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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (39285)	3/11/2004 7:43:59 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

Radical? Hardly.... Hardly? No, extremely. Come on. Join the new conservatives against the radicals. Be true to your beliefs. You can do it. Bush's radical right In new political world, conservatives and radicals aren't who you think Our foreign policy debate right now pits radicals against conservatives. Republicans are the radicals. Democrats are the conservatives. That jarring but shrewd perspective, offered by Anthony Lake, President Clinton's former national security adviser, explains much that is strange in our national discussion. And while Lake is critical of President Bush's policies, he does not use the word "radical" to make a partisan point. He is also critical of his own party's newly discovered conservatism. In his speech last Thursday on the need to promote democracy, particularly in the Arab world, Bush embraced much of what liberal human rights advocates have been saying for years. Lake himself, when he worked for Clinton, proposed the idea of "democratic enlargement" as the underlying principle of American foreign policy. Bush explicitly rebuked a narrowly realist worldview. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," Bush said, "because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." The United States, said Bush, must promote democratic change even in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, nations ruled by America's longtime friends. This is not his father's foreign policy. Indeed, the first President Bush resisted overthrowing Saddam Hussein and reshaping Iraq out of that great conservative impulse known as prudence. His son's democratic imperialism is genuinely radical. What Bush 43 calls for is very different from the transformation of Germany and Japan after World War II. By thrusting war on the rest of the world, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made unconditional surrender and their long postwar occupations inevitable. By contrast, the war in Iraq was an optional war for the United States. We now learn from Bush's latest speech that it was less a war about immediate threats posed by Saddam than a bold experiment in support of a grand theory. "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East," Bush said in his speech, "will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." Democrats have been in a box ever since the Iraq debate began because they have always identified with the emphasis on spreading democracy that is at the heart of Bush's rhetoric, but are deeply uneasy with the use of military force to impose new regimes, even democratic ones, on other nations. They also want to preserve old alliances and the old institutions of international cooperation. All this, says Lake, now a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, is why Democrats are today's conservatives. Democrats find themselves opposed to "the radical turn of unilateralism, fractured alliances, the disruption or trashing of international organizations and alliances, and a disdain for negotiations." "The Democratic critique," he continued in an interview, "is that every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt -- Republican or Democrat -- has conserved alliances and built multilateral approaches. ... They're trying to conserve the traditions of the last 50 years." There's a lot to be said for that. The spread of democracy since 1945 was fostered by the very global institutions and alliances toward which this administration seems so disdainful. Proposing a theory of democratic change is much easier than carrying out the practical, dangerous and expensive work of war, occupation and reconstruction. How often is it the case that democracy can be made to grow from the barrel of a gun? And, yes, winning the trust of the world also requires an administration that levels with potential friends and fellow citizens. But Lake is right to say that conservatism in foreign policy is not enough. He offers a useful metaphor: "If you had a house that was being knocked down, in whole or in part, you probably wouldn't just use the old plans to rebuild it. You'd want new plans for new conditions." Instead of simply defending the old institutions, this means that those who support them should insist on their reform. Much has changed since the United Nations was founded more than 50 years ago. The original mission of the NATO died with the Soviet Union. The United States and its European allies need to work out a new division of labor in facing terrorist threats and humanitarian disasters. The global financial institutions need change. The United States and Europe need to come to terms on agricultural subsidies that make a mockery of their claims of standing for either free or fair trade. Democrats, Lake argues, "need to be thinking large, and they're not." Bush has thrown down a radical challenge. His opponents -- Democrats and a growing group of increasingly squeamish Republicans -- should be bold enough to answer it. workingforchange.com lurqer