Frank Newgent
10th February 2004, 09:24 AM
...about foreign policy since September 11th?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1
Biden’s own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.
SNIP
While the Democrats held the White House, the ideological children of Ronald Reagan were thinking hard about America’s place in the world after the Cold War. At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world—to discourage rivals, to pursue interests, to spread values, with or without partners. Coalitions might be temporary; force might be used unilaterally and preventively, not just as a matter of convenience but as a point of doctrine. Their view admitted no daylight between American interests and democratic ideals: our motives are good, therefore our unleashed power will have good effects. These thinkers were also skilled publicists, and they defined the difference between the two parties as the difference between strength and weakness.
Within hours of the September 11th attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were suggesting that Iraq—the unflagging obsession of the conservatives throughout the nineties—should receive the brunt of American wrath. Whether or not this was a sound analysis of the threat, the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action. The Iraq war was nothing if not a war of ideas—an elective war that came of arguments and theories about America and the world. It was exactly on this level that Democrats were ill-prepared to join the contest.
SNIP
Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.
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
In the days that followed the September 11th attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a national self-mobilization. The long lines of would-be blood donors, the volunteers converging on lower Manhattan from around the country, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: the response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, “I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world, people do something for an ideal. I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind.” A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.
It has been much remarked that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. Nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we’re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” Biden said. The tax cuts haven’t just left the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity has been terrible for morale. But the President’s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice followed directly on the governing spirit of the modern Republican Party. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could stand up and ask what Americans can do for their country. We haven’t been asked to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. The war’s burdens are borne solely by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.
Perhaps this was a shrewd political intuition on Bush’s part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11th, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It’s fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours is likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we can export liberal democratic values when our own version shows so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we can expect to muster for Afghanis and Iraqis when we’re asked to feel so little for one another.
SNIP
What if we now find ourselves, at this stage of thickening maturity, in the middle of a new crisis that requires us to act like citizens of a democracy? It’s impossible to know how the public would respond to a political party that spoke about these things—because, so far, no party has.
I'm sure this year will be different.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1
Biden’s own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.
SNIP
While the Democrats held the White House, the ideological children of Ronald Reagan were thinking hard about America’s place in the world after the Cold War. At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world—to discourage rivals, to pursue interests, to spread values, with or without partners. Coalitions might be temporary; force might be used unilaterally and preventively, not just as a matter of convenience but as a point of doctrine. Their view admitted no daylight between American interests and democratic ideals: our motives are good, therefore our unleashed power will have good effects. These thinkers were also skilled publicists, and they defined the difference between the two parties as the difference between strength and weakness.
Within hours of the September 11th attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were suggesting that Iraq—the unflagging obsession of the conservatives throughout the nineties—should receive the brunt of American wrath. Whether or not this was a sound analysis of the threat, the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action. The Iraq war was nothing if not a war of ideas—an elective war that came of arguments and theories about America and the world. It was exactly on this level that Democrats were ill-prepared to join the contest.
SNIP
Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.
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
In the days that followed the September 11th attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a national self-mobilization. The long lines of would-be blood donors, the volunteers converging on lower Manhattan from around the country, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: the response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, “I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world, people do something for an ideal. I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind.” A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.
It has been much remarked that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. Nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we’re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” Biden said. The tax cuts haven’t just left the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity has been terrible for morale. But the President’s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice followed directly on the governing spirit of the modern Republican Party. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could stand up and ask what Americans can do for their country. We haven’t been asked to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. The war’s burdens are borne solely by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.
Perhaps this was a shrewd political intuition on Bush’s part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11th, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It’s fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours is likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we can export liberal democratic values when our own version shows so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we can expect to muster for Afghanis and Iraqis when we’re asked to feel so little for one another.
SNIP
What if we now find ourselves, at this stage of thickening maturity, in the middle of a new crisis that requires us to act like citizens of a democracy? It’s impossible to know how the public would respond to a political party that spoke about these things—because, so far, no party has.
I'm sure this year will be different.