Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?

[LiviaOlivia]

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD
by GEORGE PACKER
Posted 2004-02-09

Read article in full at The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1

<snip>

In treating the war on terrorism as a mere military struggle, the Administration’s mistake begins with the name itself. “Terrorism” is a method; the terror used by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is not the enemy in this war. The enemy is an ideology—in the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s phrase, “Islamist totalitarianism”—that reaches from Karachi to London, from Riyadh to Brooklyn, and that uses terror to advance its ends. The Administration’s failure to grasp the political nature of the war has led to many crucial mistakes, most notably the Pentagon’s attitude that postwar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq would essentially take care of themselves, that we could have democracy on the cheap: once the dictators and terrorists were rooted out, the logic went, freedom would spontaneously grow in their place. As Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, recently told the Times, “There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee.” Instead, in both countries the real struggle has just begun, and it will last a generation or more, with little international help in sight and victory not at all assured.

“They don’t get it, because they don’t believe this is an ideology,” Ivo H. Daalder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, said of the Administration. “They believe that this is a state-based threat—that if you get rid of evil people, who are in finite supply, you will have resolved the problem. And the proof of the pudding is a very simple statement that the President keeps repeating: ‘It’s better to kill them there than to have them kill us here.’ Which assumes there are a finite number.”

Remarkably, this narrow approach has met with no systematic criticism from the Democratic Party. Democratic leaders attack the Administration for its unilateralism, but, with a few exceptions, they have been unprepared to reckon with the nature and scale of the conflict; and this has to do with the Party’s own intellectual shortcomings. Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way—not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of “multiculturalism”) that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples. Like the Bush Administration, the Democrats have failed to grasp the political dimensions of the struggle. They, too, have cast it narrowly, as a matter of security (preferring the notion of police action to that of war). They’ve pushed the Administration only for greater effort on the margins, such as upgrading communications equipment for firemen and federalizing airport security. And the Iraq war let Democrats off the hook, allowing them to say what they wouldn’t do rather than what they would do.

<snip>

Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalism—a struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coöperation. Daalder said, “The fundamental challenge—just as the fundamental challenge in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 in France and Italy was to provide Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to Communism, to defeat it politically—is to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they have only despair.” He pointed out that America now spends forty times more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid goes to Israel and Egypt. “This is like the new Cold War, and we’ve got to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest,” he said.

<snip>

[DuctapeFatwa]

1. They can certainly reword it so it sounds more palatable. For example:

"Operation Kill the Iraqis and Steal the Oil" doesn't sound too good.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom" sounds much better.

I'm sure all the major candidates' staffs will be able to come up with even more attractive names for it, without jeopardizing the facts on the ground for the Iraqis, or the facts on the bank statement for the defense and energy industries.

[pacifictiger]

2. surely all they have to do is list the failures of current

insider hawks - afghanistan, 1980 iraq, central & south america for starters.

[DuctapeFatwa]

4. and make clear that their colonization of those countries is different

Fortunately, they don't have to make the case to the victims, who may be a slightly tougher room than affluent people with electric lights, internet access, and no babies screaming from 3rd degree burns with no painkillers in the next room.

[xchrom]

3. regarding democrats or liberals and the ''war'' on terror

liberals have always had a cohesive message -- work with what the citizens of any given country want for them selves.
we cannot bring our way of governing and way of living and force it on any one. what we can do is help people on the ground grow their own liberal cultures -- but it won't be ours.
this author seems determined that democrats pick up the rights program and rename it. well, a rose remains a rose.

[DulceDecorum]

5. No.

The rain, it raineth on everyone,
The just and the unjust fella;
But mainly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.

However,
this too, shall pass.

The days of a thief are forty.