[Marxism] The Democratic Party's imperialist past

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(George Packer is a high-profile member of the Cruise-Missile left who 
has made his arguments in the NY Times Magazine and other such venues. 
He is on the editorial board of Dissent Magazine. As Woody Allen said in 
"Annie Hall", "I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed 
Dysentery.")


A DEMOCRATIC WORLD
by GEORGE PACKER
Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?
New Yorker Magazine, Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23

(clip)

Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on 
the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early 
years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist 
movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It 
draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism 
and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the 
liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. 
Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t 
enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a 
Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the 
simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents 
of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply 
negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so 
vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation 
against any international control has turned to the battered and 
despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed 
political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, 
self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.

Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to 
realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalism—a 
struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed 
states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes 
sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar 
generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coöperation. 
Daalder said, “The fundamental challenge—just as the fundamental 
challenge in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 in France and Italy was to provide 
Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to 
Communism, to defeat it politically—is to provide people in the Islamic 
world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they 
have only despair.” He pointed out that America now spends forty times 
more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid 
goes to Israel and Egypt. “This is like the new Cold War, and we’ve got 
to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest,” he said.

As it happens, an increasing number of Democrats are pursuing this 
theme. Wesley Clark talks about a “new Atlantic Charter” that would make 
nato the first resort of American military power, starting in Iraq. 
“Uncertainties, nations looking for leadership, a multidimensional 
challenge on a global scale—all of that is similar” to the early Cold 
War, he told me. “As is the indefinite duration of the challenge.” Clark 
argued that nato’s war in Kosovo, which he conducted as Supreme Allied 
Commander, could become the basis for a new foreign policy. “You could 
call it efficient multilateralism—the recognition that if you link 
diplomacy, law, and force, you can achieve decisive results without 
using decisive force.”

Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, has for some time advocated the 
extension of nato forces in Kabul to the whole of Afghanistan, and he 
recently called for expanding public diplomacy in the Muslim world and 
imposing international sanctions against countries and institutions that 
fund terrorism, a money flow that the Bush Administration has had little 
success in shutting off. In a recent debate, Kerry said, “Most 
importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East 
economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced, 
because otherwise we’re inviting a clash of civilizations.” Senator John 
Edwards, of North Carolina, proposes publishing an annual list of 
dissidents imprisoned around the world, and forming an organization of 
Western democracies and Arab countries moving toward liberalization 
which would be modelled on efforts to reform the former Eastern Bloc. 
Invoking Truman and Marshall, Senator Biden talks about a Prevention 
Doctrine: long-term engagement in troubled regions to head off threats 
before they lead to war—for example, by funding programs to destroy 
nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. (The Bush Administration’s 
remarkably sluggish approach to securing “loose nukes” is one 
consequence of a policy aimed narrowly at terrorists and their state 
sponsors, like cards in a deck.) All these Democrats advocate a domestic 
policy that would acknowledge the reality of wartime, including 
alternative energy, tax fairness, and greater spending on security. But 
Biden reminded me, “It took the Democratic Party after World War II six 
years to get that figured out.”

If you’re paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders 
straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America’s 
world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy 
are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, 
politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the 
struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading 
Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq’s success than 
they did in opposing the Administration’s reconstruction package. A 
broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for 
Democrats out of power, it’s all the harder to persuade a skeptical 
public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability 
to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared 
with “axis of evil,” “efficient multilateralism” is a pallid phrase. 
Millions won’t rally behind the banner of the Prevention Doctrine. 
Spending twenty million dollars on schools in Afghanistan is a harder 
sell than spending four hundred billion on defense; fear is more 
compelling than foresight. Biden admitted, “This is a place where the 
President’s bragging to me, ‘Mr. Chairman, I don’t do nuance’—where he 
has an advantage.”

full: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1
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