In
the heat of Iraq the neoconservatives are seeing their visions of
Pax Americana turn into nightmares and headaches. But they are not
alone. Liberal hawks like Ivo Daalder, Robert Kerrey, and Will
Marshall also find themselves discredited as the quagmire in Iraq
swallows up all their arguments supporting the invasion and
occupation.
Without the support of the liberals, President George W. Bush’s
plan to invade and occupy Iraq may have foundered in Congress. The
support of our closest allies and the United Nations wasn’t as
important as was the buy-in by Democratic Party leaders. In the
lead-up to the war, President Bush also received critical support
from well-known writers and analysts who hailed from the
center-left.
Brandishing arguments that the invasion of Iraq would spark a
democratic revolution in the greater Middle East, the neocons
managed to forge a powerful political coalition that sidelined
Republican realists like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft as well
as anti-war Democrats like Robert Byrd and Paul Wellstone. As the
invasion plans advanced, both the neocons and the liberal hawks
dismissed the opponents of the war as being reflexively pacifist
and hopelessly naïve.
Two Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letters in March
2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was
justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by
the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. PNAC and
the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of
preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy.
With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those
hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit
strategy in Iraq. In their March 19th
letter, PNAC stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq
for the long haul: "Everyone--those who have joined the coalition,
those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action,
and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors--must
understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and
will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long
as it takes."
Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson,
Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen
Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC’s first
letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of
the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National
Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to
Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and
Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton’s top adviser
on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg,
Clinton's deputy national security adviser and heard of foreign
policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by PNAC
on March 28 called for broader international support for
reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, brought
together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another
Brookings foreign policy scholar, Michael O’Hanlon.
The PNAC letters clearly demonstrated the willingness of liberal
hawks to bolster the neocon’s overarching agenda of Middle East
restructuring. But it was not the first time that leading
Democrats joined hands with the neocons. In late 2002 PNAC’s Bruce
Jackson formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that
brought together such Democrats as Senator Joseph Lieberman;
former Senator Robert Kerrey, the president of the New School
University who now serves on the 9/11 Commission; Will Marshall of
the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership
Council; and former U.S. Representative Steve Solarz. The neocons
also reached out to Democrats through a sign-on letter to the
president organized by the Social Democrats/USA, a neocon
institute that has played a critical role in shaping the National
Endowment for Democracy in the early 1980s and in mobilizing labor
support for an interventionist foreign policy.
The liberal hawks not only joined with the neocons to support the
war and the post-war restructuring but have published their own
statements in favor of what is now widely regarded as a morally
bankrupt policy agenda. Perhaps the clearest articulation of the
liberal hawk position on foreign and military policy is found in
an October 2003 report by the Progressive Policy Institute, which
is a think tank closely associated with the Democratic Leadership
Council. The report, entitled
Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security
Strategy, endorsed the invasion of Iraq, “because the previous
policy of containment was failing,” and Saddam Hussein’s
government was “undermining both collective security and
international law.”
PPI President Will Marshall said that the progressive
internationalism strategy draws “a sharp distinction between this
mainstream Democratic strategy for national security and the far
left's vision of America's role in the world. In this document we
take issue with those who begrudge the kind of defense spending
that we think is necessary to meet our needs, both at home and
abroad; with folks who seem to reflexively oppose the use of
force; and who seem incapable of taking America's side in
international disputes.”
An open question facing the presumptive Democratic Party
leadership and the presumptive party nominee John Kerry is whether
they will align themselves with the militaristic and supremacist
foreign policy advocated by the liberal hawks. Kerry, a member of
the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, has thus far failed
to outline a national security policy that sets him apart from
such discredited liberal hawks as Bob Kerrey and Will Marshall.
Tom Barry is policy director
of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), online at
www.irc-online.org.
