Afghanistan and terrorism: Atrios is right

A lot of people seem to think that Democrats ought to "get serious about national security." Before this goes any further, let's be explicit about what "seriousness" and "national security" really mean in this context.

I get the sense that "national security" and "ideologically-driven foreign wars" are near-synonyms in this discussion. Otherwise, there would be no question that all Democrats are serious about national security. All Democrats want to improve civil defense, strengthen our alliances, reinvigorate the intelligence community and stop nuclear proliferation.

Some Democrats think that the party needs to run on a national security platform. But Kerry just lost the election on the national security platform outlined above. So, what's missing?

It's the saber rattling, stupid.

Peter Beinhart and his supporters are advocating a Crusade against Islamofascism. They argue that the global struggle against militant Islamism is the ultimate Value that will invigorate the Democratic party and inspire the electorate.

Beinhart's proposed Crusade is morally superior to some of the other gimmicky Democratic marketing strategies. If we've got to hate someone, better Islamofascists than gays, secularists, unhappily pregnant women, or publicly-funded artists. What's not to hate about Islamofascists?

Unfortunately, the Crusade has some disadvantages. First off, it's bad for national security. Our first attempt to spread Democracy in the Middle East has backfired. Loudly proclaiming our intent to carry out similar feats of "liberation" elsewhere in the Middle East is stupid. Even the Bush administration backed off that plan this week.

Beinhart and his supporters are hoping that we can outflank the Republicans by picking up where they left off. Now, Democrats can say "yes" to the Crusade when the Republicans gave up in disgust.

This brings me to the second drawback of the Crusade. The uncomfortable fact remains that most Democrats don't want to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun. These people must be condemned as enemies within.

Matt Yglesias writes:

PACIFISTS AND ALTERNATIVES. Peter Beinart and Kevin Drum are both concerned about the influence of crypto-pacifist opponents of the Afghan War on the Democratic Party. Atrios, speaking up for a popular-front, "no enemies on the left" mentality, essentially dodges the issue...

Kevin Drum voices similar sentiments

If the Taliban's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 wasn't enough to justify military action, I'm not sure what is — and I think it's fair to say that anyone who loudly opposed the Afghanistan war is just flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all. If this represents a sizable wing of the Democratic party, it's a big problem for us. [Emphasis added]

Party purges are passé . The modern alternative is to marginalize anyone whose loyalty you question. As Atrios notes, it's often advantageous to associate your adversaries with an ideology generally regarded as insane, e.g. a pacifist foreign affairs policy or conspiracy theories about oil pipelines. The argument is as follows: the case for invading Afghanistan was very strong, anyone who doubts the legitimacy of the invasion might as well be a pacifist, and moreover, the Democrats are better off without these soft-headed peaceniks anyway.

Frankly, I'm shocked that this eminently reasonable post by Atrios touched off such controversy. People seem incensed at at the suggestion that there was anything morally complex about the invasion. Atrios' distinction between moral justification and national self-interest seems to have been overlooked. Some people opposed the war not because they doubted that US entitled to fight it, but because they didn't expect it to do any good. It is an open question whether the US is safer for having invaded Afghanistan. Even the strongest proponents of military force must consider whether their proposed just wars will accomplish their objectives.

My goal is not to argue about Afghanistan but to object to the sleazy rhetoric that Democrats are turning on each other. I expect better from allegedly hard-headed, realistic foreign policy wonks.

Comments

[Hal]

"I expect better from allegedly hard-headed, realistic foreign policy wonks."

Why? It's pretty clear what's going on, and quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't descended to an even lower state of affairs.

[djw]

Yes yes yes, precisely.

[revere]

Probably lost among the many, many replies to Atrios's post, in my view he did indeed (almost) nail it. I'll get to the "almost" in a minute but first I'd like to demur slightly from Lindsay's post here and Hal's comment. One of Atrios's main points is that this is a long overdue debate amongst ourselves. If the occasion for it is an attempt to marginalize a view that is deemed politically inconvenient by some Democrats all the better. It forces the issue. I note that both Yglesias and Drum are pretty old school, i.e., chronically loser, Democrats, and I say this as a matter of fact, not as derision. Speaking Truth to Power is an important objective. But so is Speaking Truth to Each Other. That takes time and it takes effort. Atrios is making a plea for both.

I would say to Hal I don't think it really is clear what is going on. Clarity of thought is just the problem. Hence the requirement for real engagement on this issue. And to Lindsay I would say that interpreting it just as an effort to marginalize also misses this important point of Atrios. I agree that the Drum-Yglesias-Beinart-etc. positions are contrary to that of most mainstream Democrats but also to most people in this country. If no one had beat the drums of war I don't think there would have been a majority spontaneously marching in the parade anyway.

Where I take some issue with Atrios is that I also don't think that the question of justification can be left out of the conversation. It's already part of the conversation, including his, if only to argue against it. So I will recap here what I said there, as my small part in what I hope will be a more general multilog.

(1) This is just a question, Atrios seems to say, of choosing the best option (for whom? the best national option? why would the best national option be necessarily the best option)? Let me put it another way: historical examples where the use of coercive force as an instrument of national policy have turned out to the be best moral option are hard to come by or even ones where it is the best option with respect to some crude or sophisticated notion of real politik. I am assuming this is true and should be prepared to marshal arguments as part of the conversation. But if it is true, that means the burden is always on those who choose to use this policy, not on those of us who believe it nets out minus in the long run. But clearly this is a big issue. It is discussed in Jonathan Schell's book, Unconquerable World, which I recommend.

(2) I do not agree with Atrios that the question of justification isn't the main point. Maybe it isn't his (or my) preoccupation, but it is for many. Living near Irish South Boston, it was crystal clear to me that Bush's claim to attack any country that harbored or gave material support to terrorists was a bald face lie, since there are many in South Boston who openly support the IRA. Nor did I expect US bombing raids on the militia areas of Montana or northern Wisconsin where the posse comitatus hangs out. Attacking Afghanistan and its Taliban rulers had nothing to do with the proposition that any territory that harbored terrorists was fair game. It should be a topic of conversation what it did have to do with, and we may have to argue out whether it was a general feeling of acting out rage and revenge, wagging the dog, securing oil pipelines or whatever the explanation du jour might be. I think it is a legitimate topic of conversation.

My two cents (worth even less with the fall of the dollar).

[Earl]

Drum says: If the Taliban's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 wasn't enough to justify military action, I'm not sure what is — and I think it's fair to say that anyone who loudly opposed the Afghanistan war is just flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all. If this represents a sizable wing of the Democratic party, it's a big problem for us.

This gets weaker when you factor in that there is at least some evidence that Afghanistan was a planned first step before 9/11. See:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0201/ridgeway.php
just for one story, I'm sure there are better ones. Good going spreading this story, it's obviously very complicated and I don't even know exactly where I sit on it, except that I, honestly, lean toward being one of Drum's "flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all." What can I say? I believe Eisenhower. I gotta go to Drum and yell for a minute…

[bob mcmanus]

K Brennan

I keep spreading BOP around, they are trying to find a way to use the umm, diversity in the Democratic Party to its advantage. I am confused and conflicted on this issue, but hey, having a Blue-State mind and a Red-State Heart, I have been confused and conflicted since 1967.

"I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." as my good pal Will Rogers used...wait, I am not that old. The other party does not have these conflicts, which is why they are the other party, but not why they have power.

[dstein]

Of course. "Serious" means who can kill the most people while keeping a straight face. There is a lot of serious policy that involves treaties and deals and such, but that no longer counts. If you aren't willing to kill a lot of people, you aren't welcome into the debate. In the crudest form, we get "you're happy with a dictator in power!" against all those who aren't serious enough to get blood everywhere. But that's foreign policy in the 9/11 world. Killers everywhere, so we have to kill 'em first. If the peace movement is going to make a comeback, its not going to be by claiming it can kill more people in a more ruthless fashion. It's a debate that not only will we never win, but will actually result in the loss of a lot of lives as well as marginalization in other realms of policy.

[ray]

Problem is: democrats are too cowardly to see that they could carry out a crusade against "islamofascism" without guns.

Other problem is: liberals are too squeamish to confront the fact that, if we really want to root out islamofascism (can we just call it 'islamism', as people in muslim countries do?), we have to make sure that large swaths of the culture that supports it have to die.

I mean that we have to talk about cultural re-engineering here; we have to destroy certain aspects of certain cultures (as we have been doing with our own).

The response to islamism has to take a form more extreme than guns, in other words.

[Will]

Generally speaking, it strikes me that there were two varieties of instinctual responses to 9/11. Some people said, "Someone has to die." Others said, "How do we prevent another?"
The "has to die" crowd was by-and-large in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan, and so were parts of the "...prevent another" group.
But when someone says, "no wait, maybe we shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan." To a lot of people that sounds an awful lot like, "No one needed to die in response to 9/11."

[Marquis_de_Sod]

I think the following is important to keep in mind, particularly as a counter to self-appointed vanguards of global democarcy:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/2003-09-29a.html

[A Hermit]

David Neiwert has a typically well thought out post on this debate here:

http://tinyurl.com/45xt8

His conclusion (there's lots more, but this is nice summing up):

"No one is saying the Beinarts and Drums of the world don't have anything to contribute. What Beinart is explicitly saying is the reverse: That the Michael Moores and MoveOn folks have no value to the party.

So really, what doesn't help matters is evading the issue by implying the people who opposed the Iraq war -- that is, the people who were right -- not only are unqualified to contribute, but must be evicted from the ranks of liberalism. That, in fact, is the opposite of an honest conversation."