REVOLT OF THE MASSES:

The Liberal Power (Peter Beinart, 02.19.03, New Republic)

"Last time, this nation entered a war to make the world safe for democracy and establish permanent peace; it was betrayed in the event because its aims were not embodied in the peace settlement. Do we now risk such a betrayal again?" Looking back to World War I, this journal asked that question on August 25, 1941, in an editorial called "For a Declaration of War." And that is the question again today.

Today's war debate also occurs against the backdrop of a past betrayal. The first Bush administration rallied the country behind war in the Gulf with impassioned denunciations of Saddam Hussein's cruelty. And that moralistic language helped win over the small contingent of hawkish liberals--people like Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Bob Graham, and the editors of this magazine--who gave the war its bipartisan veneer. But, when the Shia and Kurds rose up against Saddam, in the naive belief that the United States cared more about their freedom than Riyadh's displeasure, Saddam slaughtered them as America's nearby army watched. [...]

The unhappy truth is that, if the Bush administration wins the war but betrays the peace, the political consequences for the president will be small. Once the fighting is over, the American press will turn its attention elsewhere, just as it has in post-Taliban Afghanistan. But the consequences for hawkish liberalism will be great. Having been played for fools, most liberal hawks will retreat to a deep skepticism of American power. They will end up on the decent, feckless left--in the company of those who sincerely condemn men such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam but have no strategy for toppling them except empty exhortations to people power. And that soft isolationism will likely retake the Democratic Party. On the right, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney won't lose sleep if Chevron and Crown Prince Abdullah run things in post-Saddam Baghdad rather than Kanan Makiya. Paul Wolfowitz will either shut up or resign.

Many people would consider this ideological reshuffling an improvement. At home, liberals could reclaim the language of human rights for themselves, secure in the knowledge that it, and they, would no longer be sullied by an association with the 82nd Airborne. The collapse of hawkish liberalism might actually diminish anti-Americanism abroad since, absent their liberal allies, Rumsfeld and Cheney would be less likely to drape their actions in the moralistic talk Europeans find so grating. After all, no one protests Russia's intervention in Chechnya on the streets of Paris and Rome.

But, when the next Bosnia did come along, its leaders wouldn't find America's new separation between liberalism and power nearly so refreshing; between the realist left and the McGovernite left, they would have nowhere to turn. The truth is that liberalism has to try to harness American military power for its purposes because American tanks and bombs are often the only things that bring evil to heel. Opposing this war might have helped liberals retain their purity, but it would have done nothing for the people suffering under Saddam. If liberals are betrayed a second time in the Gulf, hawkish liberalism may well go into temporary eclipse. But one day we, and they, will need it again.

This is almost too funny for words. Note the "liberal" betrayal that goes unmentioned here, the descent of the Iron Curtain around ann Eastern Europe that FDR and Truman betrayed. This has little or nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism, it has everything to do with the fundamental weaknesses of democracy.

In a political system where the great mass of people make the decisions it's deuced hard to focus the state on anything beyond folks' narrow personal interests and they're seldom interested in expending their cash and blood on the freedom of strangers. So war almost always requires a spectacular provocation (often fake or at least overblown). That gives the nation's leaders just enough leeway to embark on a war of vengeance and destroy the malefactor (real or imagined). But by the time the war is approaching its logical conclusion--the rooting out of the ideologies with which you were at war and the restoration of freedom to states that weren't directly implicated--the peoples' attention has wandered back to their own bellies and no consensus any longer exists for the pursuit of such policies. Thus, we ended WWI with the Soviets in control of Russia. After WWII we left Eastern Europe under a communism indistinguishable from the Nazism we'd just "freed the world" of. We left North Korea in place. We bailed on South Vietnam even though it looked like they could hold out on their own with just minimal help from us. We've left Castro in place for forty years, even though he could have been toppled at any time. We left Saddam in power in '91 and we'll almost certainly end this war on terrorism with people like Assad and Qaddafi and Arafat and the rest still in power, meaning that we'll have had only a marginal impact on the Islamicism that created 9-11. In fact, the only real hope that we'll see the war through to its conclusion is if we're attacked again, preferably several times and with massive casualties. For it's only when we fear we might be the next to die that we're typically willing to lift our attention from our own navels. Mr. Beinart should know better than to believe that has anything to do with "hawkish liberals": it's just human nature.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 21, 2003 10:39 AM