NO, MR. WALZER, THERE CAN'T BE A DECENT LEFT:

Cold Comfort: Liberalism's hawkish past is less useful as a guide to confronting future threats than Peter Beinart would like to believe. (Fred Kaplan, July/August 2006, Washington Monthly)

There is a 400-pound gorilla tearing at the margins of this book, and that is the war in Iraq. Beinart's December '04 New Republic essay was targeted at the Democratic opponents of that war. (Opponents of the Afghanistan invasion, whom the article also--more properly--trounced, comprised a minority of a minority, hardly worth such heavy ammunition.) Beinart was one of the "liberal hawks" who, even at that late date, still supported the war. In the introduction to his book, he now admits that he was wrong: "I was too quick to give up on containment... I overestimated America's legitimacy." He adds, "It is a grim irony that this book's central argument"--the continuing relevance of cold war liberalism as a vision of American self-confidence, containment, restraint, and legitimacy--"is one I myself ignored when it was needed most."

It is a graceful and gracious retraction, but it also succinctly summarizes the book's other main conceptual flaw: its romanticizing of the Cold War. Beinart writes as if "cold war liberalism" were some coherent doctrine that Democratic presidents, especially Truman and (in his finest hours) Kennedy, adopted to the letter. His intellectual heroes are George Kennan, the statesman who coined the policy of containment, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian who reconciled moral principles with the hard-headed interests of realpolitik. Both are worthy heroes. Niebuhr especially deserves a reassessment these days. Believing in the Christian tenet that all men are sinners, Niebuhr reasoned that all nations are capable of evil, too. America has a superior political system, he allowed, in that it keeps evil at bay through checks and balances. But that only means it must do the same in its foreign policy--by accepting some restraints on its power: not to the point of refraining from warfare (Niebuhr was no pacifist), but stringently guarding against the delusion that America's intentions are inherently pure and that its leaders can therefore do as they please without seeking consent from the community of nations.

Using Niebuhr as a template, Beinart pinpoints what's so basically dangerous about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neocons (all of them, as he cogently puts it, the "intellectual heirs" of John Foster Dulles and his "rollback" doctrine). It's precisely their "complacent confidence in American virtue," which not only blinds them to the world's skepticism but keeps them from seeing any need to prove the skeptics wrong. By contrast, in the liberal view, as Beinart paints it, "America's challenge lies not in recognizing our moral superiority but in demonstrating it... [N]ational greatness is not inherited and it is not declared; it is earned."

Not only is it obscene to imply that Reinhold Niebuhr would have counseled leaving Saddam Hussein in power because France, Russia and Germany wanted to, but as worthy as the Reverend Mr. Neibuhr was, nevermind when he was writing in the forties and fifties, even when he died, in 1971, the dehumanizing oppression of the Soviet Union and its satellites had another twenty years to run. The Cold War was a moral obscenity that his generation has to answer for and from which Europe will never recover. For the Decent Left to choose this sort of accommodation with evil as their template for the War on Terror would be a tragedy.

At the heart of the notion of containing evil is the cynical decision to let the monsters do whatever they want within their own borders so long as they don't cross ours and, by promising not to intervene in their affairs, it enables these despots. In doing so we do reduce ourselves to their moral level. Demonstrating moral superiority requires ending their immoral rule, even if it means getting our hands a bit dirty. I

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2006 6:38 PM