Peter "PNAC" Beinhart speaks

[ProSense]

The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal

By PETER BEINART

Published: April 30, 2006

This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme: competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will assure them that they can execute it better than George W. Bush.

Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed, they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such stories, after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.

Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral clarity, reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might with relentless force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth is set free.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It was Ronald Reagan's story as well. To a remarkable degree, the right's post-9/11 vision relies on a grand analogy: Bush is Reagan, Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher, the "axis of evil" is the "evil empire," the truculent French are the truculent French. The most influential conservative foreign-policy essay of the 1990's, written by the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, was titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." And since 9/11, most conservatives have seen Bush as Reaganesque. His adherence to a script conservatives know by heart helps explain their devotion, which held fast through the 2004 election, and has only recently begun to flag, as that script veers more and more disastrously from the real world.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/magazine/30liberal.html?ex=1146542400&en=6d40aae5e76b8a96&ei=5087%0A

And gets smacked down:

DAVID SIROTA
04.30.2006

Peter Beinart Has No Clothes

No matter how many times Establishment pundits and politicians contradict themselves and push policy prescriptions that then fall flat on their face, the sheer audacity of these people to continue puffing out their chests as "experts" never ceases to amaze. It's positively incredible, really - only in politics (and perhaps economics) can someone embrace brazen hypocrisy, make high-profile predictions that end up being wildly off the mark and then not only keep their job, but continue to be billed - and to bill themselves - as a guru.

The most high-profile example of this these days is Peter Beinart of the New Republic. He is running around promoting himself as the Democratic Party's visionary leader on foreign policy - sententiously berating the Democratic Party for not telling America "what their vision is" on foreign policy.

Beinart, you may recall, is one of the Washington pundits who most loudly echoed the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq. "If the Democratic Party becomes the anti-war-with-Iraq party...we really will no longer have a 50-50 nation, we'll have a 60-40 Republican nation," Beinart declared on Fox News in 2002. "The Democrats will be in a kind of McGovernite wilderness for a generation." He was, of course, about as far off the mark as one can get. Today, polls consistently show that Iraq has been a major factor in the decimation of President Bush's approval ratings. And it is no secret that one of the major reasons Democrats haven't done a better job of capitalizing on those poor numbers is because they have refused to support getting us out of Iraq.

But bad predictions are nothing when Beinart's subsequent attacks came. The Washington Post wrote the month before the invasion in 2003 that "Beinart is a full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq, a stance that has led him to assail, among others, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)." Beinart specifically "chided Kerry for making anti-war noises after voting to support action against Saddam Hussein, saying Kerry's presidential candidacy 'is doomed to fail if Kerry keeps speaking so dishonestly about Iraq.'" In the New Republic, Beinart attacked Kerry for "think he can have it both ways on the war."

Snip...

Here's what the Atlantic Monthly now reports, essentially stripping Beinart naked and proclaiming "The Emperor has no clothes":

"Like many Democrats of his ilk, Beinart initially supported the intervention in Iraq, believing that bringing down a WMD-wielding, genocidal dictator was in the tradition of liberal interventionism. He has since changed his mind, however."

Let's review this one more time just to understand what kind of chutzpah is really at work here - a chutzpah so laughable in its egotism that it's almost hard to fathom. The very same pundit who is running around with a new book promoting himself as a model if intellectual integrity/courage and demanding Democrats reflexively embrace neoconservative hawkisness in the name of having a "vision" is the same guy who led the charge for war in Iraq, berated Democrats who criticized the war, yet now has quietly decided to change his mind on the whole affair, joining in criticizing the Bush administration for the war in Iraq that he himself originally promoted. I would say this is as ridiculous as a kleptomaniac telling people not to steal - but that would be an insult to criminals, as the brazenness of Beinart's behavior is even more disgusting.

More…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/peter-beinart-has-no-clot_b_20089.html

Beinhart signed this PNAC letter:

Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces
January 28, 2005

Snip...

There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a "broken force." Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

more...

http://www.newamericancentury.org/defense-20050128.htm

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Since when does one man get to decide the meaning of "security"?

Right now the odds of given american dying because of inadequate care (in case of a disease/accident) for lack of health insurance is THOUSAND OF TIMES HIGHER than dying from a terrorist incident.

[Ms. Clio]

2. Yes, he wants us to believe the Cold War has morphed into the "Long War"

and that what we really need is another LBJ to get us ever deeper into the Iraqmire.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. watch it! want to have your chocolate ration rescinded?

[Ms. Clio]

5. I really need to reread that book

only I'm trying to maintain the Colbert buzz as long as possible.

[LiberalPartisan]

3. TNR really has become a complete joke

They obviously ache to be seen as prophetic and important. Too bad. Twenty years ago it was a decent magazine - today it's way too convinced of its own importance - which by the way is nil.