to institute sensitivity training for occupation forces: the problem goes deeper.

The problem isn't a lack of "sensitivity," a blindness to the subtleties of the "battle for hearts and minds," or a lack of oversight by commanders in the field: the problem is the occupation. It must end."

There is a problem with this post. This is one of the key steps in the rehabilitation of Peter Beinart. He makes the talk-shows, engages in genteel fashion his former political foes, gently chides the anti-war left for not having the big vision but generally shows that he is cut from the same cloth. You know, one thing that liberals ought not be and that is opportunists. When the war fever swept the nation, was it liberalism's role to talk sense or fan the flames. Let's ask Peter Beinart. Not only was he supporting the war then, but not so genteel-ly he was urging the Democrats to purge Michael Moore (who has more sense in his big toe than the guru of neocon liberalism has in his brain. This may sound like it is an ad hominem attack. It is not. I mean this as fact. The proof is in Baghdad today) and Move-On. So it is not the disagreement on politics that separate us, it is a question of moral character and values. Beinart has a moral outlook akin to Joe McCarthy. He deserves the same response from the liberal community."

But what of his insight that this period is like the period of the late forties as the Cold War was developing. This is the period which is the basis for Beinart's political viewpoint. You won't find Beinart inveighing against McCarthy. He is too busy praising the Democratic Party members who engaged in McCarthyite practices. Now we should rejuvenate the Democratic Party once again by purging the progressive antiwar faction...only...it is a little late now...public opinion has shifted a bit... that moment has passed when war fervor was in high dudgeon and Beinart was then the " full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq" that WaPo described; ready to divide the party, throw out the traitors, and lurch right with Bush and the Republicans. Many of us date the slow decline of the Democratic Party as dating from Beinart's glory period in the late 40's, the attack on Wallace, and Humphreys support of Joe McCarthy and the DFL purge of leftists in Minnesota. It is always a little surprising to me that the Democratic neo-cons can simultaneously sell themselves as a way of resuscitating the Democratic Pary by recreating the policies of the period of its decline.

Bluebell and Hoppy immediately come to mind. Transhuman I also believe opposes the war in Afghanistan.

Let me ask you. If after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center if Clinton could have convinced Americans to go to war in Afghanistan in order to wipe out Al Qaead and the Taliban then would you have supported such a war?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I think it is very strange how a genuine question evokes such a defensive comment. I think that pacificism is a perfectly respectable position, I went to a Friends high school, but mistaken. I also think that it leads to political problems.

I disagree with you that leaving Saddem in power was moral. Bush's lying about every part of the effort was indecent.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Actually, I oppose going into Afghanistan with the intent to take down the Taliban government.

Going after BIN LADEN was a different issue entirely and could have been done without involving the destruction and - failed - reconstruction of a country of no interest or concern to the citizens of the US (as opposed to UNOCAL.)

We went into Afghanistan with the EXCUSE of bin Laden in order to get an oil pipeline and heroin.

Of course, that doesn't make me a pacifist, either. My standing offer - one billion in advance, bin Laden in ninety days - remains open.

When I say we should leave the rest of the world alone, I mean we shouldn't invade them or lecture them or sanction them every time we don't like something they do.

We should deal with other countries as George Washington advised - fair economic dealings and no foreign entanglements.

That isn't "pacifism".

And like others, I can't recall any "pacifist" posts around here.

In scouring history for usable models, there is always the danger of hitting on a misleading analogy. The idea of a "Marshall Plan" for the Middle East strikes me as one such misleading notion.

The Middle East, except now for parts of Iraq, is not a region in ruins that needs huge infusions of cash and in order to be "reconstructed". The region is instead mired in prolonged economic stagnation due to corruption, kleptocracy, illiberal economic policies, traditional social arrangements and habits of life that are not favorable to economic vibrancy, and an unsafe and insecure environment that scares off investment. They mainly need internal reform, not overseas economic saviors.

Our status in the region being such as it is, any bold plan for economic reform and reconstruction spearheaded by the United States is likely to be discredited, simply by virtue of the fact that it is coming from the the US. This is really the sort of thing that should be done through the UN developmental agencies, with coordinated multilateral encouragement for economic change coming from a variety of world governments.

But don't expect political miracles from this. Since at least part of the impulse behind jihadism is a reactionary opposition to the effects of economic integretion, and the cultural pressures integration entails, the immediate effect is likely to be more jihadism, not less.

LOL...it wasn't about the question per se it was about defining pacifism as and the people who might advocate it "dangerous". And even though you are backing away now I think the tone of your comments on pacifism were perjorative Daniel.

And I am not defending Saddam or think that he is somehow a victim. But we did undercut all we stood for, and in a sense became like him, when attacked him without provocation and unilaterally. That begs the question...it is immoral to leave him in power to see him kill tens of thousands but it is moral to invade Iraq and kill tens of thousands to remove him?

No after 1993 but yes after Bin Laden declared war on Americans, military and civilian, "everywhere."

Note: Can we please stop calling flying a bunch of B-52s in circle patterns and putting a few wannabe Afghan warlords on per diem a "war."

Step One is to win one more state than we won in the last election.

I like it, Dan K.  And then, we go to war with Iran.  Wahoo!

If you are asking seriously there are no guarantees. I think we have to start with the Democratic Party, believe me this is no pleasure for any of us, and try to change its direction. There have to be costs for Beinart, Lieberman, Zell Miller, Marshall Wittman and the whole unsavory lot; this is where they know the key fight is, and this is where the right wing politics must first be countered. We may win the fight in the Democratic Pary and still elect bums; but it is guaranteed we will elect bums if we base our efforts on "electability" and listen to the crap out of DLC/TNR. These guys spend more time, money and effort lambasting the progressives in the Democratic Party than they spend effort attacking the likes of Zell Miller (one of the DLC's own). I think since Miller went so visibly nuts, the only DLC criticism was a half-hearted apologia for Miller by Ed Kilgore who formerly worked for Ol' Zell.

Peter, thank you for taking the time to participate in this forum.

I agree with your key points when put into the broadest possible terms (interdependence, economic opportunity, rejecting isolationism). But I think we need to come to terms with the fact that the vexed economic and political situation in the Middle East cannot be readily addressed by a "Marshall Plan". More importantly, the lessons to be learned from the Cold War are more complex than you tend to present them.

The early Cold War is simply not a good analogy for the current campaign against terrorism. We are not dealing with a massive nuclear-armed enemy military and large-scale guerrilla wars on four continents. Furthermore, not only are the situations non-parallel, but your policy prescriptions have been skewed in the wrong direction. When faced with an existential threat from the Soviet Union, Truman pursued a policy of containment. When faced with a much lesser threat from jihadist terrorism, the neocons prescribed a greater response-- military conquest-- and the TNR hawks bought into it. You've admitted that you were wrong about Iraq, but you don't seem to understand *why* you were wrong.

The key false lesson learned from the Cold War by conservative and liberal hawks alike is that containment was the right policy because, and only because, of mutually assured destruction. In this mindset, the threat from the Soviet Union kept America from doing what it could and should rightfully do... kick ass all over the globe with impunity whenever it serves our interest.

I would argue that containment was the right cold war policy not merely because of the external limits placed by the Soviets, but by the inherent limits of military force to solve political problems. The key deviation from Truman's policy of containment, the commitment of a large number of US troops to Vietnam, was an unequivocal disaster for this very reason. The people of South Vietnam, by and large, simply did not support the Diem government or the US military presence. No amount of napalm was going to change that equation, except to worsen it.

You are right to discuss the importance of international "legitimacy" for military actions, but you still seem to think that the Iraq War could have worked with UN support. In Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Kurdish Iraq there were local allies with popular support capable of forming a government. In the rest of Iraq, we had no such thing, and therefore we had no hope whatsoever of securing the country without a huge increase in the number of boots on the ground that would have required a draft. And even then we still would found ourselves committed to patrolling a country on the verge of civil war.

Only if a solid local majority is willing to fight on our side, can we expect a military intervention to succeed.

I would also like to see a new liberal consensus emerge that incorporates the ideals of interdependence and economic development with a willingness to use force when necessary. But I remain disheartened at the tendency of many liberal hawks to mischaracterize Iraq War opponents as a bunch of squishy pacifists. And until we can agree upon the lessons of history, I remain skeptical of the ability of Democrats who supported the Iraq War to lead this country in the right direction.

Well, Clinton didn't. He did manage to bring the bombers to justice.

But, no, I wouldn't have supported a "war." Just like I don't agree that a "war" is going to solve the problem of terrorism. 

That's very different than saying I'm a pacifist. Use of the military to get bin Laden and Company in Afghanistan was the right action. The U.S. certainly has a right to defend itself, and, therefore, war, sometimes, is justified.

But the problem we have today is not one solved by war.

Still doesn't make me a pacifist.

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

Perhaps, instead of name calling, you could provide us with some links proving TH wrong?

So far, from what I've found, he's right.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go give tidings to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Oops -- I mean, go cook dinner.

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

I would also like to see a new liberal consensus emerge that incorporates the ideals of interdependence and economic development with a willingness to use force when necessary.

May I remind you that:

"Liberalism is an ideology, philosophy, and political tradition that holds liberty as the primary political value.[1] Broadly speaking, liberalism seeks a society characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on power, especially of government and religion, the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports relatively free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of minorities are guaranteed. In modern society, liberals favour a liberal democracy with open and fair elections, where all citizens have equal rights by law and an equal opportunity to succeed[2]. Liberalism rejected many foundational assumptions which dominated most earlier theories of government, such as the Divine Right of Kings, hereditary status, and established religion. Fundamental human rights that all liberals support include the right to life, liberty, and property. In many countries, "modern" liberalism differs from classical liberalism by asserting that government provision of some minimal level of material well-being takes priority over freedom from taxation. Liberalism has its roots in the Western Enlightenment, but the term now encompasses a diversity of political thought, with adherents spanning a large part of the political spectrum, from left to right. In the context of economics, the term "liberalism" refers to economic liberalism, which is associated with the political ideology of liberalism itself."

Why else did the Bush administration invade Iraq, spend hundred of billions in blood and treasure but to secure our economic interdependence with the oil-producing middle east and parts of Africa.  Beinart understood this in the beginning when he supported the "preemptive war".  Now that it appears the empire-building - not to mention the nation-building - exercise is failing and flailing, why shouldn't the concerned citizen take action to remove the elected representatives who provided no legislative oversight to an over-reaching executive; demonstrated no interest in keeping on the path of righteousness the private enterpriser's who contracted to perform in the public interest to generate economic interdependence, i.e. returns on investments.

What will it take to galvanize the liberalism in America, a decline in asset values, accompanied by stagflation?  Globalization of the economy will in the long term result in a lower standard of living in the U.S. due to world wage rate equilibrium and prices of goods and services will rise if the dollar is no longer the reserve currency.  I don't see any such discussion emanating from either political party in the U.S.  Where is Ross Perot when you really need him.

I didn't oppose Afghanistan because I don't oppose wars in self-defense. I do STRONGLY disagree with Beinart who I don't think is really much different from a neo-con (he did support the Iraq war).

If the US was once exceptional, it no longer is (Read Newsweek. There's a great quote from the head of Intel on our self-delusion).

I believe it is wrong, wrong, wrong to take a kid from Iowa who enlists in the National Guard to get tuition money (since liberals are failing to adequately support public funding of higher education) and send him off on one of these "liberal" wars that have nothing whatever to do with the defense of Iowa.

If that makes me a pacifist, I'm a pacifist. I believe war is hell. While I can understand why Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima -- I don't worship him because of it. While my Irish Catholic parents took me to see JFK when I was 9, I don't romanticize the Bay of Pigs or have any illusions about the hundreds of thousands who died in SE Asia largely due to our hubris.

I see Beinart as just another of those "best and brightest" chickenhawks, romantic about war, grandiose in their vision of America, never ever counting the costs in bodies, dollars and deferred or abandoned priorities.

I did not realize that being a pacificist was a bad thing. Having gone to a Quaker school most of the teachers, the principle and the folks who ran the school were all pacificists. I don't happen to share the view.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Washington could advise against foreign entanglements both because the United States did not have much ability to project force when he spoke and he could count on the British Navy to do much of the heavy lifting. As the war against the Barbary Pirates in the Jefferson Administration demonstrated it is very hard to be a global trading power and stay out of foreign entanglements.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Artappraiser

I am a bit confused by your post. In theory neither party is an ideological party. However, two things seem true. With the South and some urban ethnics having bolted from the Democratic Party don't you think the Republican Party is the more conservative party and the Democratic Party the more left party?

If you do then I am presuming the Peter Beinart is actually trying to move the Democratic Party back toward the middle. The left covers a broad spectrum. The Democrats elected to the Presidency and even to many lower offices are generally Liberals but many of the activists in the party are further to the left and what a Democratic Party that more resembles a Social Democratic Party like in Europe.

Did I either misunderstand you are do you not think my characterization is correct?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Dan

A Marshall Plan for Africa might be a good idea. Many of Africa's health and food problems are as a result of the lack of highways. Building of infrastructure in Africa might be a very productive use of aid.

The Middle East is largely isolated from the rest of the world except for Israel and the selling of oil. It isn't really integrated into the world's institutions. There are many global institutions that could be used to help create civil institutions which will balance both the various governments,and the Mosque as the only alternative to the government and broaden the horizons of young Arabs.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Gettysburg, this sort of sick crap really is unacceptable. Who the hell are you to lecture us on being Ameerican. That's Beinart's job.

Those were not the "things that were supposed" to happen. Once Nixon expanded the war there was never any question that IndoChina would all go as S.Vietnam did. Pol Pot and his minions certainly owed their rise to the deliberate destabilization of Sihanouk's regime by the US when he was deemed too nationalist and isufficiently anticommunist. You are deliberately changing the subject or else really did not know the times. What was asserted was that if S.Vietnam went Communist so would Thailand, Burma, and Malaysia, none of which occurred. In terms of your numbers of deaths arising from the integration of South and North could you give us a source? Just so we are on the same page, what is the death total of Iraqis since the American invasion?. I am often suspicious of numbers right wingers love to throw around.

I have no issues with pacificism political or otherwise. Daniel it to me seems you have difficulty in differentiating the difference between pacificism and people who oppose unilateral wars of aggression. That is what I have seen here and I also have not seen people advocating pacificism here.

But I see you did a very good job not answering the question if there is a difference in Saddam killing tens of thousands of people and us killing tens of thousands of people in an unprovoked war of aggression...

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Lieven Link

Well, if you apply the scientific principle of parsimony to ethics...

Those might be nice definitions, but it bears no resemblence to what modern conservatives stand for. They embrace unfettered capitalism--the greatest source of social, cultural, and ecological change our society knows. They empower the government with secret and uncheckable powers--very inconsistent with their former attitudes of caution and doubt. They rebuild entire nations. Even on social issues they seem reactionary rather than conservative--they want to return to the past rather than conserve the present, even when returning to the past would itself be a radical experiment in social engineering.

The kind of people you call conservatives are today known as moderate Democrats.

Liberalism, otoh, isn't just embracing change, but embracing Rationality--the idea that human society can improve itself and the world by conscious effort. With that definition, a liberal doesn't fear government--they fear a government that is beyond the control of society at large. A government that could censor information (thus destroying rationality) or act in secret (thus being impervious to social choice) or outside the law is, except under the direst of circumstances, unacceptable.

Peter,
I'm enjoying your book--I'm only on p. 50--and my question so far is how you decide when the likely moral benefits of military intervention outweigh the moral costs. I agree with you that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, but not always. How you draw the line is an important question, particularly given the compelling and substantially dishonest case that can be made for interventions (in Iraq, for example, involving professing not merely belief, but certainty about WMD, despite substantial IC debate and ambiguity evident in the Oct. 2003 NIE). The real decisons are likely to be at least as fuzzy a lot of the time. I was impressed that you acknowledged theoretical, not just factual error about that decision (even Bush says he was wrong about some things factually, because he was given bad intel, which is a typical case of passing the buck disguised as coming to terms with mistakes). (Also, I might mention your book is written in a lucid, readable style.) As a political and strategic matter, however, every decision to refrain from military action can and likely will be cast by hawks as evidence of wavering and weakness. So elaboration of the criteria and of the theory that should weigh in on these decisions, allowing for the fact that every case is unique, would be helpful.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

From Lieven, "Wolfish Wilsonians":

The American Creed

The central reason why this has occurred is that messianic internationalism not only appeals to many contemporary liberals, but also is deeply rooted in the American civic nationalist tradition and strengthened by certain failings in the contemporary study of political science and international relations. The belief that American values represent salvation for all mankind, in its religious form, is as old as the first White settlement of New England. In its modern, secular form, it was summed up in the National Security Strategy of 2002, which held that the values of “freedom, democracy and free enterprise. . . are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common-calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.

Like so many Americans over the years,(11) Bush also casts America as the agent of a historical teleology. Statements that “our nation is on the right side of history”(12) echo the Soviet cliché, “The winds of history are in our sails.” The administration appeals to America and the world in the name of the American Creed, using language that might have come word for word from the liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration, as expressed by Madeleine Albright and others; and indeed from President Woodrow Wilson, who declared in January 1917, “These are American principles, American policies...And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

The strength of the rhetorical appeal by both the Bush administration and the liberal hawks does indeed lie in its deep roots in the American tradition. As Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “Americans of all national origins, classes, religions, creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political creed.”(13) In theory, anyone who assents to the American creed can become an American, irrespective of language, culture, or national origin; just as anyone could become a Soviet citizen by assenting to communism.(14)

The principles of the American thesis are rationalist and universalist. In Tocqueville’s words, Americans “are unanimous upon the general principles that ought to rule human society”; this is no less true in the twenty-first century than it was in the 1830s. Partly in consequence of this, the creed is also a basically optimistic set of assumptions. It suggests both that America has achieved the highest possible form of political system and that this great system can be extended to the rest of mankind. Centuries before Francis Fukuyama recoined the phrase, a certain belief that America represented the “end of history” was already common in American thought, and still more so in the American subconscious.

In Richard Hofstadter’s words, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”(15) This American thesis is also, both in American belief and in reality, the core foundation of America’s “soft power” in the world, and of America’s role as a civilizational empire; the American version of Romanita. Both in the past and at present, the American creed has deeply shaped the conduct of American foreign policy.(16)

The essential elements of the American creed and American civic nationalism—faith in liberty, constitutionalism, the law, democracy, individualism, and egalitarianism—have remained largely the same as when Tocqueville described them.(17) They are chiefly rooted in the Enlightenment, and derive in turn from England; the liberal philosophy of John Locke, and much older beliefs in the law and in the “rights of free-born Englishmen.” The contents of the American thesis are of course no longer exceptional to America; most are also held by the other developed democracies, and indeed by most of the world, at least in public. Two features of the creed are, however, exceptional: the absolutist passion with which these beliefs are held and the degree to which they are integral to American nationalism. According to Samuel Huntington,

It is possible to speak of a body of political ideas that constitutes ‘Americanism’ in a sense in which one can never speak of ‘Britishism,’ ‘Frenchism,’ ‘Germanism,’ or ‘Japaneseism.’ Americanism in this sense is comparable to other ideologies and religions...To reject the central ideas of that doctrine is to be un-American...This identification of nationality with political Creed or values makes the United States virtually unique.”(18)

 

Other states have also embodied their own versions of such a thesis in their own civic nationalism. De Gaulle’s monument on the Champs-Elysées in Paris is inscribed with an extract from one of his speeches—”Since time immemorial, there has existed a covenant between the grandeur of France and the liberty of mankind”—that is an entirely American sentiment. However, in most of these cases the thesis has either been publicly contested by many people, as in the case of France; or, as in the case of imperial China, has been mainly the faith of national or imperial elites. What is unusual about America is the unanimity of belief in these guiding national principles.

The Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch has described discovering in America “a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission.” This ideological consensus, he said, is invested with “all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol.” Discovering it gave him “some of the anthropologist’s sense of wonder at the symbol of a tribe.”(19) In the twenty-first century, the United States may indeed be the most truly ideological nation in the world.

America is not of course the most ideological state on earth. A number of other states still claim an infinitely more rigorous, ruthless, and extensive right of control over the thoughts of their subjects than the American state ever has, or ever could. So did the communist states in their prime. But even then, these ideologies were resisted by large parts of the populations concerned; and after a few decades not only most of the intelligentsia, but most citizens as well lost all genuine belief in them, while continuing to go through the required motions in public. The same became true of theocratic Iran in the course of the 1990s.

Russian and Chinese intellectuals of my acquaintance who came to America in the 1990s after living in this atmosphere of private cynicism towards public ideology often reacted with utter astonishment, and some fear, to the way in which ordinary Americans glorify their country’s beliefs, institutions, laws, and economic practices in private conversations, not just as a matter of defensive patriotism, but with a sincere belief in their validity for all mankind: “They actually believe all this! No one is forcing them to say it!”(20) Closely related to this is the sense of national mission:

All nations...have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself. However, no nation in modern history has been quite so consistently dominated as the United States by the belief that it has a particular mission in the world.(21)

 

Against the background of this ancient ideological tradition, and inflamed by the attacks of 9/11, a number of intellectuals belonging to the Democratic Party have set off in recent years on the same well-worn path as the neoconservatives had done two generations earlier, when most were followers of the anticommunist, pro-Vietnam War, and pro-Israel Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.(22) Their approach was summarized in a 2003 document, Progressive Internationalism, drawn up by a group of former officials, think-tank members, and academics with a view to influencing the Democratic election campaign and the policies of a future Democratic administration.(23) Like other works by members of this school, this document does differ from works by the rightwing nationalists in that it stresses the need for multilateralism. The problem is, however, that its other statements on the use of force to improve the world are so alien to dominant European thinking that if implemented they would in fact make such multilateralism very difficult. Much of the content and even the language of Progressive Internationalism is indistinguishable from neoconservative tracts. Several of its signatories had joined with neoconservative and other rightwing Republican commentators in supporting the Iraq War.(24)

Armed Missionaries

... Neoconservative hypocrisy aside, liberal interventionism is often rooted in a genuine desire to liberate other peoples from their history. Its proponents claim that it is also antiracist, since it claims that all people can make rapid progress towards democracy regardless of their race, culture, or economic level. But what if the peoples concerned are unwilling or incapable of accepting such liberation? In a pattern familiar to all students of the missionary tradition and mentality, this attitude can all too easily slip into an aggressive, chauvinist, and ultimately even racist attitude toward such peoples. This tendency is enormously fed by the very strong currents of ethnoreligious nationalism which exist in American life alongside American civic nationalism. For after all, if the message is self-evidently true and universal, then any failure cannot be due to the message. It must be due to some failure on the part of the audience.

Or Michael Moore films

All I see are rationalizations Daniel...

I don't care how "badly" Saddam acted in the past or might act in the future. The reason is after the first Gulf War we turned him over to the world (the UN) to handle. Therefore there are 2 reasons why our attack on Iraq was immoral. First we went against the world opinion and invaded without their (the UN's) ok. And second Saddam had not attacked the United States or any of our territorial possessions warranting our invasion. Our invasion of Iraq sets a dangerous precedence in the world. It destabilizes it by saying that it is ok to invade another sovereign nation unprovoked and unilaterally if you feel that they might pose some future undefined threat to you. That is a globally destabilizing precedence to set. It thumbs it's nose at international rule of law which most civilized nations follow...

Saddam was a shit, there is no doubt about it. But Greenbaum and his numbers. Mr. Greenbaum, you weaken your own case by throwing about numbers that have no relation to reality. Saying he killed millions is hard to fathom; you know how hard it is to kill six million, and dispose of bodies ,even when you have hundreds of thousands men and modern industry geared up for this sole purpose. He invaded Iran with US backing and support; we supported or at least condoned his use of chemical weapons; we wanted to counter the regional impact of the new Iranian revolution; if this was one of his crimes, shouldn't we also punish the Americans who actively supported and built this policy (Rumsfeld for example). Saddam was a bloody dictator; not a uniquely evil one, more the garden variety, of the type that we have always dealt with when it suited our foereign policy imperatives. Are you so incurious as to how, if he killed millions, the prosecution at his trial has had such a difficult time presenting evidence of his culpability or responsibility for even hundreds.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

I got stuck at the first line of this post: "reviving liberalism requires better understanding our intellectual history."

 

Bully for you!  You should have been stuck. Your stickiness is, in the main, what Lieven is talking about.  See, Beinart wants desperately to ground "liberalism" in an American Credal messianism not unlike that of the Jacobins in France.  That's why he summons our dieties from their heavenly pantheon -  rough n ready Ole Hickory TrumanKennedy JaneFondaMichael MooreMoviinOn PantyWaistRememberMcGovern FeelGulityNow?shinola.

Well to indulge his trite historiography we are the party of Jefferson and Jackson. We are Americans, tough minded rough n ready pragmatists, a people of whom only some you can fool some of the time....We are not Jane Fondas, Abbie Hoffmans, Wild-eyed Greenies etc.  Indulge his fantasies...we're hard bitten realistis, left populist veterans of his 4 decades old kulturkampf (he isn't, I am - pity)

He's trying to stuff ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

I got stuck at the first line of this post: "reviving liberalism requires better understanding our intellectual history."

 

Bully for you!  You should have been stuck. Your stickiness is, in the main, what Lieven is talking about.  See, Beinart wants desperately to ground "liberalism" in an American Credal messianism not unlike that of the Jacobins in France.  That's why he summons our dieties from their heavenly pantheon -  rough n ready Ole Hickory TrumanKennedy JaneFondaMichael MooreMoviinOn PantyWaistRememberMcGovern FeelGulityNow?shinola.

Well to indulge his trite historiography we are the party of Jefferson and Jackson. We are Americans, tough minded rough n ready pragmatists, a people of whom only some you can fool some of the time....We are not Jane Fondas, Abbie Hoffmans, Wild-eyed tofu-eatin soy latte Greenies etc.  Indulge his fantasies...He is discovering that we're hard bitten realists, left populist veterans of his 4 decades old kulturkampf (he isn't, I am - the pity)

He's trying to stuff ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag

Exactly when did trying to free oppressed people and change dictatorships become a right wing neocon act? I always thought they were liberal views, right wingers supported dictatorships.

Cambodia's problems were CAUSED by the Vietnam War and our increasingly desperate attempts to win it.

Leaving that aside, though, you miss the point. The theory behind the Vietnam War was that this would stop the advance of Communism before it spread throughout Southeast Asia and destabilized the region. In fact, losing South Vietnam didn't have any appreciable effect on our position in the Cold War. We didn't need to fight it, and 56,000 Americans and one million Vietnamese needlessly died as a result of Cold War liberalism.

Ellen. The Latest Spengler (without his usual religiosity). I think his argument is quite persuasive don't you think?

Jun 6, 2006



Military destiny and madness in Iran
By Spengler

Washington expects Iran to accept a package of concessions in return for abandoning uranium enrichment, for an unsettling reason: American analysts believe that Iran can accomplish its strategic objectives without nuclear weapons. In Iraq, pro-Iranian politicians backed by Shi'ite militias already hold the balance of power. Iranian subsidies to Hamas as well as Iran's control over Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon ensure that the Islamic Republic will have a veto over any prospective change in the status of the Palestinian territories.

If the Middle East merely were a chessboard, Iran would accept Washington's offer in return for demands such as those

suggested by Ehsan Ahrari in Asia Times Online on June 2: security guarantees, acquiescence to an Iranian oil pipeline to Pakistan and India, and so forth (Tehran wants more than talks). Rational calculation suggests that Iran is better off taking the US offer (along with economic incentives from the European Union) and waiting to see who replaces President George W Bush in January 2009. The next US administration may be less inclined to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, there will be war, and Washington will strike Iranian nuclear installations, probably before the end of 2006 (see Why the West will attack Iran, January 24). Western analysts think President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a madman, and hope that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will evince more rational behavior. Reading the Iranian president's Der Spiegel interview last week, in which he dismissed German indignation over his threat to wipe out Israel as the result of a "Zionist plot", it is easy to believe that his rug is missing a few knots. But madness is an occupational hazard of becoming the leader of desperate men fighting against inevitable ruin. Napoleon Bonaparte, after all, was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon.

The tragedy will proceed more or less as follows:

In Washington, the State Department has the cabinet's grudging authorization to persuade the Iranians to abandon their imperial ambitions peacefully in return for economic concessions.

In Tehran, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has the government's grudging authorization to persuade the Americans to concede to Iran a dominant position in the Persian Gulf without a fight. The Bangalore-educated Mottaki was the campaign manager for one of Ahmadinejad's opponents in the 2005 presidential elections and is identified with the supposed moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Mottaki sincerely believe that a compromise is in their mutual interest, and have every hope of reaching such a compromise. Nonetheless they will fail, just as the diplomats of Europe failed to prevent war in July 1914 despite the near-universal conviction that war could and should be avoided at all costs.

Iran stands at the precipice of a demographic and economic tailspin. At current depletion rates Iran no longer will export oil a generation hence, and its subsidy-heavy economy will fail just as an entire generation of Iranians retires. By mid-century Iran's demographic profile will resemble the inverted pyramid of the aging Western countries. For this reason, I have argued before, Iran has embarked upon imperial expansion (Demographics and Iran's imperial design, September 13, 2005).

With oil trading in the mid-US$70 range and foreign-currency reserves above $50 billion, though, Iran theoretically could bide its time and wait for opportunities. Western resolve in the Persian Gulf is failing rapidly, as the American public repudiates the administration's Quixotic effort to build democracy in Iraq.

From a game-theoretical standpoint, therefore, Iran could postpone nuclear-weapons development with little prejudice to its ambitions. When Mahmud Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the map, he is expressing a heartfelt sentiment rather than a practical policy, for Israel has a nuclear arsenal large enough to make Persian an extinct language overnight. Mutually assured destruction is a frightful policy, but it did keep the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union through 40 years of Cold War, and it is conceivable at least that a similar uneasy peace might prevail between Iran and Israel.

Iran's main strategic objectives are the Iraqi, the Azerbaijani, and eventually the Saudi oilfields, but its preferred and most successful methods are infiltration and subversion through the Shi'ite majorities who inhabit oil-rich regions on its borders. A collateral objective is to keep pressure on Israel through Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has sufficient rockets to destroy the Haifa refineries and other important Israeli targets.

Nuclear weapons, therefore, have little offensive value for Iran at the moment. To achieve its long-term ambitions, though, Iran cannot do without nuclear capability. In the event that the United States and its allies (if it still has any) were to attack Iran to forestall a regional oil grab, nuclear weapons would be of great use to Iran, either as a way of attacking enemy staging areas, or as a terrorist device.

If Iran were offered (1) subsidies for civilian nuclear technology, (2) research capability that kept the nuclear option open for the future, (3) a free hand among Shi'ites in neighboring countries, (4) endorsement of an oil pipeline to Pakistan and India, and (5) security guarantees from the United States, the Iranian government would agree to abandon the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade, at least for the time being.

Europe happily would make such an offer, for the present generation of Europeans wants nothing more than to pass away in peace. "Apres moi le deluge!" does not begin to express Europe's aversion to conflict. But the United States will veto the concessions that Iran demands unless Iran abandons its Shi'ite co-religionists in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. Indicative was National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's accusation that Iran remains the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. President Ahmadinejad already has boasted of Iran's ability to hurt Western countries if Iran comes under attack. Iran's influence among terrorist organizations constitutes a retaliatory weapon against the Western nations. The United States will not tolerate an agreement that leaves an Iranian knife at its throat.

But Iran's leverage against the West depends on the Shi'ites' enormous capacity for self-sacrifice (The blood is the life, Mr Rumsfeld!, October 12, 2005). It cannot betray allies with whom it has ties of religion as well as blood without undermining its capacity to deploy such forces in the future. After more than a millennium the Shi'ite moment in history appears to have come, and no government can rule the major Shi'ite country without offering a path to victory for its denominational allies.

That is why it is so hard for Iran to bargain away its nuclear ambitions. As long as Iran lacks nuclear weapons, the Western powers (as well as Israel) have the option to scotch its plans at will. Without nuclear capability, Iran must live under the constant threat of an attack against which it cannot defend. Ahmadinejad's generation of Iranians, who came to adulthood in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and bled for their cause through the terrible Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, is determined to secure Iran's greatness for the ages.

If I were running a branch of US military intelligence (let us not speak of that asylum for unemployable academics, the Central Intelligence Agency), I would suspend all the game-theory exercises and order the senior staff to read classic tragedy. It is a fair bet that not a single senior US officer knows the German national tragedy, namely Friedrich Schiller's 1797 drama on the death of the Imperial Generalissimo of the Thirty Years' War, Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634). Despite its theatrical flaws and lapses into sentimentalism, Schiller's Wallenstein presents an astonishing double portrait of a commander paralyzed by superstition and an army driven by impossible ambitions.

Wallenstein very nearly became a Napoleon a century and a half before the Corsican's brief career. He created a new kind of army in the service of the Catholic cause, composed of adventurers attracted from all of Europe by the promise of loot and advancement, living off the land with disastrous consequences for settled populations. Ultimately the Thirty Years' War killed off half or more of the people of Central Europe. Wallenstein sought a separate peace with the Protestants that would have left him and his locust-horde as the arbiter of European power. But he vacillated long enough for the emperor to divide his forces and arrange his assassination.

Schiller's brilliant portrait of Wallenstein's winter camp reveals an army whose success also must be its downfall. Its existence is an affront to civil society, which must find means to expunge it or perish. The secret of Wallenstein's mysticism and paralysis of will was to be found in the ill-fated character of his soldiery. They had nowhere to retreat to, and nothing to lose. Jacques Callot's 1633 prints, Miseries of War, show peasants wreaking horrible vengeance on discharged soldiers. Wallenstein may have been mad, but his madness was existential, for the Generalissimos's existence was at odds with the order of things.

The same is true of the Iranian leadership. Iran has failed as a society in the face of the modern world. It embodies a fatal combination of modern demographics, that is, a rapidly aging population, without having assimilated modern productivity. The forces that have rallied to the banner of the Islamic Revolution both at home and abroad have no more hope than Wallenstein's soldiery. Away from their jihad, they can look forward only to a relentless pulverization of the traditional society whence they came. Such is the stuff of strategic mysticism. When there is no retreat, nothing to which to return, Destiny beckons from the enemy's lines and the army leaves its trenches and flies forward into the cannons.

That is why I do not expect a deal with Iran, despite the best intentions of the diplomats, and their terrible knowledge of what lies ahead should the West use force against Iran's nuclear capabilities. What the West euphemistically calls a "war on terror" is, in fact, a religious war. It must be fought like the Thirty Years' War. What the West requires, sadly, is not Condoleezza Rice, but a Cardinal Richelieu.

I am presuming the Peter Beinart is actually trying to move the Democratic Party back toward the middle

Sorry to confuse you, daniel. I am not clueless about the situation, I do know that Mr. Beinart is not considered a liberal by many in the blogosphere who are quite upset by even seeing his name.

But the point is that he says he is a liberal. Have you looked at the full title of his book?

The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again

In his first paragraph here, he speaks of liberals with the word "we":

The Good Fight begins with a meta-argument: that reviving liberalism requires better understanding our intellectual history. Put another way, we have trouble defining what we believe because we don’t know enough about what we once believed...

I can come to no other conclusions except either that Beinart thinks the word liberal means the same thing to most people as the word Democrat or that he wishes liberals as he defines them to take over the Democratic party some day.

I, on the other hand, see no political gain for the Democratic party to be using the word at all at this current point in time, except to say that the Democratic Party calls out to many kinds of liberals to be part of its coalition. I cannot see the benefit for the Democratic Party of constant talk of "what liberals think" and "what liberals should do" instead of what Democrats should do. I don't think the ideological fight of the past 30 years by the conservatives has been good for this country and I don't think a similar ideological fight by liberals will be much better, if it has any chance of succeeding. I don't care if it's Mr. Beinart's version of the definition of liberalism or his liberal enemies version.

Most people don't think that Karl Rove is an idiot. Karl Rove believes in building a bigger and bigger big tent party, and pandering to conservative ideologues only when absolutely necessary. (Certainly I don't see him thinking he has to change Pat Buchanan's and Bill Kristol's minds on foreign policy so that they are on the same page before he can win an election.) I myself in particular don't see Mr. Beinart's ideology nor his liberal opponents ideologies getting anyone anywhere good, neither the Democratic Party, nor the country. (I instinctively feel like I won't like what either plans for our country, and will be looking for someone, anyone, less ideological and more pragmatic to vote for.) That's without even getting into the point that in the short term, giving so much buzz to the term liberal in Democratic Party circles is still semi-suicidal. I hope all this revival tent style buzz about the supposed revival of liberalism of one kind or another is over by August and people start using the term "Democrat" again in the blogosphere, or I fear things might not go so swimmingly in November.

Both positions are of course wrong - typical of humans.

Rationality is needed for survival - which has logical corollaries that lead to "correct" action which benefits all rational sentients.

"Morality" is a term which mostly means a set of irrational rules enforced by guilt.

You're STILL evading the point - or just being obtuse.

Nobody has said anything about pacifism being "bad".

What they said was nobody here was a pacifist and therefore your suggestion that people here were pacifist just because they oppose stupid interventionism is just incorrect.

And it was during that war that the US Congress passed a resolution specifically stating that the United States was in no sense a "Christian" state and therefore had no specific beef with the Muslims.

We need exactly that sort of resolution now.

But of course that would put the Israel Lobby into throes of convulsions.

Besides which, why does having the ABILITY to project force require DOING so?

Oh, wait, you're a Zionist - I forgot. Never mind.

A troll is someone who posts something which is diametrically opposed to the majority view - and he knows it. And he posts it solely to get everyone's goat.

Just recently Gettysburg posted some nonsense about how the violence in Iraq really wasn't that bad, citing some nonsense about only 40-50 people getting killed. I cited the figures of over a thousand getting killed in one month in Baghdad alone.

TODAY, he posts nearly the exact SAME crap in another thread. And I called him on it again.

He KNOWS what he's doing when he posts this nonsense. He's deliberate provoking the people who he knows know better. And that is troll behavior.

Anybody else I've marked as a troll is using the same tactic - some with more subtlety than Gettysburg, at least.

Some of these people may actually be Republican "astroturfers" for all we know. I don't see any point in cutting them any slack if their content is either pointless or deliberately misleading.

"Saddam was responsible for killing millions not thousands."

Millions? Are you referring to the Iran-Irsq war? The maximum figure I've seen is 1.5 million Iranians, rather less Iraqis, perhaps 2 million maximum total.

And while Saddam allegedly started the war, he was certainly provoked by Ayatollah Khomeini.

So I'd say ascribing "millions" of death to Saddam would be hyperbole - especially given that Bush wants to use nuclear bunker busters which could theoretically kill up to three million people from direct and post-attack health threats over several countries.

Not to mention Vietnam, where the US war cost an estimated one to two million deaths of Vietnamese civilians in the South, and perhaps the same number in the North, plus a million or more NVA and VC deaths. The total could be as high as seven million - three times what Saddam could be accused of by starting a war.

Of course, Saddam massacred a large number of Shia and Kurds as well, so you might get a few hundred thousand more bodies out of those actions. But then the Clinton sanctions killed half a million Iraqis or more, and the current war has killed at least 100,000 to 250,000 more Iraqi civilians.

I'd say the US and Saddam were at least even in being mass murderers.

You'll notice, folks, that the net result of the above is: join the Republicans, don't attack them.

Care to guess why?

This is why I call this guy a troll.

We see these guys on the Linux sites all the time: "I really love Linux [Democrats], but you know, it really has a lot of problems that Windows [Republicans] solves pretty easily. If only Linux [Democrats] were more like Windows [Republicans]..."

Get the picture?

Well, not that anyone should get the wrong idea, but if you're looking for "adorable and smart", Justin supposedly isn't that bad - and he is gay, apparently.

I'm more an Andrea Corr and Angelina Jolie obsessive, myself.

Mr.Beinart, you wrote the following in early August, 2002, and I think that it is fitting that you be reminded of what you "once believed". Please consider that you had, in 2002, a "bully pulpit", and it seems to me, as evidenced by what I'm going to detail below.... what you "should have known", you chose an advocacy of Mr. Bush's "pre-emptive war", instead. You advocated pre-emptive war against another country, in the face of information that should have dissuaded you.

You got paid when you were wrong....you made a living at being wrong....squandering a chance to publish a more accurate, anti Iraq invasion message.

Now, you're here to help promote your book.... and you'll continue to get paid...for your story about how you were wrong.

TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Small Talk
by Peter Beinart
Post date 08.08.02 | Issue date 08.19.02

It has been more than six months since President Bush began hinting that the United States would attack Iraq. And the Democrats have finally come up with a response: They are in favor of debate. The United States needs "a national dialogue," explained Senator Joseph Biden. A "national dialogue," echoed a spokesman for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt. In a Washington Post op-ed, former Bill Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger called for an "honest discussion with the American people." As of this writing, the anti-honest-discussion lobby has yet to respond.

There's nothing wrong with all these calls for dialogue. But it's hard to have a useful discussion when only one side knows what it thinks. And right now only one side does. Bush and most Republicans are arguing that the United States should go to war against Iraq; most Democrats are arguing that we should argue about it.

Some Democrats seem to regard their uncertainty as a sign of judiciousness--rather than rushing to judgment, they are waiting for the facts to come in. But the facts won't tell Democrats what to think......

.........But if he is left alone for the next few years he'll likely do something aggressive closer to home--against Israel, the Kurds, or maybe Saudi Arabia--and use his weapons of mass destruction as blackmail to keep the United States from responding.

Is it worth risking American casualties to make sure that doesn't happen? Expert testimony can't answer that. For that matter, neither can national dialogue. After all, the United States dialogued for five months before the Gulf war; in the end the Senate voted almost exactly as you would have predicted on the day Saddam invaded Kuwait. The Democrats don't need more information about war with Iraq. What they need is a theory about how post-September 11 international relations work.

Bush has a theory: preemption. His idea is that containment--the first hallmark of cold war U.S. foreign policy--won't work against terrorists and mad dictators who want to wreak havoc at least as much as they want to capture territory. And that deterrence--the second hallmark--won't work against fanatics who aren't fazed by the prospect of massive retaliation. So the United States must destroy them before they destroy us.....

..........I think Bush is right about preemption. For one thing, we aren't containing Saddam now--he's been free to build up his chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal for almost four years now. And given the improbability of Saddam's allowing weapons inspectors free rein, not to mention the waning international support for Iraqi sanctions, it's unlikely we can contain him any better in the future.....

.........But the answer isn't for Democrats to mimic Europe's support for a containment that no longer contains. It's to advocate what might be called "preemption plus."........

..........Focusing on the political corollary to military intervention in Iraq would draw attention to the lingering GOP isolationism and relativism that undermine the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It would also serve as the logical moral successor to liberal anti-communism, which stressed the role of development and human rights in containing Soviet expansion. And it would ensure that Democrats are not bystanders as the United States marches to war. A national dialogue on Iraq is all well and good. But first the Democrats must have something to say.
I'm not a scholar, Mr.Beinart, but I knew in 2002 that Chief U.S. Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson took a hard line against "aggressive war". It seemed to me that "pre-emptive war" was indistinguishable from "aggressive war", so I was even more skeptical than I might have been.
Here are some of the things that I think, should have influenced you to use your "bully pulpit" to challenge Bush, instead of supporting him:

George J. Tenet before the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
07 February 2001

“We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since (Operation) Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs, although given its past behavior, this type of activity must be regarded as likely,”.....
.....There are still constraints on Saddam’s power. His economic infrastructure is in long-term decline, and his ability to project power outside Iraq’s borders is severely limited, largely because of the effectiveness and enforcement of the No-Fly Zones. His military is roughly half the size it was during the Gulf War and remains under a tight arms embargo. He has trouble efficiently moving forces and supplies—a direct result of sanctions. These difficulties were demonstrated most recently by his deployment of troops to western Iraq last fall, which were hindered by a shortage of spare parts and transport capability. http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2001/UNCLASWWT_02072001.html

http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/933.htm
Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Cairo, Egypt (Ittihadiya Palace)
February 24, 2001

(lower paragraph of second Powell quote on the page)
.............but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.................

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0107/29/le.00.html CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER Rice Discusses Role of U.S. Military Overseas; Aired July 29, 2001 - 12:00 ET ...........KING: Still a menace, still a problem. But the administration failed, principally because of objections from Russia and China, to get the new sanctions policy through the United Nations Security Council. Now what? Do we do this for another 10 years?

RICE: Well, in fact, John, we have made progress on the sanctions. We, in fact, had four of the five, of the permanent five, ready to go along with smart sanctions.

We'll work with the Russians. I'm sure that we'll come to some resolution there, because it is important to restructure these sanctions to something that work.

But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

This has been a successful period, but obviously we would like to increase pressure on him, and we're going to go about doing that...........

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,235395,00.html
"We're Taking Him Out"
His war on Iraq may be delayed, but Bush still vows to remove Saddam. Here's a look at White House plans
By DANIEL EISENBERG Posted Sunday, May. 05, 2002

............Hawks like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board chief Richard Perle strongly believe that after years of American sanctions and periodic air assaults, the Iraqi leader is weaker than most people believe. Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed. The best hope for Iraqi ties to the attack — a report that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic — was discredited last week...........

Published on Saturday, July 20, 2002 in the Boston Globe
Is Iraq a True Threat to the US?
by Scott Ritter

........Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.

In direct contrast to these findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. To date no one has held the Bush administration accountable for its unwillingness - or inability - to provide such evidence.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld notes that ``the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'' This only reinforces the fact that the case for war against Iraq fails to meet the litmus test for the defense of our national existence so eloquently phrased by President Lincoln.....

Scott Ritter's Iraq Complex - NY Times November 24, 2002

....and it wasn't like there weren't available reports of post 9/11 statements by Bush and Rice that press reports contradicted, or at least raised questions about....they made me less willing to trust Mr. Bush's statements and his motives....well before August, 2002:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/17/attack/main509471.shtml
'99 Report Warned Of Suicide Hijacking

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2002

Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the report was written, said U.S. intelligence long has known a suicide hijacker was a possible threat.

(AP) Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building......

......"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.....
It is not widely reported that Bush himself had made the original, misleading statement, just 5 days after 9/11:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html
September 16, 2001

Remarks by the President Upon Arrival
The South Lawn

...........Never did anybody's thought process about how to protect America did we ever think that the evil-doers would fly not one, but four commercial aircraft into precious U.S. targets - never.............
I did not intend to put you "on trial" here, Mr. Beinart, but I have to wonder what it would take to influence you to donate all of the proceeds from your book sales to charities that aid Iraqi orphans or the families of U.S. military casualties. I wonder how you persuade anyone to pay you for anything that you write, anymore, or what the "opportunity cost" was for what you wrote from your "bully pulpit", in August, 2002, compared to the opposite influence you might have had.

Disturbingly, your message today still seems to be a sermon about the necessity of "deciding what to think", over the quality and integrity that "sound" decisions require.

Now....if you want to advocate for "pre-emptive war", why settle upon such a "small potatoes" target, as Iraq or Iran. All of the arguments that you made about pre-invasion Iraq in 2002 are at least as valid as the justification that I discussed in my last post here....and the risks rise in relation to the potential reward!

There is no "center" in American politics. There is only the right and far right.

Neo-con internationalism is making us the new seventeenth century Spain.

Gettysburg, I appreciate your comments. I do not think you are a troll. Clearly you and I do not agree on how we view Bush, the neocons and his administration. But I think your goal has always been to put forward your thinking and not to bait people. I think Transhuman was incorrect implying you are a neo-con troll, although I understand why he might have thought that. The lecture I was referring to was specifically:

"You seem to be so anti-Bush that you forget that you are an American. You are an American right? Based on your above post I would deduce that you are some sort of Iranian nationalist."

To me this says that if one expresses opinions, even opinions from the side of the Iranians, then they are not Americans. I hope you were writing from the heat of the moment. It would be very sad to me if a rational thoughtful person like you really thinks that calling views un-American is appropriate.
My comment about Beinart is related. I have no problem with a person if they started out supporting the war and then realized they were deceived or they did not realize the costs, whatever, and then changed their views. The problem with Beinart as many people here have noted, was he was so cocksure of himself, such an arrogant fatuous fool, that he used the model of his cold war liberal heros and went like a true disciple of McCarthy..."antiAmerican, pacifist, antiantitotalitarian"... hunting among Democrats. Now he wants to rehabilitate his reputation. I know, he has a great career as the liberal the mainstream media loves. I am talking about the fact that his actions have revealed the low character of someone who acts in a fundamentally dishonest and self-aggrandizing manner.

Even if rationality was instrumental to obtaining your own "good", one could still be liberal. The liberals wants symmetric rationality--rationality for both the governor and the governed. So even if the liberal admits that their desire for prosperity and liberty for the masses is based on something other than rationality, they could still believe that symmetric rationality is the best means to obtain their irrational (extra-rational?) objective.

Even though valueless rationality or even the belief that rationality is impossible are both logically defensible positions in philosophy, they are radical positions in politics--if rationality doesn't in some way make things "better", at least for you, then what is the point of politics?

In order to win a political contest?

Unless you win, you don't get to implement policy, no matter how well thought out.

Don't think of it as a zero sum game, where the Left has to spend eight years cleaning up an eight-year mess the Right has created. If all we come up with is to stop Bush first and roll back what Bush has done second, we'll deserve to be ousted again in '08. Think forward.

Mr. Beinart is correct to say that we need core positions, not tactics. Kos has argued the same thing. The Democratic party today is needlessly reactive and visionless. What's past is past. Forget what the R's have done since 2000, and envision what you'd like the Ds to do once in power. Give people something positive to think about, and link anything you want to do to their everyday lives.

It is possible to govern from conviction instead of fear.
We can show that again.

The liberal view is that all societies and cultures are equally worthy.

Not really. The "culture" of the terrorist is not equally worthy.

The society and culture of Islam certainly is.

But they're not the same. Unless, of course, you believe that the problem is Islam, and not a very small, perverted subset of that culture (which has really nothing to do with Islam, and is basically like saying doctor-shooting anti-abortionists represent Christians).

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

I hope all this revival tent style buzz about the supposed revival of liberalism of one kind or another is over by August and people start using the term "Democrat" again

Don't you think there's some value in reappropriating the word "liberal," and taking it back from being a GOP four-letter-word?

They've used that club against us way too long.

(I'm not suggesting Beinart is or is not the vehicle to do that, just that it needs to be done.) 

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

Ooops. You're right. I missed that.

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

Artappraiser

Thanks for the added thoughts. Beinart seems to me to be a traditional liberal. Most of those of I read in the blogs aren't liberals at all but to the left of liberals. One of the problems for Democrats is the fight between liberals and for lack of a better word progressives.

We are starting to see a similar problem among Republicans. Their business wing, traditional conservatives are pro-trade, pro-immigration as well as pro-tax cut. You then have the movement conservatives and the Evanglicals who are cultural conservatives and more populists.

Bluebell is not far wrong when she says the Beinart is going after the more leftwing of the Democratic Party. I take it this is part of the animus between the DLC and many people at the Cafe.

The Democratic Party's traditions is to be internationalists abroad and interventionists in order to promote opportunity at home. The internal fight are with those who generally oppose internationism and who seek greater equality of result even at the expense of liberty.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

United Nations population growth rate charts via Spengler.

"Pejorative comments" and "you accused people here of being pacifists" both suggest that readers perceived Daniel's question:

Many at the Cafe take something of a pacifist perspective.  This seems dangerous in this world How do you fit pacificism in your perspective?

as a slur against TPMCers.

I don't see it as a slur at all -- like Daniel, I see pacifism as a logically defensible and moral position, even if I don't agree with it -- and I think it's clear that Daniel did not see it as a slur either.

More importantly, I think it's a useful question for Mr. Beinart to consider.  Whether or not one thinks that there are people at TPMC who can be described as taking "something of a pacifist perspective"  (I happen to think that there are, and would be disappointed if there weren't), there are definitely a number of self-identified pacifists in the liberal coalition, many of them religious leftists.  By contrast, I'm not aware of *any* self-identified pacifist groups that fall into the right wing camp.  So... itt would be interesting to know how this fits into Mr. Beinart's p.o.v.

Personally, I see pacifism and Beinart's p.o.v as entirely reconcilable in terms of coalition building.  Pacifism is not isolationism, not even close.  Take the Quakers, who Daniel mentions, as an example.  Generalizing here, but taken as a group, I would say  they're already engaged in pressing everything that Beinart has said here.  They're extremely active in both domestic and international politics... I would describe them as non-violent liberal interventionists. 

Granted, probably the majority of people on the left believe that violence is sometimes justified.  But most of us also believe that it's an option of last resort.   There's a lot of common ground there.

Be nice to Beinart.

Because I won't.

Iraq was Beinart's Chappaquiddick. He'll never get over it. Tough to be smart and young and have your reputation permanently stained.

Beinart chose the wrong war to be wrong about.
The consequences for the US and the world are too huge. When the obstetrician drops the newborn baby, "oops, sorry about that" doesn't cut it.

I wish him well on his rehab book tour. He'll find out that people are forgiving. But he should remember that history is not. In fact it's got a special trash bin for pundits who get the big story so wrong.

Meanwhile, what Peter --Chappaquiddick-on-the-Tigris-- Beinart has to say about liberals while he's busy wiping the blood off the floor, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

No, I never said any of those things.

As a matter of fact, my only comment re Republicans was that the tooth and nail fighting with Republicans is not in favor with the voting public.

But, right now, in the eyes of the voting public, Democrats represent a few special interest groups. Gays, abortions, impeach Bush proponents, and eco freaks and an assortment for far left fringe types, but are not a mainstream political party.

If Democrats do not provide a home for those in the middle, and even in the right, then there is little hope that they will ever win an election again. That should be obvious from all the losses in the past 12 years.

The question of how, and who to include, I leave up to debate.

It's a legitimate point, and I am not sure Cold War liberalism had any specific view about nationalism. I would say, however, that Cold War liberalism was in part a political calculation (as I believe Beinart is making as well) that anti-Communism could not be ceded to the Republicans. Therefore, once a country was portrayed, even if only by the Right, as "Communist" or threatening to go Communist, Cold War liberalism said that we had to make a stand and sometimes said that we had to intervene militarily as well. This was necessary to avoid the charge from the Right of being "soft on Communism", and it was also seen as necessary by Cold War liberals to establish that the US had legitimate interests and needed to project itself as a hegemonic power to stop Communism.

My point is, this was a recipe for disaster, because a movement that espouses those principles is not likely to have the temperment, intelligence, or guts to argue that a country like Vietnam wasn't really going Communist or wasn't really worth fighting for.

And, of course, Beinart and others of his ilk lacked the guts to oppose the Iraq War, which was not necessary or related to the war against terror, as well.

I agree Lieberman should not undermine the party by running as an Independent. But that wouldn't even be a possibility if MoveOn and Howard weren't trying to purge him.

To get the subpoena power, we Democrats need as many bodies in our column in Congress as possible regardless of where they stand on whether to impeach or the NSA or other such issues.

Here we had a shoe-in seat that is now up in the air because one part of the party is attempting a purge and the other part of the party will turn on everyone else if the purge is successful.

Nobody's right when everyone is wrong.

And I don't really give a damn that they started it. Attack them all you want for trying to purge people. I'm with you there. But responding in kind I oppose.

As for writing the DLC, I received an e-mail Friday from the DLC defending Joe Lieberman and have been working for the last several days on a response. My problem with their defense is its failure to acknowledge their role in the current intraparty squabbles.

As to the question of making sure they are not getting us to come to their side, the entire statement is emblematic of the problem.

Your stuck in this us/them pattern of thinking.

The SIDE I want them on is the side of the Democratic Party and the American people. That doesn't mean I expect the moderates to become liberals or for the liberals to become moderates.

It means I expect both moderates and liberals to defend each other from personal attacks and to not engage in such attacks against each other. It means I expect both moderates and liberals to defend the legitimacy of their fellow Democrats taking the views they take even if they disagree, rather than suggesting that their position represents some sort of character flaw such as an inability to "gracefully yield to new ideas."

And who the hell DOES gracefully yield to new ideas anyway? New ideas always require a constant re-explaining, a continual effort to make people understand. But when you attack people, they become defensive and less willing to listen. Once attacked they will defend even what they know is wrong just out of pride. It's the nature of people, which I wish we liberals showed more understanding of.

The other question is, if people change their minds, are you going to accept yes for an answer?

Beinart has stated that he was wrong on the war, but it seems that's not enough for a lot of people. Are you really that gracious when its your turn to eat crow. I find the dish awfully distasteful myself and respect anyone who can find it in them to swallow even a bit when necessary.

The positions people should take are the positions they believe in. I opposed the Iraq war from day one and have been annoyed by Lieberman's stance, but I'm frankly less annoyed with him than other Democrats because I think Joe's position is sincerely held.

John Kerry, on the other hand, based on his past voting record and positions, should have been against the war from the beginning. But he caved to political pressure based on what short term polling said and tried to play it both ways.

You agree that you want Democratic leaders who stand on principle rather than act on the basis of polling. I think Joe Lieberman is doing that, just not on the basis of a principle you and I agree with.

So are you going to replace him with someone willing to pander to you? Will that make us stronger?

One of the things I love about the Democratic Party is that it is NOT -- unlike the Republican Party -- representive of one, single ideology. We have as many different ideas and positions as there are in America as a whole. And we debate and argue and deliberate about them instead of demanding partywide conformity as the Republican s do.

And that's part of what we need to explain to the America people.

I could write more, but I need to get back to work.

I draw slightly different conclusions than you--or maybe radically different ones, you be the judge. Every country is worth fighting for, if by fight we don't necessarily mean wage a superfluously violent hot war. I'd hope to God that by now our policy elites would realize we have a lot of tools in our chest at least as powerful as our military.

The Right likes to point to the fact that Communism has been a disaster for Vietnam. This is true. It's likely however that the bumbling militarists we were backing would have been no better, and likely worse, for the people in Vietnam. I don't take this to mean we were necessarily facing a no win situation, just that we lacked imagination.

What this might mean today is that given that the world is no longer divided between two superpower camps we ought to be a lot more flexible in who we back/engage/negotiate with. Especially given that a certain segment of our party likes to tout that they're about a Third Way (ahem) you'd think they'd be a lot more flexible in seeking other solutions.

See my post on your blog.

To me, "morality" as a term is meaningless as other than "rules enforced by guilt" because it's entire history is based on religious principles.

"Ethics" has been based almost entirely on ill-defined social and cultural values and concepts.

I prefer to use the term "correct behavior" because it is based on what is logically derived from known facts as being workable and effective in achieving the primary goal of any sentient which is survival.

"Morality" can be twisted and turned based on emotional edict. "Ethics" can be interpreted many different ways because it tends to be based on concepts such as "rights" which have no precise definition or referrents in reality.

"Correct behavior" is that which is demonstrably - according to scientific fact, the laws of economics - which are nothing more than recognitions of the facts of actual human behavior - and logic - workable in actually achieving a specific purpose.

Ah, but the POINT of the falling fertility rates is the RISE in economic prosperity and literacy and other positive cultural factors.

Like most countries, advancement in economic status produces falling birthrates.

How is this a requirement forcing them to be "expansionist"?

Spengler has no argument to demonstrate that.

"Israel is the only state in the entire Middle East which affords Jews and Muslims equal civil rights"

Unless you're married to a Palestinian, of course...

Ahem - what part of that don't you understand?

(Okay, that was a troll response. Everybody else gets away with it, so sue me.)

I agree - it would be off-topic to raise the whole Zionism issue here, so I'll let it lie.

"I find it hard to believe that someone who is closer to "transcending" human nature than anyone else needs to insult and verbally abuse people so frequently, as I would expect them to possess superior rhetorical abilities."

What part of "you're a bigot and a fool" fits that picture? Apparently Zionists don't have "superior rhetorical abilities". Maybe that's your true complaint.

Got your point, but others will persist in using the terms "morality" and "ethics".

You are exactly correct in that a successful ethic, morality, etc. is the one that works. The trick is deciding the purpose.

Liked your post on ethics.

Why wasn't Pol Pot responsible for the mass murders in Cambodia?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I would argue that 9/11 represented more of a shock to liberal thinking. The liberal view is that all societies and cultures are equally worthy. It is umcofortable at the idea that Western values should have primacy in American life. This is an increasingly difficult position to hold when we are attacked by people who reject even basic notions of civilization and whose long-term vision includes replacing Western values with medieval theocratic ones.

This is just more neocon sophistry.

Please cite a single "liberal" of any consequence who claims Taliban society is equally worthy to our own Democratic society.

Please cite a single "liberal" who thinks that those Hindu communities which tolerate wife-burning, or African societies that practice genital mutilation, or hereditary Sheikdoms that practice strict Sharia law are "equally worthy" to our own.

There are none...

On the contrary, liberals and progressives led the fight that ended the brutal Apartheid system in South Africa --they didn't treat it as a "society equally worthy" to our own.

Liberals and progressives were the most outspoken opponents of the Taliban's fundamentalism-inspired enslavement of women; liberals have been the leading critics of the theocratic Saudi dictatorship --it's refusal to allow women to vote and it's exploitation of poor southeast Asian workers.

Similarly, liberals have been making the case for interdependence on global warming, combatting AIDS, developing fossil fuel alternatives, protecting biodiversity, fighting human trafficking, limiting weapons proliferation, and many other urgent issues of our day...

Sorry --your gobbledeygook about how "liberals" supposedly view societies has no basis in fact.

No liberals had or have a problem with destroying the Taliban and al Qaeda for what they did on 9/11; most --unlike the so-called conseratives-- want the Saudis held accountable, too. Most also supported military action in the Balkans, and plenty --like Gen. Wes Clark-- supported the Gulf War.

But nearly all liberals sided with the pre-war military and diplomatic concensus that Bush's plan to invade and occupy Iraq was pre-ordained to failure and would distract us from the war against the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

And guess what? The liberals were right, the neocons and Right-Wing Republicans were wrong.

. . . probably the majority of people on the left believe that violence is sometimes justified.

A majority? How about 99.5%!

Just as Daniel avers that he hadn't the slightest intention of disparaging those commenters he claims, based on no evidence, are pacifists, why don't you tell me that 99.5% is a "majority" and that's all you meant to say. It would show the same level of intellectual honesty.

I should add that saying "probably the majority of people on the left believe that violence is sometimes justified" wasn't the best way to put my argument anyway, since it implies that all pacifists think that violence is never justified, when in fact I think that most (maybe 99.5%, who knows?) do justify violence in certain circumstances.  "Radical pacifism" ala Gandhi is pretty rare. 

Actually, maybe that is the source of some of the contention here.  Maybe some of us are thinking of pacifism only in terms of Gandhi-style pacifism, while others are thinking of pacifism in broader terms?

Sophistry, eh?

Perhaps if pressed, many liberals will concede that yes, not all societies are equally worthy and sure, when you think about it, there's a lot that is in fact superior about Western values compared to other values systems.  But they certainly do get their nose out of joint when anyone tries to overtly ASSERT these things. 

As evidence I cite the culture wars on many college campuses that try to require an introduction to Western civilization - the much-demonized Dead While Males - in their curricula.  The idea that all Americans should have a thorough grounding in the Western tradition is anathema apparently.  "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go" was the chant I remember hearing.

I also cite the recent Danish cartoon controversy, where the left's inclination was to appease the forces of Islamic extremism and be extra senstive to offending Islamic sensibilities rather than standing up for Western values of free speech and the right to criticize religion.  It was much noted at the time how different this reaction was compared to when art offensive to Christians was shown publicly.  That art was defended on free speech grounds by many of the same people claiming we ought to be sensitive to Muslims' feelings.

I cite the many leftist commentators whose natural reaction, when hearing someone fulminate against some retrograde culture or society - including the Taliban's I might add - is to say yeah sure but let's also talk about our own flaws. We have our own Taliban here in the US etc. etc.  I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Christian right described as the "American Taliban".

I cite the campaign against apartheid.  Now make no mistake, I am not defending apartheid.  It was evil to the core.  But I always wondered why this particular evil so energized the left while so many other evils around the world went ignored.  The average African country during the apartheid years was as brutal, as oppressive and as divided along ethnic lines as was South Africa.  Yet when I was a student at Berkeley in the mid-80's, it was South Africa that nearly shut down the campus as activists pushed for divestment.  Why? Well I would argue that perhaps it was partly due to the fact that white South Africa was a symbol of the West.

So sure, when pressed most liberals will admit that our culture has much to recommend it.  It's sometimes too bad that it requires pressing.

Having lived through the times, I know them quite well and wasn't changing the subject.

The domino theory said that if South Vietnam fell other countries in SE Asia would as well. Two did. The domino theory was correct. It was fortunate the dominoes stopped in Thailand. Luckily the Thai had a strong enough cultural identity and no history of colonialism so that they were able to fight off the weak communist insurgency there.

The bad things predicted if the communists won was that other countries would fall to them and there would be a bloodbath. Both happened. There is no denying what happened in Cambodia. I have read a number of different estimates on the number executed in South Vietnam post 1975. This one places it at about 100,000.

http://jim.com/repression.htm

Of course, a primary is not a purge.

But THIS primary is a purge because national organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party have targetted a particular candidate in a particular local race. A normal primary is just a decision by local voters.

It's also a purge because the clear purpose is to punish moderates for being moderate -- to send a message that anyone in the party who takes moderate positions will pay a price. In short, that their views are not welcome in the party.

BBochove said as much:

There have to be costs for Beinart, Lieberman, Zell Miller, Marshall Wittman and the whole unsavory lot

(And I must say I also strongly object to referring to ones fellow Democrats as an "unsavory lot.")

We have a monumental struggle ahead of us in the coming years and we cannot get through it and succeed if we cannot show some small measure of loyalty to each other -- regardless of whether we agree on everything.

As to overcoming the damage done by our recent mistakes you will be proved right--but only if we talk about it, decide how to make amends, and do so.

This will include placing blame where it is due, which will require hearings, and must lead to consequences.

Moving on without the above would suture over a deep infection.

Hey!! Watch out !!! A Democrat who has an idea about how to actually get back in power will not last long here!!
;-)