Between Iraq and a Soft Place

Democrats counter with a kinder, gentler interventionism

Jim Henley from the November 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

It wasn’t until the 2006 midterm elections that, almost despite themselves, the Democrats took real advantage of public dismay with the war, running forthright anti-war candidates such as Jim Webb, now a senator from Virginia. Even this success came in the face of the usual intraparty counsel to avoid losing “credibility on national security” by opposing what almost everyone but GOP die-hards was coming to regard as a failed war.

In the wake of a fantastically successful election campaign, the newly empowered Democratic majority immediately ceded the initiative on national security to the White House and the Republican Party. Whether the issue was withdrawal timelines, surveillance powers, detainee provisions, or groundwork for possible new wars against Iran or Syria, the Democratic leadership’s general approach was to acquiesce in Republican rhetoric and priorities. The excuse offered to the party’s increasingly anti-war base, that it was all the fault of Senate cloture rules or conservative “blue dog” Democrats, rang hollow: When the leadership wanted to stop changes to Social Security in 2005, it was able to make the issue a matter of party discipline. At no point since the new Congress took its seats has the leadership been willing to crack heads and enforce order on anything touching the socalled War on Terror.

Whence this timidity? Yglesias traces Democratic skittishness on what passes for national security to the 1990s. (I would trace it to the 1970s and ’80s, when the Reagan-era Republican Party clobbered Democrats at the presidential level by, among other things, projecting “strength” on national security.) Despite fears of a quagmire in 1991, the war to evict Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait was a spectacular (if short-term) success. The United States won its 1999 air war against Serbia, aimed at stopping the conflict between Serbians and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, without a single American casualty. By 2002 elected officials were reluctant to bet against the success of the American military. But in 2002 legislators were being asked to bac  a much more grandiose scheme than the limited objectives of the first Gulf War and the war to hand Kosovo to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

This brings us to the book’s biggest flaw: its handling of the Clinton years. Yglesias presents the Clinton administration as the apotheosis of the liberal internationalism he favors, which seeks to expand rule-based international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court, on the assumption that, as the world’s premier power, the U.S. will benefit from a stable global order over the long term. For Yglesias, Kosovo was a borderline case where the U.S. played on the fringes of the international order in a good cause. By his account, the Clinton White House recognized the threat of Al Qaeda and had begun taking steps against the organization, handing off a plan of action to its successor that the Bush administration ignored.

It’s entirely too rosy a picture. Far from being a borderline case, Kosovo represented an outright flouting of not just international but domestic legitimacy. Late in the book, Yglesias properly cautions against the enthusiasm among both liberal interventionists and John McCain’s advisers for “venue shopping,” including the creation of new international organizations such as a “League of Democracies” to have one more forum that could potentially endorse American uses of force. But forum shopping was precisely what Bill Clinton did to launch the Kosovo war. When the U.N. Security Council refused to authorize an attack on Serbia, the White House secured the (grudging) approval of NATO instead.

What’s more, Clinton launched the war not just without congressional authorization but in defiance of outright congressional disapproval, since Congress voted to refuse him the authority for war. To gin up public enthusiasm his administration engaged in the same “worse than Hitler” rhetoric that hawks have used ever since, well, Hitler. The continuities between Iraq in 2002–03 and Kosovo in 1999 are more striking than the differences. No wonder most of the architects of the Balkan war, including Bill Clinton himself, spoke initially in favor of war with Iraq.

Whatever stock you put in the Clinton administration’s claim that the war was necessary to prevent the genocide of ethnic Albanians, as opposed to merely ensuring the victory of one side in a vicious civil war, the Iraq war has to count as a direct cost of the 1999 intervention. It set a precedent for forum shopping, validated the use of humanitarian rhetoric in advocating foreign war, and filled prominent liberals’ heads with hubris about using violence as a tool of global reform, fostering the very “liberal hawks” Yglesias sets himself against.

In the Middle East, too, the striking feature of the Bush-to-Clinton-to-Bush period is the continuity of real-world policy, not the difference. While Yglesias rebuts the crude version of the GOP’s attempt to blame the September 11 attacks on Clintonian inaction, he never grapples with the responsibility the Clinton administration does bear. In explaining the aspects of America’s terrorism problem that hawks willfully scanted in the aftermath of 9/11, he adduces the landmark work of political scientist Robert Pape on the origins of suicide terror in resistance to foreign occupation. Neither Pape nor Yglesias thinks suicide terror is admirable only that its relationship to interventionism can’t be wished away. But American intervention in the Middle East didn’t begin with the inauguration of the younger George Bush or go on hiatus after the reign of Bush the Elder. Clinton maintained America’s bases in Saudi Arabia, continued unbroken support for autocrats from Riyadh to Cairo, and used America’s veto power at the U.N. Security Council to twist disarmament-oriented sanctions into a tool for Iraqi regime change. Meanwhile, Barack Obama forswears “permanent bases” in Iraq but also, according to his website, promises that a “residual force” will remain to conduct “targeted counter-terrorism missions”—presumably, given the lack of “permanent bases,” from friends’ couches.

With the advent of the so-called netroots, of which Yglesias is a charter member, the Democratic Party has its most vibrant anti-war constituency since the 1970s. But even the netroots still have a weakness for “humanitarian” intervention, one that is shared at the top of the ticket by Obama’s call for “no-fly zones” (he is ambiguous on which countries should enforce them) in Darfur. On balance, though, a Democratic Party that took the principles of Heads in the Sand seriously would do less damage abroad (through war) and at home (to civil liberties) than any recent administration. (Yglesias himself is a Darfur-intervention skeptic.) It would be a far cry from the more sweeping anti-interventionism of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), but given the concentrated benefits of militarism to contractors and politicians alike, liberal internationalism is the closest thing to a peace platform American politics is likely to see in the short to medium term.

How much will Obama embrace Yglesias’ flawed but more optimal foreign policy approach? Partially at best. Obama has called for expanding the size of the U.S. military, already by far the most potent on the planet, and he has made conflicting but ultimately threatening statements about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. And Obama is at bottom a practical politician. Just as liberal internationalism is an equivocal peace program, Barack Obama is an equivocal liberal internationalist. Nevertheless, because he has spoken unflinchingly of the need not just to end the Iraq war but to “change the mind-set” that led to it, his election would constitute at least a mild rebuke to the people and ideological assumptions behind the invasion.

Of course, even if the liberal internationalist approach works out as its enthusiasts envision, it will come bundled with a progressive economics anathema to libertarians. Whether you consider less war a worthwhile tradeoff for higher taxes and more sweeping social programs is between you, your wallet, and your conscience.

Jim Henley blogs at highclearing.com and theartofthepossible.net.