Tuesday, October 7, 2003; Page A25
Stephen
Sniegoski
has this comment on the "Wrong Path to
War." More on
War Liberalism THE topic for this article is "war
liberalism," which I have dealt with
before.
It deserves attention
now because of the likelihood that, with
the Bush administration's popularity
sinking, a Democrat will win the 2004
election and the new administration will
reflect, in large measure, the positions
of war liberalism. Now, the war liberals
who actually supported the war -- though
with some reservations -- are now being
joined by liberals who either opposed the
war or (more likely) criticized the war
after it lost its popular luster.
These liberals too hold
that the US cannot simply pull out of Iraq
-- the position of even "anti-war" Howard
Dean, who says American security depends
upon the creation of democracy in
Iraq.
Also significant, the
liberals are likely to try to mobilize
international pressure against Iran and
Syria because of their support for
terrorism inside Israel (note this has
nothing to do with the US) and their
alleged development of WMD (again these
states are not even said to threaten the
US, as was the false claims of the Iraq
propaganda).
The policy that a new
Democratic administration would follow
would be what I call "neocon lite."
Significantly, the incoming Democratic
administration will not follow the
position of the anti-war Left, which
presents the war and occupation as an
example of American imperialism and would
like the US to simply pull out.
People of this type
represent a significant body of the
Democratic foot soldiers, but they will
have little impact on formulating
policy. IT is necessary to present a little
run-down of war liberalism, which I
presented in an earlier message of some
months ago.
While neocons
spearheaded the war on Iraq, and without
the neocons there would have been no war,
they had a number of auxiliaries, with war
liberals being one of these.
War liberals in the
media included: Christopher
Hitchens (who coined the term
"Islamo-fascism" to designate the enemy
for liberal ears), Richard Cohen
(Washington Post), Thomas Friedman
(NY Times), Bill Keller (NY Times
originator of the
"I-Can't-Believe-I'm-A-Hawk Club"), Tim
Noah (Slate magazine's "Chatterbox"
columnist), David Remnick (editor
of the New Yorker), Jonathan Alter
(Newsweek), and Kenneth Pollack
(Clinton's National Security expert who
wrote a major book advocating the war,
The Threatening Storm).
If you want to call
The New Republic liberal, add it in
as well. Many of these war liberals
supported the war with certain caveats. As
staunch internationalists, they have
argued that the war would have had more
international support if the Bush
administration had handled the matter in a
less heavy-handed fashion and they have
criticized the administration's numerous
lies -- WMD, Saddam's terrorist
connection, the ease of occupation.
They are now criticizing
the war profiteering, especially of those
companies with close ties to Bush
administration figures. These themes will
loom large in the Democratic 2004
campaign. They are politically safe
positions to take -- no one supports lies
or war profiteering. They have both mass
and elitist appeal, with support from the
internationalist foreign policy and media
elites. Now for a quick look at the war
liberals. What motivated the war
liberals? 
Liberals have not been shy about
supporting America's wars since the Cold
War. Becoming "humanitarian
interventionists," they took a leading
role in supporting the NATO war on Serbia.
One explanation for the liberal change is
that while they had difficulty in viewing
an enemy, or potential enemy, on the Left,
such as Communism, as being totally bad
(Establishment liberals berated Reagan for
calling the Soviet Union the "evil
empire"), they have been able to view
Milosevic and Saddam as
murderous right-wing fascist dictators who
must be eliminated not simply
"contained."
It should be added that liberals have
championed America's past wars -- World
War I and World War II -- and had viewed
them as vehicles for progressive global
reform. They view the war on Iraq in a
similar way -- as a means to democratize
the entire Middle East.
Finally, let me put in the taboo motive --
support for Israel. Most of the war
liberals support Israel, though not in the
hard-line Likudnik fashion. Most
significantly, they tend to hold negative
views of Israel's enemies. The Washington Post article by
E. J. Dionne represents the
quintessence of war liberalism --
essentially good war but wrong approach.
It presents non-interventionism as selfish
and implies that American interference
throughout the world is essential for the
good of humanity. However, even if the US
is viewed as a libeating force, the
question is why, among all the many
despotisms of the world, was Iraq chosen
as a target for liberation.
Why wasn't sub-Saharan
Africa chosen for war and occupation? Or
perhaps even peaceful intervention?
Africans suffer from brutal despotisms,
internecine warfare, and grinding poverty
and would be less opposed to American
occupation than Arabs.
Furthermore, why wasn't
Afghanistan reconstructed after the
attack, instead of letter it fall into
chaos? In short, there are many places in
the world that suffer from tyranny and are
in need of material help.
Why Iraq? War
liberalism's humanitarian war does not
answer this question.
In short, it would
appear that war liberalism does not
determine where to fight wars but can be
used to justify wars determined by other
means. And war liberals support wars that
can be presented as oriented toward
idealistic goals.
David
Irving starts a new US tour this
Fall 2003. Locations include: Atlanta, New
Orleans, Houston, Arlington (TX), Oklahoma
City, Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Portland (Oregon),
Moscow (Idaho), Sacramento, Las Vegas,
Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago,
Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville. The
theme is comparisons - Hitler, Churchill,
Iraq, war crimes law, and Iraq.
[register
interest]
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Wrong Path to
War By E. J. Dionne Jr. PRESIDENT Bush should be
searching his soul over how he took a legitimate
war against terrorism and systematically undermined
the support he needed to wage it. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's
domestic opponents and much of the world joined him
in supporting tough action against terror and
agreeing on the urgent need to advance the values
of democracy, free expression and tolerance. That sense of shared purpose has evaporated. It
was destroyed less because of what our enemies and
wayward friends did than by the administration's
almost casual disregard for the link between facts
and arguments. The president used the tactics of a
political campaign to sell the war in Iraq. Now
comes the fallout. It's increasingly obvious that the
administration was willing to say whatever was
necessary to get the Iraq war done on its schedule.
It made the war a partisan electoral issue in 2002
and turned off potential allies abroad. The
president lost the high ground that he and the
United States occupied when our forces waged war on
al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The administration's primary after-the-fact case
for the war against Saddam Hussein is that
Iraqis are much better off without him. But it
didn't have enough confidence in the
humanitarian argument
to make it the primary basis for war before the
shooting started. And it was not candid in advance
about the high costs of the enterprise. Bush and his acolytes decided that most
Americans would not back an attack on Saddam unless
(1) he could be connected in some way to 9/11 or
(2) he could be shown to pose a clear and present
danger to the United States. The administration pushed and pushed on vague,
unsubstantiated claims of a link between Saddam
Hussein and al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney
can't stop making the case for a connection between
Hussein and 9/11. In his Sept. 14 "Meet the Press"
appearance, the vice president said the Iraq war
was about striking "a major blow" at "the
geographic base of the terrorists who had us under
assault now for many years, but most especially on
9/11." Even Bush had to concede a few days later
that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was
involved with the Sept. 11 attacks." Which
statement is operative? Last week American weapons inspector David
Kay reported that American forces and CIA
experts had found no chemical or biological weapons
in Iraq and that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was
in only "the very most rudimentary state." But Bush
couldn't admit that this raised serious problems
with his prewar case for preemptive attack. And now we have the spectacle of White House
aides accused of outing a CIA employee to discredit
her husband's critical comments about the
administration's prewar claims concerning Iraq's
nuclear program. The administration could have taken a less
political path, a higher road. That's the approach
outlined by several essays in a new book, The
Fight Is For Democracy, edited by George
Packer and subtitled "Winning the War of Ideas
in America and the World." The volume, largely a
gathering of tough-minded liberals, reminds us how
broad the post-9/11 consensus in favor of a strong
and principled American role once was -- and still
could be. Packer and the other authors are ready to
criticize their own side. The "softheadedness into
which liberalism sank after the 1960s," Packer
writes, "seems as useless today as isolationism in
1941 or compromise in 1861." But Packer also attacks the administration for
failing to cast its project in larger terms, or to
question itself. The United States, he notes, has
"always swung feverishly . . . between periods of
business dominance, when the rest of the world can
go to hell, and bursts of reformist zeal, when
America shines a light unto the nations." "September 11 was a hinge between two such
eras," Packer continues, "and our current
conservative leadership wants to take the country
into one without leaving the other. It wants to
wage war on terrorism and still preserve all the
privileges and injustices of a low dishonest age.
It wants lockstep unity and unequal sacrifice." Another liberal writer, Michael Tomasky,
argues that "there was a liberal case for invading
Iraq which has nothing to do with trumped-up
arguments about Saddam's nuclear capability and
everything to do with the suffering of the Iraqi
people." A war supported by straightforward arguments and
based on a broad alliance, patiently constructed,
could have united our nation and much of the world
on behalf of democratic ideals. Instead, the
administration is stuck with a pile of
exaggerations and half-truths, and the consensus
brought into being by 9/11 has been
shattered. 
Previous comments by Stephen Sniegoski: 
The hunt
for weapons of mass destruction yields -
nothing-
Official Is
Prepared To Address Issue Of Iraqi
Deception
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