Peter Beinart and Armando have been engaging in a debate over foreign policy and national security over at Swords Crossed. For those of you who are not familiar with Peter Beinart, he is “is a journalist and editor-at-large for The New Republic, having served as editor of TNR from November 1999 until March 2006.” He is a graduate of Yale and a Rhodes Scholar. In understanding Beinart, it is helpful to understand the history of the The New Republic.
The New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann through the financial backing of heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and her husband, Willard Straight, who maintained majority ownership. The magazine’s first issue was published on November 7, 1914. The magazine’s politics were liberal and progressive, and as such concerned with coping with the great changes brought about by America’s late-19th century industrialization. The magazine is widely considered important in changing the character of liberalism in the direction of governmental interventionism, both foreign and domestic. Among the most important of these was the emergence of the U.S. as a Great Power on the international scene, and in 1917 TNR urged America’s entry into World War I on the side of the Allies.
Herbert Croly famously said: “The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.”
As for Walter Lippmann, this is from his wiki:
Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy. He believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to World War II and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianism however, he rejected this view. Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky’s moral and intellectual antithesis: He agreed with the Platonic view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an intellectual specialist class. Chomsky used one of Lippmann’s catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent.
Compare this to the thinking of the godfather of neo-conservatism, Leo Strauss:
Strauss noted that thinkers of the first rank, going back to Plato, had raised the problem of whether good and effective politicians could be completely truthful and still achieve the necessary ends of their society. By implication, Strauss asks his readers to consider whether “noble lies” (Plato) have any role at all to play in uniting and guiding the cities of man. Are certain, unprovable “myths” taught by wise leaders needed to give most people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society? Or can society flourish on a foundation of those “deadly truths” (Nietzsche) limited to what we can know absolutely? For example, in The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato’s Republic that are required for all governments: primarily, that a state must believe its land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately, and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of where you are born.
There is an obvious commonality at play between the thinking of Lippmann, Croly, and Strauss. Chomsky called it ‘Manufacturing Consent’, but we can think of it as a cynicism about the innate wisdom of the popular will. I am sometimes a bit lazy about describing this bipartisan legacy and its effects on our foreign policy during the 20th-Century. Sometimes I just use shorthand and accuse these folks of being the media wing of the military/industrial complex. Using that rhetoric is tempting, especially in the short-form writing I am forced to do in a diary platform. But it obscures and much as it reveals. In this particular instance (the debate between Beinart and Armando) it will be more useful to keep the above in mind, but to look at the specifics of the case at hand.
Beinart begins:
A few weeks ago, Armando did something I appreciate: He read my book. And to make matters stranger, I agree with a good part of his response, since it reiterates a point I make on the book’s fifth page:
I was wrong to support the Iraq war. Armando goes on to note that
others, including Wesley Clark, were wiser than me in foreseeing some
of the problems that would arise. Agreed. They were.
Beinart grants that he was wrong to support the war in Iraq. But he is concerned that the left is responding to the debacle by becoming more isolationist. And, as we can see from the history of The New Republic, they have always been concerned with molding the public’s attitude to be more favorable to interventionism. Here is how Beinart puts it to Armando (first he introduces the far left opposition to the war in Afghanistan):
For the first year after 9/11, those were marginal views on the left. But since 2004, poll after poll shows that liberals and Democrats increasingly don’t see the anti-jihadist struggle as our fight. We rate it remarkably low on our list of foreign policy priorities. We are considerably more likely than Republicans to say America should mind its own business and retreat from the world. Less than 60 percent of us, according to a recent MIT survey, would re-fight the war in Afghanistan or use military force to destroy a terrorist camp. (Again, I have the details on this in the book)
Is this because liberals are furious about Iraq? Of course. But it was fury at Vietnam that led Democrats, disastrously, to overwhelmingly oppose the Gulf War in 1991. Just because Bush (and to some extent, pro-war liberals like me) got us into this mess doesn’t mean that liberals can’t hurt ourselves badly if we react to it the wrong way. And there is some evidence that we are.
I highlight this problem because I believe it is only when liberals see fighting jihadist totalitarianism–an ideology that enslaves women and non-Sunni Muslims, and murders gays and lesbians–as our cause–not Bush’s, ours–that this struggle will be won.
Armando responds to this by insisting that liberals do see the fight against jihadists as our fight, but that we do not think Bush is advancing that goal. In fact, Armando argues, Bush is making matters much worse. This leads to a debate about how to deal with the politicization of national security and how to support Bush in those rare instances where his approach is correct without lending him cover to pursue the war on jihadists in the wrong ways. And, thus, Armando has become trapped on the flypapaer of Beinart’s game. The debate that Beinart hopes to win is not over the specifics of how to fight the war on terror, but over manufacturing consent that the war is our fight, too.
Here, we have to go back to the Cold War. Liberals could agree that Stalinism was a horrid, murderous, and potentially expansionist political system that must be confronted. Liberals could generally agree that communism, as practiced in China, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, Cuba, and Cambodia, was a threat to human rights, freedom, and spirit. Having just gone through the trauma of World War Two, there was a general consensus that totalitarianism must be confronted and could not be safely ignored. The division arose over how best to confront totalitarianism, and over whether socialist policies (like health care, welfare, social security, progressive taxation) were really as dangerous to liberty as the police state tactics used in Communist countries. The New Republic chose a middle road. They were generally supportive of a robust containment policy, but they opposed the Vietnam War. Then, as now, they labored to keep the New Left from overreacting to the debacle in Indochina by abandoning the fight against Communism.
The fight against jihadists is obviously important. We can’t ignore the destruction of lower Manhattan or a direct attack on the Pentagon. It’s obvious that we need to be vigilant in order to protect ourselves from catastrophic terrorist attacks (particularly ones that attempt to decapitate our government or ruin our economy). But, that is where the consensus should end. It simply is not the case that we can eradicate the desire of jihadists to attack us by invading Muslim countries. Meddling in the internal affairs of Iran, Pakistan, or (obviously) Iraq, will do nothing to tamp down the threat. Any honest assessment of human nature will agree that such actions will inevitably increase the threat. We did not win over Poland and Romania by dropping bombs on Warsaw and Bucharest. We won them over by the example we set in human rights and in our prosperity. In this context, there should be no consensus that the “anti-jihadist struggle [is] our fight”. At least, there should be no consensus that it is our fight if the fight involves increased meddling in the affairs of Muslim countries. Beinart puts it like this:
We are considerably more likely than Republicans to say America should mind its own business and retreat from the world.
Beinart sets up a false dichotomy here. We need to consider two different types of “retreat[ing] from the world.” Bush has retreated from the ABM Treaty, from the United Nations, from international norms regulating warfare, the treatment of prisoners, and torture. That is its own form of retreat, and one which liberals have fought every step of the way. The other type of retreat, the one Beinart refers to, is for the United States to re-orient our aggressive forward-leaning basing strategy. The threat of terrorism arises, in large part, from our basing troops in Saudi Arabia, our containment of Iraq, and our pro-Israel stance on the Palestinian question. Those are the reasons Usama bin-Laden gave for attacking America.
While I would agree that it is dangerous to react to the 9/11 attacks by caving in to the demands of the jihadists and retreating from the region, it still remains sensible and urgent to reassess our posture in the region. Is it absolutely necessary to have bases in Saudi Arabia? No. It’s not. We have moved our air base to Qatar. Does that solve the problem? I doubt it.
Securing a steady supply of oil and gas from the region is important. It’s not just important for the United States, it’s important for our allies (particularly Japan). It goes beyond the financial interests of the big oil companies, it contributes to the financial well being of all modern economies. A liberal approach to attacking jihadists would involve putting our resources and political capital towards creating alternative energy sources (and more domestic energy sources), so that our standard of living is less dependent on the steady supply of energy from the Middle East.
It would look to reduce our military presence in the region, not find justifications for increasing our military presence.
Beinart seems to understand this (at least on some level) but he considers a retreat from the region to be an evil to be avoided at all costs.
That is why I am also skeptical of his work. That is why I sometimes accuse him and The New Republic of just being a front for the military/industrial complex. Because, there are always winners and losers anytime the country makes major changes. There are people that benefit financially from the status quo. There are people that benefit from the huge military budgets that are required to keep our bases from Korea, to Kyrgzistan, to Afghanistan, to Azerbaijan, to Bahrain, to Iraq, to Kuwait, to Qatar, to Dubai, to Eritrea. Likewise, there are people that benefit from all the homeland security spending that is necessitated by all the resentment our bases cause. It’s a self-perpetuating loop that keep America on a permanent war footing.
We wind up spending as much, if not more, money on defense and security to fight jihadists as we spent to contain communism. This is no accident.
I have two main problems with Beinart’s approach. First, it is not making us safer. Second, it misappropriates our funds away from more productive uses.
The goal should be achieving enough energy independence that the supply of energy from the Middle East can be disrupted without it having disastrous effects on our economy and the economies of our allies. This, in turn, should allow us to draw down our forward-leaning deployment posture. As, our forces ‘retreat’ from the region, the resentment they cause should go into retreat.
But, we need not see this as a retreat at all if it is accompanied by a robust advance back into our traditional post-World War Two organizations and alliances. Collective security, through organizations like NATO and the United Nations can still work for us. But only if we are the vanguard of human and civil rights. That’s where the war on jihadism must make its victories.
Beinart gives us a false choice. By buying into Bush’s rhetoric on the War on Terror, he is really just manufacturing consent for more of the same under a kindler, gentler regime. The defense and homeland security contractors will make more money than ever, but it won’t make us one whit safer, and it will ruin us financially.
Lippmann, Croly, Strauss, and Beinart think they can convince Americans of our unique moral superiority, of our absolute indispensibility in keeping the world from falling into some Hobbesian nightmare. To do this, they appeal to our national myths. Those myths were never less true than they are today. Bush’s retreat from international norms, civil rights, and human rights, have undermined the legitimacy of the myths that Beinart relies on. We’d all like to believe the best about ourselves. We’d like to believe that America’s presence in the world, with bases stretching the globe, is a force for good.
But, right now, we need to face up to the charade Bush has made of those myths. Money spent in Iraq or Uzbekistan is money not spent at home. Civil rights and human rights that are ignored at home destroy any plausible presentation that we can defend them abroad. The left is only responding to the collapse of our national myths and, correspondingly, the moral legitimacy we need to justify our enormous military budgets.
How all this plays out politically is another matter. How long will the center hold? How long we will have to pretend the status quo is making us more secure, that it is economically sustainable, and that we have the legitimacy to lead? I hope it won’t be too much longer before the Beinarts of the world are the ones in retreat and that those of us that really believe in human rights, civil rights, self-determination, and collective security are in the advance.
