A good summation of the Dem's Iraqi Policy.
sentimental pacifism and multilateralism.
CAMPAIGN 2004
The Multilateral Mirage
Can Democrats embrace a sensible approach to foreign policy?
BY LEE HARRIS - WSJ.com
Mr. Harris is the author of "Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History," just out from Free Press.
The Democratic Party is in a bind. It needs to disagree with President Bush--that, after all, is the point of having two parties. It also needs to be more liberal than Mr. Bush, since that is the only way it can preserve its traditional ideological basis. But on the question of Iraq, the question arises: Is there really a liberal alternative to Mr. Bush's Iraq policy?
For the last several months the Democratic Party has tried to answer this question in the affirmative by employing two different rhetorical smokescreens: sentimental pacifism and multilateralism. Associated with the once hopeful candidacy of Howard Dean, the theme of sentimental pacifism is still on display in front yards across the country, in the form of those signs that tell us, "War is not the answer." But stripped of its rhetoric, what does this actually mean? That the Democratic Party is renouncing war as a matter of principle?
Of course not. The only people whose political views these signs represent is that small minority of principled pacifists for whom all organized forms of violence are anathema. But the Democratic Party cannot afford to become more liberal than President Bush if the cost of doing so is serious pacifism. And that leaves the alternative, the multilateral mirage: Yes, sometimes war is the answer, but only if the war that you have undertaken is multilateral.
This position, as espoused by John Kerry among others, holds that the problem with the war in Iraq was not the objective of the war, or even the war itself, but the way the decision to go to war was reached. It was not made multilaterally; and therefore it was not a war that the U.S. should have been engaged in.
Let's trim off the rhetoric and see what the word "multilateral" really means. Certainly it cannot mean merely having allies, since the U.S. had allies in its invasion of Iraq--and quite respectable ones, too, such as Britain and Spain. But if it means having enough allies to win the war, then clearly, since the Saddam regime is no more, it follows we had enough allies.
Multilateralism, as it is currently used by leading Democrats, means only one thing: action that is officially approved by the United Nations. But the moment this is grasped, the multilateral mirage vanishes. No Democratic candidate can tell the American people that he will only defend their national interests when the U.N. says it's OK for him to do it. That, like the pacifist option, is the path of political suicide.
There is no need for the Democrats to take this path. They could continue to disagree with Mr. Bush on Iraq and not terminate themselves, but only at a price: They would have to adopt a policy of neoisolationism, a position that is bound to be uncomfortably close to Pat Buchanan's, but which still offers a politically viable alternative to the policy of Mr. Bush.
Many Americans today wish the administration well in its idealistic efforts to bring democracy to Iraq, but remain skeptical of the political realities involved in such an undertaking. But such skepticism is not liberal, nor is it neoconservative; it is conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the word and based on a sober assessment of the difficulty of changing the deeply ingrained collective habits of strange peoples in strange lands.
If the Democratic Party wishes to articulate this conservative and skeptical doubt about the feasibility of extending liberalism to parts of the world that have no indigenous history of liberalism, then it would be serving a valuable purpose in our national dialogue. The Democratic Party would be then opposing the Bush administration on a principle that a large number of Americans can readily appreciate, even when they disagree with it.
Or the Democrats could always decide to stay liberal, and drop their opposition to President Bush's policy in Iraq, as Joe Lieberman has done. In addition, the Democrats might continue to wish that we had stayed out of Iraq, and yet still acknowledge that there is now only one realistic way forward to a more liberal world, and that is the way that America has taken.
Recall the case of William Jennings Bryan. Nominated three times as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, an extreme populist liberal, and yet an isolationist, Bryan resigned as Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state in the hope of keeping America out of the Great War, only to volunteer to fight the Germans as a private the moment Wilson declared a state of war to exist. Bryan saw what was at stake in the struggle, and he knew which side was the only side that he could possibly fight for--America's.
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