SECURITY VS. FREEDOM...AGAIN:

Construction Paper: Why liberals need an affirmative position on Iraq (Nick Penniman and Richard Just, March 2003, American Prospect)

Millions of people will soon be freed from a yoke of cruelty and dictatorship. One might have expected liberals to use this moment to cheer the prospect that the war's aftermath could lead to a better life for Iraqis, as well as for those Arabs, Israelis, Turks and Kurds who have for more than two decades lived under the threat of attack by Saddam Hussein. One might have expected liberals to begin making the case for a lengthy and serious rebuilding of Iraq -- a process that is hugely complicated and that no one knows whether the Bush administration will commit to wholeheartedly. But neither of these things has happened. Instead, on the brink of the ouster of a dictator who is the very embodiment of illiberal values, too many liberals are on the sidelines throwing beer cans at the proceedings.

It's time for progressives to make an eleventh-hour effort to correct this mistake. Some may continue to criticize this administration's treatment of its allies, but such criticism is no substitute for pushing a set of progressive ideas for a new Iraq. Chiding the president for allocating funds to rebuild Iraqi schools while allowing American public schools to languish -- as we have heard some liberals do -- is not a foreign policy; it is the absence of a foreign policy. Any fair-minded liberal should admit that Iraqi rebuilding and American domestic priorities are not mutually exclusive; both carry a strong moral imperative and both are clearly in our country's national interest.

In order to carve out for themselves a constructive position on Iraq, liberals will have to reclaim the optimism that once animated the progressive spirit but seems now to be a casualty of the build-up to war. Since September 11, progressives have become infected with a reflexive dread on questions of foreign policy -- first, dread of an imaginary quagmire in Afghanistan, now dread of instability in Iraq, dread of Hussein's demise leading to increased terrorism and dread of what other Arab leaders might think if, God forbid, our actions put pressure on their regimes to liberalize or reform.

Well, we have news for our progressive friends: Dread isn't going to fly with the majority of American voters -- and it isn't progressive. In two months, U.S. forces will have liberated Iraq from Hussein's rule. How will a temperament of permanent dread look then? Imagine the line George W. Bush will land over and over again on the campaign trail: "For those who said we couldn't plant the seed of democracy in the Middle East, I say, 'Never doubt the resolve of the American people.'"

Optimism is an invaluable political commodity in America, and it is nearly impossible to win elections without it. Right now Bush has it, and liberals don't. Consider the recent history of presidential elections. In 1976, Jimmy Carter offered a moral vision of American life that stood in stark contrast to the perceived dirtiness of Nixonian politics; in its own way, Carter's implicit promise to American voters was a powerful sort of optimism. Four years later, his moralism came to be seen by voters as a kind of self-righteous negativism, and one that America could never be worthy of. So Ronald Reagan -- despite an agenda that was anything but moderate or mainstream -- won over those voters by sunnily conveying that the United States was meant for great things in the world. In 1992, Bill Clinton triumphed by using a similar optimism to speak to the economic aspirations of the middle-class. (Remember "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"?) And since 9-11, Bush has won over many moderates with his confident message that Americans are a resilient people who will not just survive terrorist strikes but exhibit bravery in preventing future ones.

American progressives need to reclaim their sense of optimism on foreign policy. And if they are looking for some inspiration to escape the temperamental and political corner they have painted themselves into, then they need look no farther than their own history. From the American Revolution to the New Deal to the civil-rights movement, the crusading spirit of liberalism is decorated with victories won on behalf of democracy and the common good.

Unfortunately for liberalism, the authors are peddling a falsehood. The Left is fueled not by a vision of the common good but by a promise of individual security, hence the advocacy of a massive social welfare state and the fundamental disinterest in freedom generally, but especially when the extension of freedom threatens personal security, either physical or financial, and even more so when the freedom under consideration is that of foreigners. Circumstances happen to have placed Woodrow Wilson and FDR in the Oval Office at the time of WWI and WWII, but neither entered the war until American lives came under attack and neither demonstrated much interest in liberty broadly, being content to leave the Soviet Union in place, though Wilson did at least launch some desultory attacks. Meanwhile, Truman set the tone for the liberals' prosecution of the Cold War by
accepting containment theory, which essentially made the U.S. and U.S.S.R. co-guarantors of the capitivty of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Liberals did get us involved in the Korean and Viatnam wars, but only as defensive actions, practically guaranteeing that we'd not win them but also that they'd not widen and invoilve us in a wider war for freedom. Since Vietnam The Left has opposed every military action we've undertaken, with the exception--to some degree--of Bill Clinton's aerial campaigns in the Balkans and the war in Afghanistan immediately after the 9-11 provocation. Meanwhile, the Scoop Jackson wing of the party which did support the idea of waging wars of liberation has migrated to the Republicans where they are known as neo-conservatives.

Take a look at what President Bush has proposed for our war on terror and it's easy to see why the Left can not support it. It's one thing to go after actual terrorist organizations, but the cost in dollars that could be spent on domestic social programs and the risk to Americans lives here and broad make it absurd to believe that the Left would ever come to grips with a campaign that eventually contemplates removing Yassar Arafat, Saddam Hussein, the mullahs in Iran, Kim Jong-il, and Bashar Assad from power and that will carry American troops from the Philippines to Colombia to combat indigenous guerilla/terrorist movements. A diversion of funds to such a vast, almost boundless, military campaign would threaten things like Universal Health Care and is, thus, anathema.

and

THE REMINDER OF FAILURE:
The anti-American century (Amotz Asa-El, March 23, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

AMERICA became what it is thanks to its prudent handling of three challenges: tolerance, development, and power. In each of these categories America looms ominously as a stark reminder of another European power's grand historic failure.

The first case in point is Germany. No country in human history has welcomed penniless immigrants, tolerated diverse faiths and accommodated political refugees as America has. Originally, Germany had the potential to be just as prosperous, inviting and inspiring, but it chose a course that led elsewhere. When a surrendered Germany finally embraced American-style pluralism, it was far too late in the day to come coupled with American-style greatness. That hurts.

Then comes Russia. There, the tragedy lay in the mishandling of the frontier. As de Tocqueville noted prophetically more than a century before the Cold War began, the US and Russia were both blessed with vast landmasses that begged pioneering, but while America would be developed by initiative from below, Russia's would be by decree from above.

And indeed, when America had entrepreneurs build new towns, highways, and factories from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Russia killed its peasantry and littered its hinterland with gulags.

In recent years, when a bankrupt Russia's vast frontier finally met private enterprise, America's frontier had long been established as the world's breadbasket and tool shop. That too hurts.

Finally there is France. Here, the great shame lies in the failure to lead the world. Having sought so much and accomplished so little in numerous misadventures from Gen. Kotuzov's Moscow to the FLN's Algeria, France's imperial experience has been a disastrous continuum of ill-fated conquests; the US, though fought a lot, did less conquering and more inspiring.

In 1940, Time magazine founder Henry Luce's essay "The American century" saw the New World coming to dominate the old. Subsequent decades have vindicated Luce, as history became rife with airplanes, satellites, spaceships, movies, jeans, automobiles, sneakers, PCs, fast food, pop, jazz, rock, and spectator sports that had "Made in USA" written all over them.

And that, apparently, hurts America's detractors most; so much, in fact, that if it were up to them ours would be declared the anti-American century.

What's most interesting about these three historic successes of the United States is their essential similarity. Immigration, wide economic development, and cultural hegemony have all been made possible by the fact that to be an American is to accept a set of universalist ideas--that Men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalianable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" and that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed"--that are accessible to anyone and therefore end up being widely dispersed both within our society and throughout the world. And what's peculiar about this, particularly for a nation that supposedly has no sense of its past, is that those ideas are the product of our Founding over two hundred years ago. On Booknotes tonight, Bernard Bailyn mentioned how unique the Federalist Papers are, not just because we still read them but because they've grown in importance the further we get from the time they were written. This is because we remain connected to our past and to the universal ideas of Westen Civilization in a way that Russia, Germany, and France no longer do. In their varying degrees of experimentation with Statism all have abandoned the faith that liberty conveys blessings, so it's no wonder that we find our interests diverging nor is their bitterness at us for keeping the faith and thereby reaping the blessings much of a surprise.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2003 9:09 AM