The Things That They Carry - Part Two
The attacks of 9/11 ended the brief post-cold-war interval and recreated elements of both the psychological and the strategic environment of the cold-war 1960's. Once again, it was we who were targeted; once again, we would be engaged on many fronts against an ideologically committed foe. And Americans probably feel more vulnerable today than they have at any time since the depths of the cold war. President Clinton once observed that at such moments, Americans prefer a message that is ''strong and wrong'' to one that is ''weak and right.'' But Clinton, who inoculated the Democrats against attacks on so many domestic issues, never had the opportunity, or perhaps never saw the need, to do so in terms of national security. The terrorist attacks made the moral quandaries of the 90's look like luxuries and restored the old party stereotypes with a vengeance. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans enjoyed an astounding 40-point advantage on the question of which party was best at ''keeping America strong''; the election was understood as a referendum on national security policy, and the G.O.P. swept the board.
Democratic strategists initially expected to concede the issue of national security in 2004. Howard Dean said that he planned to conduct his campaign on ''balancing the budget and having a health insurance program for everybody.'' Other candidates, like Representative Richard Gephardt, barely mentioned foreign policy at all. But when Bush tried and failed to get a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, decisively alienating almost all of our European allies in the process, foreign policy was back in play. Candidates and their chief aides began beating a path to the well-padded refuges of Clinton administration officials -- the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School. ''Everyone talks to Sandy Berger,'' Robert Orr says. ''But now they're calling the second-tier people like me.''
When Bush submitted a resolution to Congress authorizing his war aims in the fall of 2002, he posed the first litmus test on the use of force in the age of terror. (The war in Afghanistan had enjoyed near-universal support.) Whether out of conviction or a fear of failing that test, many leading Clinton administration officials, including some who considered Iraq a Level 2 issue, came out in favor of the war. And so, despite their misgivings, did Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Senator John Edwards. But Dean, out on the hustings, discovered that the war was extremely unpopular among many Democrats. Back in the fall, he supported a slightly more restrictive form of the resolution that ultimately passed Congress; now, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, he uncorked an applause line that reshaped the campaign: ''What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq.''
Dean had happened upon a very large gulf between the Democrats in Washington and many of the party's most passionately engaged members. He was already becoming the tribune of the virulently anti-Bush wing of the party on domestic policy, and now he plumbed equal depths on the question of the use of force. ''Dean made Iraq a political manhood test,'' laments Will Marshall, a well-known Democratic centrist and head of the Progressive Policy Institute. ''His conflation of anti-Bush sentiment and antiwar sentiment ratcheted the debate toward what has at least echoes of the old antiwar stance.'' By the time President Bush submitted his request for an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan in September, the politics of the war inside the party had shifted drastically. Conventional wisdom had it that no candidate seen as pro-war could get a foothold among the highly liberal primary voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, even though polls found that Democrats in both states preferred a candidate who had approved of the war but criticized its conduct. Kerry and Edwards voted against the appropriation, Gephardt and Lieberman for it. Lieberman found that he was encountering such hostile audiences in Iowa that he decided not to contest the caucuses there.
The litmus test for nomination, it seemed, was incompatible with the litmus test for election -- a predicament the Democrats knew all too well. And the candidates who tried to split the difference only confirmed the impression that the party was willing to play politics with national security. Democratic strategists began to use the expression ''heading over a cliff.'' And some of them began to cast about for a savior.
VI.
The opening speaker at the Center for American Progress's foreign-policy symposium was Gen. Wesley Clark, who had been invited long before he declared himself a candidate for president. Clark was speaking from New Hampshire, and he appeared on two giant screens. His hollow cheeks, his banked intensity, his palpable sense of solemnity and the sheer immensity of his image gave an air of almost desperate urgency to his words. He spoke angrily of the way Bush had destroyed the international relationships and undermined the institutions that previous presidents nurtured and that he himself, as NATO commander during the war in Kosovo, used as instruments to forge a sense of common purpose. The war in Iraq, he said, was a mistake of historic proportions -- ''a disastrous turn of events in our history.'' And then, his mien grave and gaunt, Clark said something that produced an audible murmur in the room: ''There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9/11. You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers.''
This was not the Wesley Clark who struck such a spark of hope from both senior Democrats and ordinary voters when he joined the race only a month before. Theodore Sorenson, the Kennedy speechwriter, had introduced Clark by saying, ''He does not have to dress up as a flyboy to be called commander in chief.'' Clark was supposed to be the irrefutable answer to all those Rocky the Flying Squirrel jokes. He had fought bravely in Vietnam, as John Kerry had, but rather than going on to oppose the war, he had dedicated his life to the military, and he had capped his career by fighting and winning a war that exemplified the virtues of multilateralism. Clark's resume made him the object of wildly varying strands of political enthusiasm. The filmmaker Michael Moore, a self-proclaimed Dennis Kucinich Democrat, wrote an open letter in September urging Clark to run. ''The general versus the Texas Air National Guard deserter!'' Moore fantasized. ''I want to see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.'' And that soldier's soldier Col. David Hackworth -- Hack to Larry King and the CNN audience -- described Clark on his Web site as a fearless warrior and a brilliant thinker.
And yet here was the former Supreme Allied Commander positioning himself slightly to Howard Dean's left. Indeed, the central paradox of Clark's campaign, which in recent months has neither gained nor lost much altitude, and remains fixed in a flight path well below Dean's, is that a candidate whose chief virtue was his credibility on national security issues has proved to be such a peacenik. People around Clark disagree as to the source of his surprising politics. One figure who has given Clark substantial advice says that Clark has moved left owing to the ''political dynamic'' fostered by Dean. Clark himself says that he's just angry at the commander in chief's failure to take responsibility. When Clark and I spoke in November, I said that those of us in the audience at the conference assumed that he believed the Bush administration could have and should have stopped the terrorist attacks -- a terrible charge, almost a calumny. No, he said; he meant that the administration had refused to conduct ''an after-action review,'' as he would have done. Of course, if that's what he meant, he could have said so. It seemed, rather, that he had decided to mine the vein that Dean had worked so effectively.
Clark embodies what is most powerful, but perhaps also what is most vulnerable, about the Democratic critique of the Bush administration's national security strategy. Clark's first book, ''Waging Modern War,'' is a minutely detailed account of the Kosovo air campaign, the first, and so far only, war fought by the NATO alliance, which Clark conducted as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander. You could easily read the book as a primer on the futility of multilateral warfare, for Clark describes his endless battles with the Pentagon, the White House and our 18 allies. On several occasions, the war effort almost collapsed from dissension. But it didn't: the Serbs ultimately withdrew, the Kosovars returned home and for several years now an uneasy peace has reigned in Kosovo. ''The real lesson of Kosovo is this,'' Clark writes: ''To achieve strategic success at minimal cost, a structured alliance whose actions are guided by consensus and underwritten by international law is likely to be far more effective and efficient in the long term.''
Clark wrote those words in a preface composed after the terrorist attacks, and what he meant was that acting in concert will be more effective than the unilateralism he already saw emerging. He often tells the story of meeting a senior official in the Bush Defense Department (Donald Rumsfeld himself, Clark told me), who said to him, ''We read your book -- no one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb.'' Iraq was the anti-Kosovo: the Bush administration orchestrated a breathtakingly successful military campaign by more or less acting alone, but not only sacrificed the legitimacy that comes from joint action but also inherited virtual sole responsibility for the postwar mess. Clark argues that the very consensus war-fighting strategy that produces terribly inefficient wars also greatly increases the likelihood of a successful postwar outcome -- which is what the whole effort is supposed to be about. ''It's not where you bomb and what building you blow up that determines the outcome of the war,'' Clark said to me. ''That's what we teach majors in the Air Force to do -- make sure you hit the target. It's the overarching diplomacy, the leverage you bring to bear, what happens afterward on the ground, that gives you your success. And for that you need nations working together.'' That, in a nutshell, is the Wesley Clark alternative paradigm of national security.
Clark is the seniormost member of a younger generation of soldiers formed not by Vietnam, though he fought there, but by the humanitarian wars of the 90's -- by Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. What makes modern war modern for Clark is not just high-tech gadgetry but both the limitations and the opportunities provided by public opinion, international law and multilateral institutions. When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 -- we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane -- he said, ''You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,'' thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ''You could then have gone to NATO and said: 'O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.''' NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war.
On Iraq, Clark said that he would have tried ''another diplomacy round,'' and then, if Saddam Hussein failed to comply with inspectors' demands, he would have returned to the Security Council to secure an international coalition for multilateral war. (But Clark has also said that invading Iraq, rather than continuing to press the war on Al Qaeda, was ''a strategic mistake.'') After we finished talking, in fact, he flew to South Carolina, where he laid out his alternate plans for Iraq, which feature a Bosnia-type interim government with representatives from Europe, the U.S. and neighboring states and a NATO peacekeeping operation run by an American general.
Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different -- the post-9/11 world. Clark argues persuasively that the NATO ''consensus engine'' forces member governments to ''buy into'' joint decisions. But what if the French or Germans don't want to buy into Iraq or, say, to a tough posture should Iran start violating critical nuclear safeguards? A key aspect of the neoconservative argument on terrorism, most associated with the analyst Robert Kagan, is that Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch. Clark's answer is that if we take the concerns of our allies seriously, they will rally to our side. But they may not; Frenchmen may consider the United States, even under a benign President Clark, a greater threat to world peace than Iraq. It may be that in his years with NATO, Clark so thoroughly absorbed the European perspective that he has trouble recognizing how very deeply, and differently, Americans were affected by 9/11.
All this, of course, is airy theorizing; the immediate question for Democrats is whether all of Clark's medals can act as a flame retardant if and when Karl Rove starts to roast the general as a Europeanized peace-lover. We can't know, of course, until the experiment begins. James P. Rubin, the former press aide to Madeleine Albright, who is now advising Clark, opines, ''He doesn't have to show that he's a tough guy; he doesn't have to check the boxes.'' That's the whole theory behind Clark's candidacy. But is the litmus test really about toughness -- or is it about understanding the transformative effect of 9/11? Will Marshall says that Clark has already stumbled into ''the red zone.'' Marshall says that he still believes that with the right candidate ''we can go toe to toe on this and win our argument.'' He was hoping that Clark would be that candidate. Now, he says, ''we'll see.''
VII.
Conservative intellectuals have taken to arguing that Democrats, far from being lost in a funk of pacifism, have in fact signed on to President Bush's national security strategy, albeit with some important quibbles over Iraq. Robert Kagan recently observed that the 2004 election is unlikely to offer ''a national referendum on the fundamental principles of American foreign policy in the post-cold-war, post-Sept. 11, 2001, world'' so long as the leading Democratic candidates, including the supposedly dovish Howard Dean, fully embrace the war on terror that President Bush has declared -- unlike the McGovernites, who believed that ''America was on the wrong side of history.''
Surely this is at least partly right. The foreign-policy debate is no longer ideological, if ideology has to do with differing conceptions of ends, rather than means. The Democrats are not really a peace party. Defense spending, once the great threshold issue separating hawks from doves, has been laid to rest. You have to go as far to the left as Dennis Kucinich to find a candidate who wants to cut, rather than increase, defense spending.
But Kagan is wrong to think that only ends, not means, amount to fundamental, or at least essential, principles. The difference between the idea that international law, multilateral institutions and formal alliances enhance our power -- the Wilson-F.D.R.-Truman-Kennedy idea -- and the view that they needlessly constrain our power, is a very important difference indeed. In an article last spring in World Policy Journal, Dana H. Allin, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon, foreign-policy thinkers from the conservative side of the Democratic spectrum, proposed a doctrine of ''nationalist liberalism,'' which would ''consciously accept the critical importance of power, including military power, in promoting American security, interests and values,'' as the neoconservatives had in the 1970's. But the doctrine would also recognize that America's great power ''will create resistance and resentment if it is exercised arrogantly and unilaterally, making it harder for the United States to achieve its goals.'' The authors laid out a ''generous and compelling vision of global society,'' which would include ''humanitarian intervention against genocidal violence; family planning; effective cooperation against global warming and other environmental scourges''; foreign aid; free trade; and large investments to combat AIDS.
All the major Democratic candidates could be considered nationalist liberals. And it's no surprise: since this is more or less the consensual view of the foreign-policy establishment, practically everybody the candidates have been consulting takes this view. With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did.
O.K., then, it doesn't. And yet it sure feels as if it does. Iraq has, in fact, become the Democratic manhood test. One of Howard Dean's 30-second ads in Iowa showed Gephardt standing next to President Bush in the Rose Garden while an announcer said, ''October 2002: Dick Gephardt agrees to co-author the Iraq war resolution, giving George Bush the authority to go to war.'' Dean is running as the candidate who stood up to the president and his own party on Iraq, just as Wesley Clark is running as the candidate whose whole experience demonstrates the madness of Iraq. Dean may well be a nationalist liberal, but his audience members -- the activists, the students -- often are not; he is exploiting that deep discomfort with the exercise of power, the skepticism about American legitimacy that Condoleezza Rice was writing about. (A candidate who says, as Dean does, ''We're all just cogs in a big machine someplace,'' is not catering to the middle.) This is the cliff that Democratic thinkers fear the party is heading over. As one Senate aide tells me, ''I don't see how a Democrat who is easy to stereotype as soft, even if it's unfair, is going to win.''
The Democrats seem trapped between two irreconcilable impulses, or litmus tests. This is especially obvious, and painful, with figures like John Kerry, who has tried to have it both ways. In the run-up to the war, Kerry harshly criticized President Bush for alienating our allies and then voted for the resolution authorizing war. Then he voted against the $87 billion appropriation, complaining that the president lacked a clear postwar plan. As Baghdad plunged into chaos and Dean worked his magic, Kerry began to sound more and more like an antiwar candidate. And then when Saddam Hussein was captured, Kerry criticized Dean for failing to acknowledge the full magnitude of the achievement. It's no wonder that Chris Matthews tied Kerry into a pretzel when he pressed him on ''Hardball'' to supply a ''yes or no answer'' on Iraq.
You can imagine two very different solutions to the irreconcilable-litmus-test problem. If the capture of Saddam Hussein leads to a rapid improvement of conditions in Iraq, the Democratic litmus test could change, and the party could nominate a candidate who couldn't be stereotyped as soft. And if, alternatively, conditions in Iraq fully disintegrate, the general election litmus test could change, and Howard Dean could prove to have been prescient. But there is a sizable body of opinion that argues that the Democrats cannot overcome their historic reputation with a candidate who opposed the war, or perhaps even opposed the $87 billion appropriation -- no matter what his other views or his resume.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: ''Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?'' In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn't. ''Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?'' O'Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that ''the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.''
Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that's the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement.
James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about politics and international affairs. |
