Between Iraq and a Soft Place

Democrats counter with a kinder, gentler interventionism

Jim Henley from the November 2008 issue

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, by Matthew Yglesias, New York: Wiley, 272 pages, $25.95

When Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in early June, newspaper analysts and campaign consultants couldn't figure out how a freshman African-American senator beat Hillary Clinton, who spent most of 2007 as the Inevitable Nominee because of name recognition, pedigree, and the loyalty of liberal women. They cited everything from Clinton fatigue to the Obama campaign's 21st-century organization, but mostly ignored the impact of the issue that created an opening for Obama. Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war in 2002, and he presented his opposition as an asset. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, and she refused to disown her vote afterward. That party hacks and insider journalists couldn't recognize the importance of Iraq to Obama's success demonstrated that they, like Clinton herself, were captive to an outdated perspective on the politics of war and peace.

Heads in the Sand is a sharp, punchy challenge to that perspective. Matthew Yglesias, who has written about politics and foreign policy for The American Prospect and The Atlantic, asserts that the Republican Party's approach to U.S. foreign policy is ruinous to America's real interests. This is a familiar argument from Democrats. But he also argues that the Democrats' own inability or unwillingness to offer a clear-throated alternative to the GOP's "aggressive nationalism" has been ruinous to the Democratic Party's electoral prospects.

Time and again, Democratic strategists have tried to say just enough about foreign policy to make the issue go away and let the party fight elections on economic issues. Time and again, the issue has failed to go away. The "liberal hawks" who have controlled the Democratic foreign policy establishment for most of the years since the 1995 Dayton Accords argue that the key to electoral success is for Democratic candidates to project images of "strength" by assenting to the nationalist program. Yglesias, a blogger for the left-liberal Center for American Progress, argues that public perception of Democratic weakness stems less from the party's reluctance to use force against designated foreign enemies than from its evident fear of forthrightly opposing Republican positions. In other words, giving the Republican leadership what it wants on war, torture, sanctions, and surveillance makes Democrats look servile, not strong.

As a broad-brush history of hawkish Republicanism during the Bush years, Heads in the Sand is first-rate. And Yglesias has a plausible critique of what the civil liberties blogger Glenn Greenwald has called the Democrats' program of "strength through bowing." But while his own preferred alternative, a rule-based international order he calls "liberal internationalism," is coherent, it leads him to understate the Bush administration's continuity with the broad sweep of American foreign policy since World War II. (Disclosure: Yglesias has been a friend of mine for several years, and I read a version of his book in manuscript.)

Yglesias sets the record straight on whether George W. Bush's foreign policy ever, even during his first presidential campaign, merited the label isolationist (it didn't). He recapitulates the bizarre social psychology of late 2001 and 2002, when everyone "serious" agreed that it was far more important to denounce fringe figures with little power, from the obscure academic Ward Churchill to the Falstaffian filmmaker Michael Moore, than to scrutinize the actions of the people actually running the U.S. government. He explains the concept of the "Friedman Unit," the satirical term (named after New York Times columnist and Iraq war booster Thomas Friedman) for the crucial, ever-renewing "next six months" in Iraq that were, at any point from 2004 to 2007, supposed to determine whether "things will work out."

The book’s most counterintuitive thesis may be that 9/11 changed nothing. Yglesias is right that on the plane of ideas, all that the Al Qaeda massacres in New York and Washington did was make the contending parties, to paraphrase Robert Frost, only more sure of all they thought was true. In the days following 9/11, anti-interventionist libertarians, hawkish neoconservatives, and anti-militarist leftists all argued that events had proven their pre-existing beliefs correct. John Montoya of the now-defunct Adequacy.org wrote an early satire of the phenomenon, titled “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics.”

On the plane of social psychology and practical politics, however, 9/11 was profoundly unsettling. Most Americans, probably even most elites, have weak or nonexistent attachments to any one particular view of foreign policy, and in the days and months after 9/11 they felt not vindication but shock, grief, fear, and rage. “The right,” Yglesias writes, “seized advantage of the opportunity to frame issues in a way that was highly favorable to its existing policy preferences but spectacularly unsuited to the actual situation.”

Yglesias labels the mind-set of conservative hawks as “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” after the superhero comic about a corps of interstellar policemen whose power rings are limited only by the will and imagination of their wielders. The Bush hawks’ totem word was resolve. For the first time, Yglesias argues, the aggressive nationalists who were always a force in Republican politics gained full control of American foreign policy. Their conviction was that enough resolve would render the rest of the world plastic, to be reshaped as America dared to dream.

In the event, the world—and the Middle East in particular—proved to be stubborn material. The brief, ballyhooed “Arab Spring” that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a false one. Token electoral reforms in Egypt and Saudi Arabia went nowhere, and the United States has since cleaved to some of the region’s most authoritarian regimes in its effort to build a coalition against Iran, the biggest regional beneficiary of the Iraq war.

Meanwhile, violence unleashed in Iraq by the American invasion has resulted in tens to hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis, millions of internal or external exiles, and thousands of dead and maimed American troops. Victory has been tacitly redefined as getting violence down to a level that the American public doesn’t much notice and getting an Iraqi government that, however corrupt and unrepresentative, assents to a long-term U.S. military presence.

While the Republicans were squandering all those lives and upward of $1 trillion, what was the country’s nominal opposition party doing? Mostly, Yglesias contends, wishing the whole thing would go away. In 2002 the Democrats’ House and Senate leadership urged Democratic lawmakers to ratify the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which gave President Bush the authority to attack Iraq at a time and in the circumstances of his choosing. That, they reasoned, would take the war “off the table” for the midterm elections. The Democrats lost seats anyway, rare for midterms when the other party holds the White House.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004 the party carped about aspects of the conflict’s conduct but never questioned the wisdom of the war itself. Democrats treated body armor and vehicle plating as crucial issues but seemed to think the prudence and justice of maintaining the occupation of a hostile Middle Eastern nation were not worth bringing up.

The occasional Democratic politician who stuck his neck out found an intraparty rival ready to chop it, as when Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean correctly declared that Saddam Hussein’s capture at the end of 2003 didn’t make the U.S. any safer. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut—at that point still a Democrat—declared that Dean was “in a spider-hole of denial.” The phrase rhetorically blurred the distinction between war critic and national enemy before Republicans themselves got around to doing the same.

The party nominated the ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards on the theory that their support for the 2002 war resolution would provide the party with “credibility.” Then, once again, the Democrats could “take the war off the table” and let the economy decide the election. As the war went badly during 2004, the Kerry-Edwards ticket was unable to take full political advantage. Unwilling to say they were wrong to support starting the war or determined to end it, the best Kerry and Edwards could argue was that they would, somehow or other, prosecute it more competently by “internationalizing” the occupation.

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