[Marxism] Democratic Party hawks

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050829&s=berman

The Strategic Class
by ARI BERMAN

[from the August 29, 2005 issue]

In July 2002, at the first Senate hearing on Iraq, then-Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chair Joe Biden pledged his allegiance to Bush's war.
Ever since, the blunt-spoken Biden has seized every opportunity to dismiss
antiwar critics within his own party, vocally denouncing Bush's handling of
the war while doggedly supporting the war effort itself. Biden carried this
message into the Kerry campaign as the candidate's closest foreign policy
confidant, and a few days after announcing his own intention to run for the
presidency in 2008, he gave a major speech at the Brookings Institution in
which he criticized rising calls for withdrawal as a "gigantic mistake."

The Democrats' speculative front-runner for '08, Hillary Clinton, has
offered similarly hawkish rhetoric. "If we were to artificially set a
deadline of some sort, that would be like a green light to the terrorists,
and we can't afford to do that," Clinton told CBS in February. Instead, she
recently proposed enlarging the Army by 80,000 troops "to respond to
threats wherever danger lies." Clinton, a member of the Armed Services
Committee, appears more comfortable accommodating the President's Iraq
policy than opposing it, and her early and sustained support for the war
(and frequent photo-ops with the troops) supposedly reinforces her national
security credentials.

The prominence of party leaders like Biden and Clinton, and of a slew of
other potential prowar candidates who support the US invasion and
occupation of Iraq, presents the Democrats with an odd dilemma: At a time
when the American people are turning against the Iraq War and favor a
withdrawal of US troops, and British and American leaders are publicly
discussing a partial pullback, the leading Democratic presidential
candidates for '08 are unapologetic war hawks. Nearly 60 percent of
Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three
percent want US troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent
National Journal "insiders poll" found that a similar margin of Democratic
members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that
America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is
considered beyond the pale of "sophisticated" debate.

The continued high standing of the hawks has been made possible by their
enablers in the strategic class--the foreign policy advisers, think-tank
specialists and pundits. Their presumed expertise gives the strategic class
a unique license to speak for the party on national security issues. This
group has always been quietly influential, but since 9/11 it has risen in
prominence, egging on and underpinning elected officials, crowding out
dissenters within its own ranks and becoming increasingly ideologically
monolithic. So far its members remain unchallenged. It's more than a little
ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats
how to get it right.

It's helpful to think of the Democratic strategic class as a pyramid. At
the top are politicians like Biden and Clinton, forming the most important
and visible public face. Just below are high-ranking former government
officials, like UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and Assistant Secretary of State Jamie Rubin. These are
the people who devise and execute foreign policy and frame the substance of
the message. Virtually all the top advisers supported the Iraq War;
Holbrooke, who's been dubbed the "closest thing the party has to a
Kissinger" by one foreign policy analyst, even tacked to Bush's right,
arguing in February 2003 that anything less than an invasion of Iraq would
undermine international law. Many of the officials held high-ranking
positions in the Kerry campaign. Holbrooke, frequently mentioned as a
potential Secretary of State, urged Kerry to keep his vision on Iraq
"deliberately vague," the New York Observer reported. Rubin appeared on
television sixty times in May 2004 alone. Nine days before the election,
Holbrooke addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and
reiterated Kerry's support for the war and occupation, belittled European
negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program and endorsed the Israeli
separation wall. Hardly a Dove Among Dems' Brain Trusters, read a headline
from the Forward newspaper.

Underneath the top policy officials are the anointed regional experts, who
play an instrumental role in legitimizing the politicians' arguments and
drumming up support inside the Beltway for impending conflicts in faraway
lands. Brookings fellow and former CIA official Kenneth Pollack's book The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq played precisely that
function for wavering Democratic elites in the run-up to war, turning "more
doves into hawks than Richard Perle, Laurie Mylroie and George W. Bush
combined," wrote Slate's Chris Suellentrop in March 2003. "In Washington,
it's not uncommon to hear fence-straddlers qualify their ambivalence about
an Iraq war with the sentiment, 'Of course, I haven't read the Pollack book
yet.'"

The likes of Pollack are greatly bolstered by a second front of national
security specialists at prestigious think tanks like Brookings, the Council
on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center
for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for American
Progress. Though they often toil in obscurity, the think-tank officials
form a necessary echo chamber for the political class, appearing on
television and writing issue briefs while providing, through their
organizations, a platform on which candidates can appear "robust" in the
national security realm. As one example, Stephen Walt, a leading foreign
policy expert and academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,
says that "Brookings was basically supportive of the war in Iraq. If
Brookings is signing on to a major foreign policy initiative of a
Republican Administration, that doesn't give the Democratic mainstream much
room to mount a really forceful critique of the incumbent foreign policy."
Much of Kerry's campaign platform--with its calls to add 40,000 troops to
the military, preserve the doctrine of pre-emptive war and stay the course
in Iraq--read as if it had been lifted verbatim from a Brookings strategy memo.

At the bottom of the pyramid are the liberal hawks in the punditocracy,
figures like New Republic editor Peter Beinart, Time writer Joe Klein and
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These pundits, along with purely
partisan outfits like the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive
Policy Institute (PPI), help to both set the agenda and frame the debate.
The journalistic hawks churn out the agitprop that the more respectable
think tanks turn into "serious" scholarship, some of which eventually
becomes policy, or at least talking points, when adopted by the politicians.

Central to the liberal hawks' mission is a challenge to other Democrats
that they too must become "national security Democrats," to borrow a phrase
coined by Holbrooke. To talk about national security a Democrat must be a
national security Democrat, and to be a national security Democrat, a
Democrat must enthusiastically support a militarized "war on terror,"
protracted occupation in Iraq, "muscular" democratization and ever-larger
defense budgets. The liberal hawks caricature other Democrats just as
Republicans long stereotyped them. The pundits magnify the perception that
Democrats are soft on national security, and they influence how consultants
view public opinion and develop the message for candidates. In that sense,
the bottom of the pyramid is always interacting with the top. It matters
little that people like Beinart have no national security experience--as
long as the hawks identify themselves as national security Democrats,
they're free to play the game.

Today, despite the growing evidence that the Bush Administration's actions
in Iraq have been a colossal--some would say criminal--failure, what's
striking is how much of the pyramid remains essentially in place. As the
Iraqi insurgency turned increasingly violent, and the much-hyped WMDs never
turned up, the hawks attempted a bit of self-evaluation. Slate and The New
Republic both hosted windy pseudo-mea culpa forums. Of the eight liberal
hawks invited by Slate, journalist Fred Kaplan remarked, "I seem to be the
only one in the club who's changed his mind." TNR's confession was even
more limited, with Beinart admitting that he overcame his distrust of Bush
so that he could "feel superior to the Democrats." Pollack took part in
both forums, and then earned five figures for an Atlantic Monthly essay on
"what went wrong." Even at their darkest hour, the strategic class found a
way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members
had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning,
too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in
Iraq. The hawks decided it was acceptable to criticize the execution of the
war, but not the war itself--a view Kerry found particularly attractive. A
"yes, but" or "no, but" mentality defined this thinking. Having
subsequently pinned the blame for Kerry's defeat largely on the political
consultants or the candidate himself, the strategic class has moved forward
largely unscarred.

Biden and Clinton still have more influence than antiwar politicians like
Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold. No one has replaced Holbrooke or Albright.
Pollack continues to thrive at Brookings and, despite never visiting the
country, has a new book out about Iran. Shortly after the election, Beinart
penned a 5,683-word essay calling on hawkish Democrats to repudiate "softs"
like MoveOn.org and Michael Moore; the essay won Beinart--already a fellow
at Brookings--a $650,000 book deal and high-profile visibility on the
Washington ideas circuit. Subsequently a statement of leading policy
apparatchiks on the PPI publication Blueprint challenged fellow Democrats
to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle
of the party. Replace the words "Al Qaeda" with "Soviet Union" and the
essay seemed straight out of 1947-48; the militarized post-9/11 climate of
fear had reincarnated the cold war Democrat. A number of leading
specialists signed a letter by the neoconservative Project for the New
American Century asking Congress to boost the defense budget and increase
the size of the military by 25,000 troops each year over the next several
years. The "Third Way" group of conservative Senate Democrats recently
introduced a similar proposal.

"There's an approach which says, 'Let's raise the stakes and call,'" says
former Senator Gary Hart, a rare voice of principled opposition in the
party today. "That if Republicans want a ten-division Army, let's be for a
twelve-division Army. I think that's just nonsense, frankly. It's stupid
policy. Trying to get on the other side of the Republicans is folly, both
politically and substantively."

If Hart is correct, then why does so much of the Democratic strategic class
march in lockstep? There's no simple answer. The insularity of Washington,
pressures of careerism, fear of appearing soft and the absence of
institutional alternatives all contribute to a limiting of the debate. Bill
Clinton's misguided political dictum that the public "would rather have
somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right" applies
equally to the strategic class.

"Everybody's on the make," says Steve Clemons of the New America
Foundation, who led the fight against John Bolton from his blog, The
Washington Note. "They're all worried about their next government job.
People pull their punches or try to craft years in advance what sort of
positions they're gonna be up for. The culture of Washington is very
risk-averse." Adds Walt, "It's pretty hard to go wrong right now taking a
hard-line position. There's enough places or institutions that will take
care of you. Outside of academia, if you take positions on the other side,
there's just nowhere near the level of institutional support."

Those insiders who doubt the wisdom of a hawkish course often get the cold
shoulder if they stray too far from the strategic line. After criticizing
the rush to war, Ivo Daalder of Brookings became the foreign policy point
man for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign. Many of Daalder's colleagues at
Brookings and elsewhere sharply criticized Dean, and afterward unnamed
Democratic insiders bragged to The New Republic that Dean's advisers would
never work again. That, of course, didn't happen, but Daalder and others
have since tempered their opposition rhetoric. Today Daalder blames the
antiwar movement for Dean's defeat and calls for more troops in Iraq.

For daring to tackle the liberal hawk consensus in his recent book America
Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven, who is
British and until recently a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, got lumped
into the "anti-American" category by Jonathan Tepperman of the Council on
Foreign Relations in the New York Times Book Review. "It is hardly an
anti-American position to suggest that Americans today can learn much from
the work of great Americans of the past like Reinhold Niebuhr and J.W.
Fulbright," Lieven wrote in reply. He has since left Carnegie and joined
Clemons at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank that has
acquired a maverick reputation. New America, along with places like the
Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy--an anti-imperial umbrella of
thinkers on the left, right and center--now form a sort of dissident
establishment.

Owing to their distinction, the Democratic strategic class, consisting of
the party's leading foreign policy thinkers, could have provided a powerful
check on a reckless Administration intent on rushing to war. Instead, it
bears partial responsibility for the war's costs: more than 1,800 American
fatalities, thousands of maimed and wounded US soldiers, many more dead
Iraqi civilians, spiraling worldwide anti-Americanism, surging world oil
prices, a new breeding ground for Al Qaeda, multiplying terror attacks
abroad and mounting economic insecurity at home.

At the same time, talking tough on Iraq has been a disastrous moral,
tactical and political miscalculation for Democrats. A recent Democracy
Corps poll found that Iraq tops the list of factors motivating voter
discontent toward President Bush. "This is a country almost settled on the
need for change," political consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville
write. Yet Democrats will only prosper if they pose "sharp choices,"
something the strategic class has been unwilling or unable to do. A few
small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have
tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national
security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum
up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned
them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in
stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq
mistak

--

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