Signs of Brainpower in Dem Foreign Policy Circles?

Former Dems like myself remember when the Democrats did possess and profess a real foreign policy, way back before Clinton's "we wanna be loved" hyperlegalistic political rectitude and Jimmy Carter's feckless summiteering at Camp David combined with his general incompetence domestically and across the foreign policy board, which earned him a dubious Nobel Prize. BTW, Carter in a sense brought the debacle of Iran to the world stage when a brain-dead feminist leftoid named Patricia headed the Human Rights Bureau of the State Department and wrote "NO!!!" with her lipstick across a paper advocating the sale of rubber bullets to the Shah's Police Depts. This was in line with Jimmy's girlie-man self-righteous ninnification of foreign policy, unparalleled since Wilson's debacle in failing to get the US into the League of Nations after Versailles [which coincidentally, got this eff-up Prez a dubious Nobel Peace Prize like his eff-up successor Jimmy Carter]. Subsequently, the Shah's police killed about 400 students with non-rubber bullets---the bazaaris threw up their hands in frustration, the mullahs moved forward as a semi-sane alternative, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So insane mid-level State Dept civil servants can have influence, though almost never for good, if they are political appointees with an idiotic agenda.

But I digress.

Jackson Diehl points out that the Democratic Party is not completely dominated by girlie men like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and John Murtha [never mind the few ultra-left insaniacs like Rangel and Conyers and Waters and Boxer].

Though you'd never know it from surfing the Internet, there exists in the Democratic Party a substantial body of politicians and policymakers who believe the U.S. mission in Iraq must be sustained until it succeeds; who want to intensify American attempts to spread democracy in the greater Middle East; and who think that the Army needs to be expanded to fight a long war against Islamic extremism.

So there are non Self-Destructive Democrats alive and well among the rubble of the rock-throwing rabble?

No, I'm not talking about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who wants to quickly abandon Iraq, regardless of the consequences; or Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who recently issued a "Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World" that does not include the word "democracy."

We know all about the "America First" Know-Nothing Left and how it dominates discourse on a daily basis among the cocoon-dwellers of the NYT left and the LAT screech-screamers with a Hollyweird megaphone substance-abuser cokehead attytood, but what about people actually elected to office in non-goofy constituencies?

This is about a coalition of mostly younger foreign affairs professionals who held mid-level positions at the State Department and the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and who have spent the past several years formulating a distinctly Democratic response to the post-Sept. 11 era -- as opposed to a one-dimensional critique of President Bush or Iraq. Now they are beginning to gravitate toward some of the centrist Democrats who -- unlike Pelosi or Reid -- might actually emerge as serious presidential candidates in 2008, such as former Virginia governor Mark Warner, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

As a Rumsfeld-despising independent with strong cultural biases toward conservatism, but a political soft spot for constructive diplomacy, I want to read a centrist book:

This month they published a fascinating book that lays out what the foreign policy of a winning campaign by one of those Democrats -- or perhaps Hillary Clinton -- could look like. Sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is an outgrowth of the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), it's called "With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty."

Like most of its authors, editor Will Marshall, a DLC founder who now heads the policy institute, sees himself as reviving the foreign policy of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, who formulated the Democratic response to the totalitarian menace of communism. Jihadism, Marshall says, requires a similar exercise of intellectual muscle. "Democrats have always been at our best when we have defended democratic values against illiberal ideologies," Marshall told me last week. "When we do that we can appeal to a broader public, not only at home but globally."

As Marshall sees it, the rapidly sinking popularity of Bush and the Republican Congress provides Democrats with "their first real opportunity since 9/11 to make the case on national security." The paradox is that Bush has appropriated some of the central themes of the Truman-Kennedy foreign policy -- above all, the emphasis on the global promotion of freedom. Bush has poisoned grass-roots Democratic support for democracy promotion: The book quotes a German Marshall Fund survey showing that Democrats now oppose it by 50 to 43 percent, while Republicans favor it by a margin of 76 to 19.

So Democrats have to start by "reclaiming our own ground," Marshall says. His book proposes two important ways to do that. First, Democrats can clean up the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons, and restore America's reputation as the world's foremost defender of human rights. They can also end Bush's cynical policy of demanding democracy from enemy regimes such as Iran and Syria while tolerating the continued autocracy of such friends as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In an essay laying out a "grand strategy for the Middle East," former NSC official Kenneth M. Pollack proposes that a Democratic administration take a simple but crucial step that Bush has eschewed: directly linking the $2 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt to the implementation of "a long term plan for political and economic changes."

Okay, but every modern Egyptologist knows that pressure on Egypt without pressure on Israel is useless, especially if we can't even get Iraq back up off the canvas to keep on punching until the end of the fifteenth round. And Pollack is a cryto-Israeli lobby asset, so will any linkage ever take place?

Pollack and his fellow Democrats acknowledge, no liberal policy in the Middle East will work if Iraq fails. While Democrats differ over whether the invasion was right, notes an introduction by Marshall and Jeremy Rosner, both national interests and national honor demand that "we not abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and sectarian violence."

"The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal," they say. "Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence."

Are those Democrats talking? Yes, indeed: Marshall's group also has ideas on how Democrats can build stronger ties to the Republican-dominated military, revitalize NATO and the United Nations, and reverse Bush's tax cuts in order to modernize and expand the Army. Don't be surprised if, after all the Internet noise fades away, such ideas are at the center of the next presidential campaign.

I certainly hope so, because the closest thing to a foreign policy thought-process emanating from the HuffNPuff end of the ultra-left sounds just like his capitalist ethnic kin in South Korea to North Korean tyrant Kim Jung-Il---abject quavering feminized submissiveness begging forgiveness for our material success and wishing to pay reparations for daring to defending ourselves against a worldwide terrorist conspiracy.

Maybe South Korea should send Jimmy Carter up to Pyongyang to get another promise of a nuclear "freeze" as the supplicant ex-Prez did in 1994 with such astounding success that the North Korean arsenal is going to approach a couple dozen soon.

But again I digress.