The Book Club

How Public Faith in Military Intervention Could Restore Itself

Mike,

You’d be better off just acknowledging the errors in your review—so we could move on. I made two very specific points. 1) That you dishonestly paraphrased a quote from my December 2004 essay, to make it seem that I was urging the Democratic Party to purge Iraq war opponents—when the actual quote (and the entire essay) says nothing of the sort. 2) That you claimed that my book, The Good Fight, does not “acknowledg[e] plainly” that Iraq contradicts the cold war liberal tradition—when it does exactly that.

In both cases, I cited chapter and verse. In response, you offer generalizations that don’t respond to my specific charges. And then you acknowledge that “the partial quote … made a syllogistic leap, perhaps.” And that “I thought—again a matter of interpretation—that you could have made the implications of your [Iraq] rethinking for the future much, much clearer.” With all due respect, Mike, this is spin, and it’s beneath you. Had your review encountered a good fact-check, you wouldn’t have made these claims—because they are clearly false. Your paraphrased quote was completely different from my actual one. And whether you “thought” I should have “made the implications” of my Iraq “rethinking for the future much, much clearer” is irrelevant—you accuse me of not plainly acknowledging something that I very plainly acknowledge. This would all hardly matter—except that you used these distortions as the basis for declaring you would not engage with the argument of my book.

Take it from me—someone who has spent the last few weeks acknowledging that I got a much bigger thing, the Iraq war, very wrong. Keep denying the obvious and you’re going to make yourself look worse and worse.

As to your closing point. You are right that today there is not the reservoir of public will for the kinds of acts—economic, political, or military—that the world may require of us in the years to come. But things change, often quickly. Only five years after Vietnam, America was electing Ronald Reagan, and, according to polls, supporting higher defense spending. It was among liberals and Democrats that the Vietnam hangover lasted longer—influencing the party’s mistaken opposition to the Gulf War. (I’m not saying that there weren’t important things to be learned from Vietnam, or that Reagan learned all the right lessons himself—just that Democrats drew overly broad lessons in the 1980s and early 1990s.) Right now, according to polls I cite in the book, it is liberals and Democrats—more than conservatives and Republicans—who are exhibiting isolationist tendencies. (Democrats are twice as likely to say America should mind its own business in the world, according to a Pew Center poll in October 2005, and fewer than 60 percent of Democrats still support the Afghan war, according to an MIT survey in November 2005.)

This may or may not endure. A Democratic president could change the mood in the party quite substantially, as Clinton did during the Balkan debates. But as I think you’ll agree, we need to do two things: First, learn from the Iraq disaster (and yes, those of us who supported it have the most learning to do—the book is an attempt to do that). And second, not acquiesce fatalistically to the current national exhaustion with the idea that American power—including military power—can improve the world. That’s what the Darfur effort is all about. Another Iraq would be an enormous tragedy. But so would abandoning America’s efforts to promote liberty and economic opportunity (and in the case of Darfur, sheer human survival) in the Islamic world. Americans do periodically grow disillusioned and embittered, often for understandable reasons. But the best leaders and thinkers—people like Harry Truman and Reinhold Niebuhr—are those who correctly harness America’s Wilsonian streak, crafting international efforts that appeal to our sense of national mission while also recognizing our practical and moral limits.

Right now, that means, above all, building and rebuilding the international institutions that can hold countries throughout the world (including the United States) to a higher standard on human rights, the environment, public health, and nonproliferation, in the recognition that in a globalized world, one country’s pathologies quickly spread beyond its borders. This is what Tony Blair keeps talking about. For that to happen, Democrats should take the initiative on pretty radical U.N. reform (moving beyond the organization’s current emphasis on near-absolute sovereignty), along with strengthening democratic alternatives like the Community of Democracies, and linking NATO to strengthened regional organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian States or the African Union. Such institution-building won’t bear fruit overnight, but over the long term it is the best—perhaps the only—way to rebuild the tools for sustained, legitimate American engagement with the world. That’s what the Roosevelt and Truman administrations did at the dawn of the Cold War. And it’s our challenge again today.

Best,
Peter