Liberals' Dilemma

Kevin Drum writes about pro-war liberal Peter Beinart's new book and is a bit confounded. Beinart makes a cardinal point:

A November 2005 M.I.T. study...found that only 59 percent of Democrats — as opposed to 94 percent of Republicans — still approved of America's decision to invade Afghanistan. And only 57 percent of Democrats — as opposed to 95 percent of Republicans — supported using U.S. troops to "destroy a terrorist camp." George W. Bush, in other words, has used the war on terror to cover such a multitude of sins that for many liberals the whole idea of focusing the nation's energies on defeating global jihad (whether you call that effort the "war on terror" or something else) has fallen into disrepute. Just as Vietnam turned liberals against the cold war, Iraq has now turned them against the war on terror.

Which Drum notes would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if true, though Drum believes this may be overstating the conondrum just a bit. But Drum goes on to demonstrate that he himself may be suffering a bit from Bush-Derangement-Syndrome, though not as badly as pickled-brain delirium-tremens specimens like Murtha. Drum questions Beinart's central thesis that:

we need to engage more energetically with the war on terror and criticize illiberal regimes more harshly.

Maybe so. But this is something that's nagged at me for some time. On the one hand, I think Beinart is exactly right. For example, should I be more vocal in denouncing Iran? Sure. It's a repressive, misogynistic, theocratic, terrorist-sponsoring state that stands for everything I stand against. Of course I should speak out against them.

And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration's determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can't be trusted to act wisely.

So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little. And Beinart is right: there's a sense in which that betrays my own liberal ideals. But he's also wrong, because like it or not, my words — and those of other liberals — would end up being used to advance George Bush's distinctly illiberal ends. And I'm simply not willing to be a pawn in the Bush administration's latest marketing campaign.

Here Drum is confused because he accepts the premise: "[the]Bush administration's determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike" without giving credit that it might be a way to force concessions from Iran. Then Drum says "Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can't be trusted to act wisely." without realizing the naivete of his own words.

Doesn't the sentence above contain presuppositions which discount the administrations' successes and, because of the Iraqi debacle, consider the new Rice condominium all of a kind with the previous ascendancy of Rumsfeld/Cheney/Feith/Wolfowitz?

Doesn't Drum extend the administration's shortcomings over one segment of US foreign policy, albeit the defining one for his first term, across the board so that the liberal moral sense is blunted because of political outrage?

Drum has fallen into the trap of defining himself partly by the overwhelmingly hysterical tone of the "nutroots" on the left into an instinctive mistrust of EACH and EVERY Bush foreign policy demarche.

When the US faces a monstrous threat worldwide geographically and religiously, if not militarily, as extensive as the Cold War, should the liberals accuse a Republican administration of bad faith on EACH and EVERY policy they disagree with?

The liberals have more than a moral dilemma, they have a geopolitical problem with REALPOLITIK, and in demonstrating that they can be serious in projecting America's power without falling prey to populist outcries on the ultra-left.