Huge "New York Times Magazine" article by Traub.
January 4, 2004
The Things They Carry
By JAMES TRAUB
I.
A few weeks ago, I asked Howard Dean how, given his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, he felt he could overcome the Democrats' reputation as the antiwar party. ''I think you're still in the old paradigm, which says that they're the party of strength and we're the party of weakness,'' Dean admonished me as I sat across from him on his campaign plane. The chaos in Iraq, he said, had upended the old stereotypes. In John F. Kennedy's day, Dean pointed out, the Democrats enjoyed the reputation as the party of resolution. ''I think this may be the year to regain it, oddly enough,'' Dean said. ''Oddly enough'' is right. It seems awfully unlikely that in the first presidential election since 9/11, against a president who has spent most of his administration carefully cultivating and reinforcing his role as commander in chief, the Democrats can regain the status as the party of national security, which they lost during the Vietnam War. But that is precisely what party strategists were hoping through the fall as American troops got caught in the mayhem of Iraq and the nation's standing in the world plummeted lower and lower. And they had reason to think so. A poll conducted in November by the nonpartisan PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 42 percent of Americans said that the president's handling of Iraq decreased the likelihood of voting for him, versus 35 percent who said it had increased the likelihood. Another poll taken around the same time found that a majority of respondents believed that President Bush is ''too quick to use our military abroad'' and that he practices a ''go-it-alone foreign policy that hurts our relations with allies.'' Earlier, Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and policy organization headed by the consultants James Carville and Robert Shrum and the pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, published a study with the following conclusion: ''When Democrats put out a clear message on national security, it now plays Bush's post-9/11, post-Iraq message to a draw.''
It's not just the war in Iraq that prompted these hopes of realignment; it's the Bush administration's penchant for bellicosity, its barely concealed contempt for the United Nations and for many of America's traditional allies, its apparent confusion about how to deal with North Korea. Even some traditional internationalist Republicans believed that the Bush administration had abandoned many of the central tenets of the last several generations of national security policy while squandering much of the global good will that came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And for the chief presidential candidates, or at least for Dr. Dean, for Gen. Wesley Clark and, intermittently, Senator John Kerry, the war in Iraq became the central metaphor for the larger failure of the Bush administration to make Americans feel safe in a deeply unsafe world -- the thin edge of the wedge that would dislodge ''the old paradigm.''
When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ''I'm not betting on it, and I'm hoping against it, but there's no indication that I should be expecting anything else.'' What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein's capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein's apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats -- and a considerable number of freshly polled voters -- that the party hadn't disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded.
II.
n October, the Center for American Progress, a new liberal policy institute, held a two-day conference in Washington designed to lay out the foundations of an alternative, and politically viable, national security policy. The panels at the symposium (which was also sponsored by the Century Foundation and The American Prospect magazine) featured, in the main, nonideological figures offering sober and pragmatic counsel: reserve the right to act pre-emptively but don't make a doctrine of it; do peacekeeping right; focus on ''failed'' states like Afghanistan and Sudan; devise carrots as well as sticks to deal with state sponsors of terrorism; forge a global strategy to deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
For the keynote speaker, the sponsors invited not a conventional liberal but Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's hawkish national security adviser, a fervently anti-Soviet Polish emigre reviled during the cold war by the Democratic Party's left wing. I expected Brzezinski to be at least mildly sympathetic to the Bush administration. I was wrong. ''American power worldwide is at its historic zenith,'' he told his audience, which consisted largely of technocrats and midlevel Clinton administration officials. And yet, he noted: ''American global political standing is at its nadir. Why?'' First, Brzezinski said, because of the ''paranoiac view of the world'' summed up in the expression -- a paraphrase of President Bush -- ''He who is not with us is against us.'' Second, because of ''a fear'' -- of terrorism -- ''that periodically verges on panic'' and is stoked by ''extremist demagogy.'' To Brzezinski, the Bush administration's unilateralism, and its militarism, constituted a radical break with a consensus that stretched across several generations and presumably included not only cold warriors like himself but also the liberals he once opposed, like Cyrus Vance, Carter's secretary of state.
More striking still was the closing speech delivered by Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who is often spoken of in Washington as a probable presidential candidate in 2008. Hagel sounded a decorous, Midwestern version of Brzezinski's rather frantic alarums. ''Crisis-driven coalitions of the willing by themselves are not the building blocks for a stable world,'' he said. And, ''Iraq alone cannot define our relationships.'' And even, ''Other countries have their own interests, and those interests need to be acknowledged and heard.'' Presumably that included France. Hagel also observed that ''the American image in the world is in need of immediate and long-term repair'' and suggested such instruments of ''soft power'' as educational and professional exchange programs, as well as increased language training for American students.
There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration's claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right -- but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.
III.
rzezinski's question -- Why is so much of the world against us? -- is, in fact, the starting point for the Democratic critique of the Bush administration. The sheer velocity of the change from worldwide sympathy to worldwide antipathy is almost incredible, and while much of the new anger comes from the very nature of our superpower status, the conduct of the Bush administration has plainly had a lot to do with it as well. In an article in Newsweek on the eve of the war in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria, that magazine's foreign-policy analyst, pointed out that some nations offered America only quiet support on Iraq ''not because they fear Saddam Hussein but because they fear their own people.'' The Bush administration had asked a very great deal and offered less than nothing. Zakaria noted that ''with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.'' And of course the United States is now paying a price for that in Iraq, where it cannot find either enough foreign troops or funds to supplement its own.
Conservatives have a longstanding answer to the argument for multilateralism. As Condoleezza Rice, now Bush's national security adviser, wrote in a much discussed essay in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 campaign, ''The belief that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power'' proceeds from a deep discomfort with the fact of America's power. This discomfort is, in turn, the residuum of Vietnam. There's some truth to that claim. One Democratic policy figure I spoke to said, ''If you listen to the Democrats in Iowa, you sometimes get the impression that the U.N. is going to save us from the situation.'' And yet, at least when they're not preaching to the Iowan choir, Democrats generally use hardheaded, looking-out-for-No.-1 language that Rice herself would have trouble taking exception to. They forswear ''mushy multilateralism,'' in John Kerry's phrase, for what Senator Joe Lieberman calls ''muscular multilateralism'' -- multilateralism not as a source of legitimacy but as an instrument to advance our own interests.
The consequences of unilateralism in Iraq dominate the debate. Yet if you talk to Democratic policy experts, Iraq rarely appears as the country's top national security priority. In ''An American Security Policy,'' a study ordered by Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, and written by a group that included top former Clinton aides like William Perry, the former defense secretary; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, Iraq appears as only the fourth of six major areas of concern. The first is ''The Loose Nukes Crisis in North Korea,'' and the second is the overall problem of weapons of mass destruction in Russia, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere.
As Graham Allison, an expert in nonproliferation issues at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, says: ''Iraq was a Level 2 issue. The Level 1 issue is that a terrorist could detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City instead of flying two planes into the World Trade Center.'' Allison considers this eventuality ''more likely than not.'' He proposes a coalition of nuclear powers designed to ensure that all nuclear weapons, and all fissile material, are strictly controlled -- multilateralism at its most muscular. He says he believes that even countries like Iran (though not, perhaps, North Korea) could be persuaded to join. ''But you have to choose your priorities,'' he adds. ''You have to be willing to drop regime change in order to pursue something more important.''
Clearly, the policy makers in the administration do not agree that regime change and fighting proliferation are unrelated, and in recent weeks they have produced what they maintain is proof of their belief: Libya's agreement to abandon its unconventional weapons programs for fear (the administration says) of being the next Iraq. At the same time, the administration has starved the budget for nonproliferation measures. After first trying to zero-out the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides money to help the Russians keep their thousands of nuclear weapons secure, the administration ultimately agreed to keep financing steady at $451 million, or one-tenth the annual cost of the national missile-defense program.
All the major candidates continue to press the loose-nukes issue as an opportunity to demonstrate that the old distinction between hawk and dove is an artifact of another era. In a major foreign-policy address delivered last month, Dean accused the administration of being ''penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to addressing the weapons-proliferation threat'' and proposed a tripling of spending in the area -- an idea lifted from the hawkish ''American Security Policy'' document -- with an equal amount to come from America's allies.
The underlying critique offered by Democratic policy experts is that the Bush administration, for all its bluster about how 9/11 ''changed everything,'' has in fact not adapted to the transformed world into which it has been catapulted and is still chasing after the bad guys of an earlier era. The administration understands war, but not the new kind of multifaceted, globalized war that must be fought against a stateless entity. As Ashton B. Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, puts it, ''We've done one thing in one place'' -- or two, counting Afghanistan. What about the other things in the other places? What about diplomacy, for example? Do we have some means beyond threats of military action to induce Iran and Syria to stop sponsoring terrorists? Do we have some means of persuading the European allies to toughen judicial processes so that terrorism suspects can't walk away -- a United Nations treaty, for example?
It may very well be true, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying, that ''weakness is provocative,'' but so is belligerence. The administration's Hobbesian worldview is well suited to the task of fighting enemies, but not to the task of winning over the far greater number of skeptics and fence-sitters. The State Department asked a nonpartisan group to study American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world; the report, issued in October, concluded that ''a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety.'' These were weapons we wielded boldly during the cold war; we allowed them to lapse in the 90's, when the only instrument that seemed to matter was the marketplace. The study found that the State Department has all of 54 genuine Arabic speakers, that outreach efforts rarely reach beyond capitals, that the American-studies centers that were once ubiquitous around the globe scarcely exist in the Arab and Muslim world.
The exact same case may be made in the matter of foreign aid, which has also dwindled away since the 60's. Not only does the United States spend far too little; the funds are not directed to the areas Americans are most worried about. The administration's Millennium Challenge Account program, which offers additional aid to democratizing countries, has been widely praised, but Robert Orr, another Clinton administration official, who now makes his home at the Kennedy School, says, ''The Millennium Challenge grant is only for high-end countries, none of which are involved with terrorism.'' What are we offering to countries like Pakistan or even Somalia? It turns out that we have allowed our aid capacity to shrink as drastically as our public diplomacy mechanisms have. ''We only have 2,000 people left with A.I.D.,'' Orr says, referring to the Agency for International Development. ''That's why we have to subcontract everything to the World Bank and the I.M.F. But they don't share our priorities about terrorism; we can't get them to invest in Afghanistan or Pakistan.''
Toward the end of our conversation, Dean said to me: ''The line of attack is not Iraq, though there'll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, 'What have you done to make us feel safer?' I'm going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,'' whom Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ''Our model is to get around the president's right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.''
IV.
hen the Democratic candidates mention John Kennedy -- and they do so as often as possible -- they are not trying to evoke an image of youth and vigor, or even of commitment to social justice, as Bill Clinton was. No, they are trying to remind listeners of the last time the Democrats were considered the party of national security. In a major foreign-policy address, John Kerry summoned up the ghosts not only of Kennedy but of Truman and F.D.R. as leaders who ''understood that to make the world safe for democracy and individual liberty, we needed to build international institutions dedicated to establishing the rule of law over the law of the jungle.'' True enough, but the party's line of descent from those mid-20th-century heroes was shattered 35 years ago, and the question of patrimony remains bitterly contested.
It is useful, in this regard, to consider the career of Henry M. Jackson, the last of the so-called cold-war liberals. Jackson was a senator from Washington, a contemporary of Kennedy who shared Kennedy's liberalism but also his hard-line views on the Soviet Union. The Democrats got clobbered in the 1956 election, when their presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, who represented the liberal wing of the party, proposed ending the draft and unilaterally halting tests on the hydrogen bomb. Kennedy, Jackson and others began to chart a new direction right away by suggesting -- speciously, as it turned out -- that President Eisenhower had allowed a ''missile gap'' to open between American and Soviet forces. (Dean presumably hopes to emulate Kennedy's political success rather than his commitment to the truth.) There was nothing paradoxical about this Democratic stridency: one hallmark of the cold-war liberals was a chafing impatience toward the principle of ''containing,'' rather than challenging, the Russians. When Kennedy became president, he built up the stocks of Polaris subs and Minutemen missiles. (''Dr. Strangelove'' was released in 1964.)
After Kennedy's death, Jackson continued to carry the mantle of cold-war liberalism. He compared early protesters against the Vietnam War with Hitler's appeasers, and he championed virtually every new weapons system that came along. By 1968, however, when the Tet offensive began moving the Democratic Party sharply to the left on issues of war and peace, Jackson was increasingly isolated. In 1969, he led the charge for President Nixon's antiballistic missile. Virtually all Northern Democrats opposed the weapons system, which was given Congressional approval thanks to a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. The debate, as one of Jackson's biographers, Robert Gordon Kaufman, notes, ''symbolized the dramatic transformation since 1960 in the outlook of the Democratic Party on foreign policy and national defense.'' Liberal Democrats ''now considered that the prime danger to U.S. national security was the arrogance of American power rather than the menace of Soviet Communism.''
The Vietnam War spelled the end of cold-war liberalism. Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972 but lost to George McGovern, the leader of the peace wing, who had opposed almost all the weapons systems that Jackson supported. The battle inside the party continued with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, who divided his foreign-policy team between the dovish Vance and the hawkish Brzezinski; the contest reached its theatrical climax when Carter nominated Paul Warnke, a former McGovern adviser, as chief negotiator on the 1979 SALT II arms talks. Warnke had stated that he would be willing to make unilateral cuts to the American nuclear arsenal. Jackson, who opposed the negotiations altogether, used Senate hearings to depict the nominee as an enemy of military prepared-ness. He brought in witnesses from the Committee on the Present Danger, an assemblage of Democratic hawks, many of whom would soon be known as ''neoconservatives.'' Warnke was confirmed, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year derailed the arms talks and helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan years institutionalized the Republican advantage on national security issues. Reagan adopted a policy of saber-rattling toward the Soviets unheard of since the Kennedy administration. Many of the Democratic neocons defected to Reagan, though Jackson remained a Democrat, and a cold-war liberal, to the last. (He died in 1983.) The rest of the party opposed Reagan's verbal posturing, his ''anti-Communist'' proxy fights in places like Grenada and El Salvador and the enormous increases in defense spending that, combined with tax cuts, were producing enormous deficits. Democrats depicted the MX missile and then Star Wars as symbols of an unhinged determination to counter an increasingly feeble Soviet threat.
It remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact, spend the Soviets into the ground. Nevertheless, the cold war ended on the Republicans' watch, and so Reagan's unyielding stance was given much of the credit for bringing it to a close. And while the G.O.P. emerged from that era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of fecklessness -- a status brought home in the most mortifying possible manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
V.
The habits of thought shaped by the cold war appeared to become irrelevant almost as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. United States security was no longer threatened by a single foe apparently bent on countering America's every move; for a while it seemed that U.S. security was no longer threatened at all. Americans learned soon enough that the world would not permit this peaceful, mercantilist fantasy, but the great questions of war and peace that did arise revolved around humanitarian crises -- in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere -- rather than strategic ones. The burning issue of the day was summed up in the title of an article by Richard Haass, then a scholar at the Brookings Institution: ''What to Do With American Primacy.'' How, that is, was America to deploy its extraordinary power? How were we to adjudicate between the competing claims of ''interests'' and ''values''? Do we intervene to prevent genocide? What about subgenocidal violence? And if we intervene, do we operate through the U.N. Security Council or through a ''posse'' of our own devising?
The words ''dove'' and ''hawk'' took on entirely different meanings in the 90's, for it was the hardheaded realists, many on the right, who wanted to limit the use of force to the protection of key national interests and the morally driven idealists, many of them liberals, who favored intervention. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who remained chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first eight months of the Clinton administration, describes in his memoirs a briefing in which Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations and pushing for an American role in the wars inflaming the former Yugoslavia, burst out, ''What are you saving this superb military for if we can't use it?'' (Powell writes that he almost had an ''aneurysm.'') Albright cites the same story in her own memoirs to make a very different point, for she was a ''hawk'' on the Balkans, a liberal interventionist fighting what had become the institutional reticence of the military. During the 2000 campaign, Bush's foreign-policy advisers were much given to ridiculing Albright's description of America as ''the indispensable nation,'' and it was her brand of moral activism that Bush vowed to curtail.
End of part one. |
