America is split again over the war on terror
Fred Hiatt The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
iht.com
WASHINGTON One of America's soothing foreign
policy fictions of the 1990s was that we'd all been
on the same side during the Cold War. Liberals
and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, all
shared a common enemy, a common goal and
pretty much a common idea of how to reach that
goal.
This distortion of history was reassuring to the
Clinton administration, which, when confronted
with any perplexing foreign policy challenge
(Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo), could remark on how
much more complicated the world had become in
the post-Cold War era. As communism was
discredited throughout the world, it also became
convenient for many Americans to gloss over how
contentious anti-communism had been. In fact,
almost every tenet and tactic of Cold War policy
was divisive. Some Americans didn't doubt that an
evil communist ideology wanted to enslave the
world, while others found more moral equivalence
on both sides; some saw anticommunism as the
noblest purpose, while others viewed it as a
pretext to empower the military-industrial
complex and squelch civil liberties; America's
foreign entanglements were for some a fight for
freedom, for others a defense of imperialism.
Now those glossed-over divisions are reemerging,
in parallel to, and as a consequence of, the
drawing of battle lines with regard to President
George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
The post-Sept. 11 unanimity also is eroding, with
both liberals and conservatives challenging what
they see as Bush's vision of "permanent war."
Small-government conservatives worry about the
reemergence of a vast national security
establishment; liberals see a plot to maintain
presidential popularity and thwart progressive
initiatives. And as they begin to grope for a way to
oppose the administration without seeming
unpatriotic, they are echoing, sometimes
explicitly, their Cold War divisions. In the liberal
American Prospect, for example, Paul Starr sees
the war on terrorism as providing "the functional
equivalent of the Cold War" to pave the way for
"tax cuts, huge increases in military expenditures,
deficits and the consequent exclusion of all the
initiatives that liberals might offer." Lewis Lapham
in Harper's Magazine says the significance of
Sept. 11 is being exaggerated in order,
apparently, to continue the Cold War task "of
replacing the antiquated American republic,
modest in ambition and democratic in spirit, with
the glory of a nation-state increasingly grand in
scale and luxurious in its taste for hegemony."
In The New York Times a few weeks ago, an
analysis in the Week in Review reported that
"some world leaders worried publicly that the war
on terrorism was starting to look suspiciously like
the last great American campaign - against
communism." Why is that a cause for worry?
Because of America's tendency to carve the world
into good and bad, the Times said: "Like the
terrorists today . . . Communists were often
conceived as moral monsters. . . . " In the article,
the possibility that they were moral monsters is
not really entertained. In one respect,
acknowledgment of Cold War disagreements is
encouraging, since it's hard to learn from history,
at least on a political or popular level, as long as
everyone is misremembering it. Learning from
that period would seem especially important now,
since so many of the fundamental Cold War
disagreements resonate as the nature of the war
on terrorism is debated.
Is it (was it) a fight against an ideology
(communism, Islamic fundamentalism) or against
nationalist movements making use of that
ideology? To what extent does (did) the enemy
have an address (the Politburo in Moscow, Osama
bin Laden's cave) and to what extent is it diffused
and self-replicating? Is homeland defense
(color-coded alerts) as laughable as civil defense
(ducking beneath desks in atomic-bomb drills), or
is (was) the nation right to defend against threats
at home?
Bigger Pentagon budgets, alliances with
human-rights-abusing dictators overseas, military
interventions in small Third World countries -
these were the source of bitter political
confrontation during the Cold War, and they are
reappearing as issues now. Of course, the issues
will play out differently, and not all the answers
will be the same in new circumstances; but on one
level it should be reassuring to recall that none of
this was, in fact, easy to figure out back then. And
no surprise: It involves fundamental questions of
America's nature and its proper role in the world.
What's not so clear, as the old debate reemerges,
is how many lessons have been learned. In the
early going, the administration's reluctance to
share information, its ambivalence toward civil
liberties and its embrace of authoritarian but
useful regimes abroad all raise questions.Among
critics on the left, the assumption that rebuilding
the military and sending troops abroad is nothing
but a political ploy or an imperialist reflex
similarly raises questions. Americans have the
benefit now of full knowledge of the Soviet gulag,
China's man-made starvations, Vietnam's
reeducation camps - they know that there were
moral monsters among their adversaries. To act as
though that was never true, and to assume
automatically that the threat again is overblown,
represents a different kind of failure to learn from
history.
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