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Desertion In the Field: Twilight of the liberal hawks (Tim Cavanaugh, 11/01/04, Reason)

What unified the liberal hawks was that their support for the war was based unreservedly on what is popularly understood as the "neocon" vision, the prospect of exporting democracy to the Middle East through force of arms. According to the "forward strategy of freedom," a democratic Iraq with an emancipated citizenry would serve as an example and beacon to the Arab autocracies, empowering liberals in the region while undermining dictatorships; opening up avenues of freedom and self-expression for ordinary citizens in the Muslim world would in turn remove the impetus for terrorism. For liberals whose taste for progressive-minded interventionism had been whetted by the Clinton administration's operations in the Balkans and Haiti (and probably even more so by the counterexample of Clinton's failure to stop the massacre in Rwanda), the invasion of Iraq looked like a natural fit, even if it was advanced through a Defense Department with whom they had little stylistic or political affinity.

Thus, in late 2002 and early 2003, we found such luminaries as Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others arguing for the expenditure of American lives and treasure in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments. Ignatieff dismisses the humanitarian intervention as a "fantasy." Sullivan has in recent days seized on the nebulous circumstances surrounding the disappearance of explosives at Al Qaqaa as evidence that Bush failed to keep order in postwar Iraq. Jarvis tells Reason, "though I think the execution of the war itself was good—Rumsfeld is really smart—the aftermath has been really ****ed up." Friedman declares, "Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever." Zakaria calls the president "strangely out of touch," unaware that his "attitude" is responsible for the problems of postwar Iraq. Pollack condemns "the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction." For Kaplan, the only question is whether the Bush administration is "reckless or clueless." Berman is now relieved to recall that even while championing the invasion he was cautioning against the president's "rhetoric, ignorance, and Hobbesian brutishness," and declaring himself "'terrified' at the dangers [Bush] was courting." Even Hitchens, while standing by Bush's side (or is he?), criticized the administration's "near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq."

This is a neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: All the blame falls on the president, none on themselves. Bush's former supporters channel what is now the overwhelming conventional wisdom that the administration (in the person of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld) failed to provide a large enough force to run the country adequately. [...]

But the liberal hawks, by and large, did not emphasize (and in some cases did not even believe) the weapons of mass destruction argument. They supported the forward strategy of freedom, which had at its base the notion that postwar Iraq would be capable of self-sufficiency. If you took seriously the idea that the United States was liberating the people of Iraq, then the Rumsfeld doctrine of minimal force was the only one that made sense. If keeping Iraq on life support meant committing a vast occupying force indefinitely, then clearly Iraq wasn't a very good test case for the democratic experiment.

To support the forward strategy of freedom and condemn Rumsfeld's minimal use of force is to ignore that the two are related. More "boots on the ground" is not a recipe for success; it's an admission of failure, an acknowledgement that the Iraqis can't run their own country. It doesn't surprise me that the neocons' opponents believe (wrongly, in my view) that they want to establish a puppet government in Iraq. It does surprise me that so many of their supporters seem to believe the same thing.

And, in the event, most of the problems in Iraq have been a function not of too little force but of too little faith in the Iraqis to run the show. The wobblies are even wobbling over the wrong issue. Of course, it doesn't help that being of the Left they have a surpassing belief in the capacity of our government to do things well and a distrust of the Shi'a.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 1, 2004 11:24 PM