The truth is we should have examined our policies before the WTC episode.
We should have done a lot of things. We spend our time impeaching a President for being a libertine or lobbying for reparations for the great, great, great grandchildren of slaves--until something knocks us out of auto-pilot. Hopefully, we will make good use of this window of opportunity.
Here's an editorial from todays Post that might suit you better.
Practical Idealism
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, October 22, 2001; Page A19
Even before the terrorist attacks, Republicans tended to see the Clinton foreign policy as a series of fads -- democracy, the environment, AIDS, economic development, human rights, what have you. Since Sept. 11 the temptation to sneer has grown stronger. Now we know what foreign policy is about, and the answer isn't United Nations conferences on population trends, the sneering goes. The answer is defending Americans from terrorists.
Well, a funny thing is happening as we dig into this war. The "realist" foreign policy that many Republicans urge is looking increasingly threadbare. And the 1990s agenda is looking remarkably relevant.
Realists hold that foreign policy is about relations between nation states, not about the political, economic or human-rights conditions within particular countries. Meddling in other nations' internal affairs only invites conflict, the realists argue, and conflict will reverse the humanitarian advance that the meddlers care about. In a Foreign Affairs article last year, future national security adviser Condoleezza Rice urged "a focus on power relationships and great-power politics," implicitly criticizing the Democrats for their preoccupation with soft transnational issues.
How useful is Rice's recommended focus now? The United States is at war not with a great power but with a transnational network. It is bombing a country whose anarchic non-statehood is precisely what threatens our interests. And although realists say the world is driven by national interests rather than by ideals, the administration is proclaiming American ideals for all to hear -- and is fighting a propaganda war against al-Jazeera television, a transnational satellite network.
Moreover, the internal conditions of a string of Muslim states suddenly matter hugely. To operate in Afghanistan, we need Pakistan's help. But we can count on that only for as long as Pakistan's government contains the anti-American demonstrations in its cities. To beat the terrorists, likewise, we need the cooperation of countries such as Saudi Arabia that finance them. But Saudi Arabia's fragile regime also is constrained by anti-American domestic sentiment. Again, to win the propaganda war we need Middle Eastern leaders such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak to speak out on our side. But Mubarak faces domestic constraints also.
The more you think about this conflict, the more you spill beyond the realists' conception of what foreign policy ought to be about. To succeed in the propaganda war, for example, it is not enough to say you are fighting terrorists and not Muslims, and it is not enough to help Afghans with food packages. To succeed in winning hearts and minds, you also need to rein in human-rights abuses by your new allies, such as Uzbekistan's Soviet-style dictatorship. Nobody's going to believe that you respect Muslims if your partners are seizing people with long beards and torturing them.
And what about those ambivalent Islamic allies, constrained by domestic anti-American opinion? To get at that problem you'll need the full Clintonite arsenal, from economic development to democratization. The "Arab Street" is angry and anti-American because it is full of young people who can't get good jobs and aren't allowed to express their discontent freely -- unless they direct it at the United States or Israel.
Even bits of the 1990s agenda that look least relevant right now may soon stage a comeback. The 1994 U.N. population conference may seem quaint in the middle of this war. But it is not a coincidence that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- where fundamentalist anti-Americanism has advanced quickly at the grass roots -- both experienced African-style population growth of 2.5 percent a year or more during the past decade, much higher than neighbors such as Iran or India.
Or consider the environment and AIDS, two other 1990s themes. Greens already are pointing out that if we were less dependent on oil, we might feel freer to put pressure on the Saudis to democratize instead of backing up a corrupt regime that is hated by its people. AIDS activists are pointing out that if we don't battle the plague, there will be more Afghan-style anarcho-states for terrorists to hide in. Besides, it's tough to present the United States as a land of brave idealists if we are indifferent to a scourge that has killed 22 million and counting.
Yes, democratization and economic development are a grind, and progress won't magically dissolve anti-Americanism. But the war on terrorism needs to make space for these issues, because there are no better long-term options.
For most of the Cold War, this was understood: The United States backed the development policies of the World Bank, it pushed for democratization in such places as South Korea and the Philippines, and the State Department established its Office of Humanitarian Affairs in 1975, when arch-realist Henry Kissinger presided over it. If the Communist threat did not lead us to abandon a broad conception of foreign policy, surely the terrorist threat need not induce a fit of monomania.
The writer is a member of the editorial page staff.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
