In Role Reversal, War Criticism Is Mostly From Right
Conservatives Find Fault With Bush for Not Going Far Enough, While Left Focuses on Home Front
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 26, 2001; Page A06
President Bush has called the battle against terrorism a war like no other, and the same could be said of domestic dissent. In this conflict, the right has vigorously challenged the administration's military policies while the left has been quiescent.
That could change in the weeks ahead as the debate moves from retaliation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden to more controversial questions of whether to carry the fight to Iraq and beyond. But up to now, the left has been satisfied to question Bush's moves to fight terrorism at home, leaving it to conservatives to question how the military campaign has been waged.
Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, said it is "astonishing how little antiwar agitation there has been on the left" in this country. Abroad, the left has pilloried Bush's policies, but the attacks of Sept. 11, which left more than 3,800 people dead, produced a consensus across the political spectrum here.
"It's hard to dissent from a policy of retaliation when you've obviously been attacked," Marshall said. "Typically the friction on the left has arisen when the U.S. has intervened in a foreign conflict. That's not the case here."
On newspaper op-ed pages and in the columns of opinion magazines, conservatives have challenged the administration over its initial bombing strategy, questioned the decision not to insert more troops on the ground and prodded Bush not to shrink from taking the war to Iraq in phase two. When Vice President Cheney recently rebuked the administration's critics, he was pointing to the right, not the left.
In contrast, there has been no antiwar movement of note. Campuses have not erupted with protests, and many on the left who have opposed U.S. intervention in the past have embraced military action against bin Laden and the Taliban. From organized labor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the military campaign has drawn support from the left.
"The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II," emeritus Princeton professor Richard A. Falk, long a dissenter against the use of U.S. military power in regional conflicts, wrote in a recent issue of the Nation magazine.
Bush has enjoyed this kind of support in part because he has embraced policies that progressives say are compatible with values they have long endorsed. Harold Meyerson, executive editor of the American Prospect, a left-of-center magazine, called the administration's war strategy "a case where a liberal value became one of the strategic guides to the conduct of the war."
That means a strategy designed to keep civilian casualties and other collateral damage to a minimum, that gave a high priority to humanitarian assistance for the people of Afghanistan and that played to feminists by focusing criticism on the Taliban's policy of oppressing women. "He has pursued a war that has been largely seen to be proportional," Meyerson said.
Potential critics on the left also have been encouraged by what they see as Bush's embrace of the cautionary advice of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who advocated diplomacy and coalition-building, over the more hawkish instincts of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and his supporters outside the administration.
"He went with the Powell position against the holy warriors," Robert Borosage of the liberal Campaign for America's Future said, referring to hardliners inside the administration and outside. "So a huge portion of the progressive side of politics supported that."
That is exactly what has rankled those on the right. "A lot of conservatives were worried in the first few weeks of the war that some of the pathologies that seemed to mark [former president Bill] Clinton's military interventions were resurfacing in this administration," said Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century.
Those fears led to critical columns in newspapers and to headlines in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine that read: "Fighting to Win" and "Getting Serious." All expressed fears that Bush was more concerned about keeping his disparate coalition pacified than about waging war vigorously and expansively.
Those criticisms reflect long-standingdivisions on the right that have been heightened since Sept. 11 and that are likely to intensify in the months ahead as the war against terrorism enters a post-Afghanistan phase. To some of Bush's most conservative critics, the issue is not just dislodging the Taliban and uprooting bin Laden's network, it is the shape of the world in the years ahead.
William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and co-author of a number of articles challenging the administration's war policies, said that, for many Americans, Sept. 11 represents "a challenge we need to beat back competently," but not much more than that.
"For us, more is at stake," he said. "If this war is fought right, the benefits will be huge, but if it's fought wrong, the costs will be huge. If you think what's at stake is the shape of the world order, if you think about threats of weapons of mass destruction in the future . . . then you're likely to be engaged in how this war ought to be fought."
The flash point in the debate remains Iraq and whether the administration decides that its war against terrorism requires a new effort to drive Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power and wipe out his capability to develop weapons of mass destruction.
"Iraq is not just a tactical issue of how we manage the situation," Kristol said. "Whether we take on Iraq has huge implications for the U.S. role in the world, and fundamentally, it's whether we're going to take it upon ourselves to shape a new world order."
In recent days, Bush's critics on the right have seen signs that the administration is swinging toward their view of how the war on terrorism should be fought. They cite remarks Bush made several weeks ago about weapons of mass destruction and recent comments from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other senior administration officials as evidence that Iraq may be the next target in the war.
Kristol summedup what he and others on the right have been advocating as the outlines of "an American liberal, imperial role" in the world. That is likely to provoke a huge debate and could prompt the first serious dissent from the left. Since Sept. 11, the left has chosen to embrace Bush's policies in Afghanistan while criticizing policies at home that they say will undermine civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. Bush has escaped criticism, but Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has not.
In part those on the left, particularly elected Democrats, have been wary of challenging a president whose approval ratings remain at 85 percent or higher, preferring to fight with Republicans over domestic issues such as aviation security and economic stimulus.
The Progressive Policy Institute's Marshall predicted that many on the left also will support Bush if he chooses to go after Hussein, as long as it is not done recklessly. So far, the only elected Democrat to advocate such action is Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the party's vice presidential nominee last year and a possible 2004 presidential candidate.
Borosage, however, said the left may be far more vocal in its criticism as the administration moves the war to its next phase. "Saddam Hussein is not exactly anyone's hero," Borosage said. "On the other hand, there will be enormous concern about turning this into a conflict of civilizations. There is a considerable part of liberal opinion that would see this as falling into bin Laden's trap."
Some progressives fear that Democrats are willing to cede the issue of national security policy to Bush and the Republicans and battle purely on domestic issues. But the next phase in the war against terrorism more likely will expose divisions on the left as much as the first phase has highlighted divisions on the right.
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