>>and not let it slide under the mat, like some of our posters seem to prefer.
Unnecessary roughness, 15 yard penalty...
Let's not go there, LB.<<
LindyBill is a Jacksonian. You, BTW, seem to be a Wilsonian.
>>Did reactions to September 11 divide into the four categories I had written about?
I would have to say at this point that they did. The immense outpouring of Jacksonian rage and determination made a military response inevitable. The experience of national unity, of coming together with a common purpose and determination, reminded many people of the response to Pearl Harbor. Furthermore, a significant set of public opinion on the war followed the outlines of Jacksonian views on the use of force against cowardly treacherous enemies. All this confirms the book's view that there is a powerful set of American cultural attitudes about war that takes over in times of crisis.
The anti-war sentiment that emerged, as well as some of the 'yes-but' limited support for the war
(yes, but don't inflict civilian casualties; yes, but don't infringe on civil liberties at home) followed
classically Jeffersonian ideas. The idea that the September attacks were 'blowback'—the
chickens of our bad foreign policy coming home to roost—is deeply rooted in the Jeffersonian
imagination. We were too deeply involved in the Middle East, too supportive of Israel, too closely
linked to Arab dictatorships. We had trained these 'holy warriors' in our excessively active efforts
to overthrow the Soviet Union. We had made ourselves a target. The best way forward was not
to increase our involvement with yet more squirrelly regimes in this part of the world (Pakistan, the
Central Asian republics, but to work toward reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and
reduce our involvement in Middle Eastern politics. Meanwhile, Jeffersonians did all they could to
oppose curbs on civil liberties proposed by the Bush Administration.
Wilsonians generally have supported the war, but want a war to defend international law rather than a war of vengeance. Wilsonians have called for Osama Bin Laden to be tried by an international tribunal rather than by an American court. They strongly oppose the extension of the war to Iraq—at least without a mandate from the U.N. Security Council. Wilsonians hailed what they saw as the Bush Administration's foxhole conversion to the gospel of multilateralism early in the war, as Congress released money to pay U.S. dues to the United Nations and the Administration worked overtime to create an international coalition against al Qaeda. On the other hand, Wilsonians remain quietly appalled by much of the Bush Administration's record: abandoning the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, dropping out of the Kyoto Protocol process, walking away from the landmine treaty and the international criminal court. Wilsonian hopes that the war would lead the Bush Administration to support these
and other initiatives have so far been disappointed; from the Wilsonian point of view the one ray of light has been Laura Bush's conversion to women's rights as a key goal of American foreign policy.
The real winners so far have been the Hamiltonians. From the beginning, the Bush Administration has seen the need for a more sophisticated and nuanced war strategy than some Jacksonians might have wanted. We need an international coalition—to keep the war from turning into a holy war between Islam and the West, to ensure the widest possible cooperation on intelligence sharing and on stopping the clandestine flows of funds to terrorist groups, and to take other steps to meet basic American security goals. This is internationalism, but it isn't Wilsonianism. It is a conservative multilateralism aimed at cooperating with other countries to achieve traditionally understood national interests rather than a liberal multilateralism aimed at changing the nature of the international system. <<
theatlantic.com |
