What the Democrats Have Regarding Security

[Timber Loftis]

A LENGTHY article from the NY Times Magazine addressing the ins and outs of what the Dems will do for National Security. They hope to quit being seen as weak or pacifist. They realize this is a huge issue for voters, and they want to overcome the party's peacenik image. Will they?

Enjoy.
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January 4, 2004
The Things They Carry
By JAMES TRAUB

I.

A few weeks ago, I asked Howard Dean how, given his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, he felt he could overcome the Democrats' reputation as the antiwar party. ''I think you're still in the old paradigm, which says that they're the party of strength and we're the party of weakness,'' Dean admonished me as I sat across from him on his campaign plane. The chaos in Iraq, he said, had upended the old stereotypes. In John F. Kennedy's day, Dean pointed out, the Democrats enjoyed the reputation as the party of resolution. ''I think this may be the year to regain it, oddly enough,'' Dean said. ''Oddly enough'' is right. It seems awfully unlikely that in the first presidential election since 9/11, against a president who has spent most of his administration carefully cultivating and reinforcing his role as commander in chief, the Democrats can regain the status as the party of national security, which they lost during the Vietnam War. But that is precisely what party strategists were hoping through the fall as American troops got caught in the mayhem of Iraq and the nation's standing in the world plummeted lower and lower. And they had reason to think so. A poll conducted in November by the nonpartisan PIPA-Knowledge Networks found that 42 percent of Americans said that the president's handling of Iraq decreased the likelihood of voting for him, versus 35 percent who said it had increased the likelihood. Another poll taken around the same time found that a majority of respondents believed that President Bush is ''too quick to use our military abroad'' and that he practices a ''go-it-alone foreign policy that hurts our relations with allies.'' Earlier, Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling and policy organization headed by the consultants James Carville and Robert Shrum and the pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, published a study with the following conclusion: ''When Democrats put out a clear message on national security, it now plays Bush's post-9/11, post-Iraq message to a draw.''

It's not just the war in Iraq that prompted these hopes of realignment; it's the Bush administration's penchant for bellicosity, its barely concealed contempt for the United Nations and for many of America's traditional allies, its apparent confusion about how to deal with North Korea. Even some traditional internationalist Republicans believed that the Bush administration had abandoned many of the central tenets of the last several generations of national security policy while squandering much of the global good will that came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And for the chief presidential candidates, or at least for Dr. Dean, for Gen. Wesley Clark and, intermittently, Senator John Kerry, the war in Iraq became the central metaphor for the larger failure of the Bush administration to make Americans feel safe in a deeply unsafe world -- the thin edge of the wedge that would dislodge ''the old paradigm.''

When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ''I'm not betting on it, and I'm hoping against it, but there's no indication that I should be expecting anything else.'' What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein's capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein's apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats -- and a considerable number of freshly polled voters -- that the party hadn't disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded.

II. [THE ALTERNATIVE -- TL]

In October, the Center for American Progress, a new liberal policy institute, held a two-day conference in Washington designed to lay out the foundations of an alternative, and politically viable, national security policy. The panels at the symposium (which was also sponsored by the Century Foundation and The American Prospect magazine) featured, in the main, nonideological figures offering sober and pragmatic counsel: reserve the right to act pre-emptively but don't make a doctrine of it; do peacekeeping right; focus on ''failed'' states like Afghanistan and Sudan; devise carrots as well as sticks to deal with state sponsors of terrorism; forge a global strategy to deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

For the keynote speaker, the sponsors invited not a conventional liberal but Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's hawkish national security adviser, a fervently anti-Soviet Polish emigre reviled during the cold war by the Democratic Party's left wing. I expected Brzezinski to be at least mildly sympathetic to the Bush administration. I was wrong. ''American power worldwide is at its historic zenith,'' he told his audience, which consisted largely of technocrats and midlevel Clinton administration officials. And yet, he noted: ''American global political standing is at its nadir. Why?'' First, Brzezinski said, because of the ''paranoiac view of the world'' summed up in the expression -- a paraphrase of President Bush -- ''He who is not with us is against us.'' Second, because of ''a fear'' -- of terrorism -- ''that periodically verges on panic'' and is stoked by ''extremist demagogy.'' To Brzezinski, the Bush administration's unilateralism, and its militarism, constituted a radical break with a consensus that stretched across several generations and presumably included not only cold warriors like himself but also the liberals he once opposed, like Cyrus Vance, Carter's secretary of state.

More striking still was the closing speech delivered by Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who is often spoken of in Washington as a probable presidential candidate in 2008. Hagel sounded a decorous, Midwestern version of Brzezinski's rather frantic alarums. ''Crisis-driven coalitions of the willing by themselves are not the building blocks for a stable world,'' he said. And, ''Iraq alone cannot define our relationships.'' And even, ''Other countries have their own interests, and those interests need to be acknowledged and heard.'' Presumably that included France. Hagel also observed that ''the American image in the world is in need of immediate and long-term repair'' and suggested such instruments of ''soft power'' as educational and professional exchange programs, as well as increased language training for American students.

There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration's claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right -- but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.

III.
Brzezinski's question -- Why is so much of the world against us? -- is, in fact, the starting point for the Democratic critique of the Bush administration. The sheer velocity of the change from worldwide sympathy to worldwide antipathy is almost incredible, and while much of the new anger comes from the very nature of our superpower status, the conduct of the Bush administration has plainly had a lot to do with it as well. In an article in Newsweek on the eve of the war in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria, that magazine's foreign-policy analyst, pointed out that some nations offered America only quiet support on Iraq ''not because they fear Saddam Hussein but because they fear their own people.'' The Bush administration had asked a very great deal and offered less than nothing. Zakaria noted that ''with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.'' And of course the United States is now paying a price for that in Iraq, where it cannot find either enough foreign troops or funds to supplement its own.

Conservatives have a longstanding answer to the argument for multilateralism. As Condoleezza Rice, now Bush's national security adviser, wrote in a much discussed essay in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 campaign, ''The belief that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power'' proceeds from a deep discomfort with the fact of America's power. This discomfort is, in turn, the residuum of Vietnam. There's some truth to that claim. One Democratic policy figure I spoke to said, ''If you listen to the Democrats in Iowa, you sometimes get the impression that the U.N. is going to save us from the situation.'' And yet, at least when they're not preaching to the Iowan choir, Democrats generally use hardheaded, looking-out-for-No.-1 language that Rice herself would have trouble taking exception to. They forswear ''mushy multilateralism,'' in John Kerry's phrase, for what Senator Joe Lieberman calls ''muscular multilateralism'' -- multilateralism not as a source of legitimacy but as an instrument to advance our own interests.

The consequences of unilateralism in Iraq dominate the debate. Yet if you talk to Democratic policy experts, Iraq rarely appears as the country's top national security priority. In ''An American Security Policy,'' a study ordered by Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, and written by a group that included top former Clinton aides like William Perry, the former defense secretary; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, Iraq appears as only the fourth of six major areas of concern. The first is ''The Loose Nukes Crisis in North Korea,'' and the second is the overall problem of weapons of mass destruction in Russia, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere.

As Graham Allison, an expert in nonproliferation issues at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, says: ''Iraq was a Level 2 issue. The Level 1 issue is that a terrorist could detonate a nuclear bomb in New York City instead of flying two planes into the World Trade Center.'' Allison considers this eventuality ''more likely than not.'' He proposes a coalition of nuclear powers designed to ensure that all nuclear weapons, and all fissile material, are strictly controlled -- multilateralism at its most muscular. He says he believes that even countries like Iran (though not, perhaps, North Korea) could be persuaded to join. ''But you have to choose your priorities,'' he adds. ''You have to be willing to drop regime change in order to pursue something more important.''

Clearly, the policy makers in the administration do not agree that regime change and fighting proliferation are unrelated, and in recent weeks they have produced what they maintain is proof of their belief: Libya's agreement to abandon its unconventional weapons programs for fear (the administration says) of being the next Iraq. At the same time, the administration has starved the budget for nonproliferation measures. After first trying to zero-out the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides money to help the Russians keep their thousands of nuclear weapons secure, the administration ultimately agreed to keep financing steady at $451 million, or one-tenth the annual cost of the national missile-defense program.

All the major candidates continue to press the loose-nukes issue as an opportunity to demonstrate that the old distinction between hawk and dove is an artifact of another era. In a major foreign-policy address delivered last month, Dean accused the administration of being ''penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to addressing the weapons-proliferation threat'' and proposed a tripling of spending in the area -- an idea lifted from the hawkish ''American Security Policy'' document -- with an equal amount to come from America's allies.

The underlying critique offered by Democratic policy experts is that the Bush administration, for all its bluster about how 9/11 ''changed everything,'' has in fact not adapted to the transformed world into which it has been catapulted and is still chasing after the bad guys of an earlier era. The administration understands war, but not the new kind of multifaceted, globalized war that must be fought against a stateless entity. As Ashton B. Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, puts it, ''We've done one thing in one place'' -- or two, counting Afghanistan. What about the other things in the other places? What about diplomacy, for example? Do we have some means beyond threats of military action to induce Iran and Syria to stop sponsoring terrorists? Do we have some means of persuading the European allies to toughen judicial processes so that terrorism suspects can't walk away -- a United Nations treaty, for example?

It may very well be true, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying, that ''weakness is provocative,'' but so is belligerence. The administration's Hobbesian worldview is well suited to the task of fighting enemies, but not to the task of winning over the far greater number of skeptics and fence-sitters. The State Department asked a nonpartisan group to study American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world; the report, issued in October, concluded that ''a process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety.'' These were weapons we wielded boldly during the cold war; we allowed them to lapse in the 90's, when the only instrument that seemed to matter was the marketplace. The study found that the State Department has all of 54 genuine Arabic speakers, that outreach efforts rarely reach beyond capitals, that the American-studies centers that were once ubiquitous around the globe scarcely exist in the Arab and Muslim world.

The exact same case may be made in the matter of foreign aid, which has also dwindled away since the 60's. Not only does the United States spend far too little; the funds are not directed to the areas Americans are most worried about. The administration's Millennium Challenge Account program, which offers additional aid to democratizing countries, has been widely praised, but Robert Orr, another Clinton administration official, who now makes his home at the Kennedy School, says, ''The Millennium Challenge grant is only for high-end countries, none of which are involved with terrorism.'' What are we offering to countries like Pakistan or even Somalia? It turns out that we have allowed our aid capacity to shrink as drastically as our public diplomacy mechanisms have. ''We only have 2,000 people left with A.I.D.,'' Orr says, referring to the Agency for International Development. ''That's why we have to subcontract everything to the World Bank and the I.M.F. But they don't share our priorities about terrorism; we can't get them to invest in Afghanistan or Pakistan.''

Toward the end of our conversation, Dean said to me: ''The line of attack is not Iraq, though there'll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, 'What have you done to make us feel safer?' I'm going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,'' whom Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ''Our model is to get around the president's right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.''

IV.

When the Democratic candidates mention John Kennedy -- and they do so as often as possible -- they are not trying to evoke an image of youth and vigor, or even of commitment to social justice, as Bill Clinton was. No, they are trying to remind listeners of the last time the Democrats were considered the party of national security. In a major foreign-policy address, John Kerry summoned up the ghosts not only of Kennedy but of Truman and F.D.R. as leaders who ''understood that to make the world safe for democracy and individual liberty, we needed to build international institutions dedicated to establishing the rule of law over the law of the jungle.'' True enough, but the party's line of descent from those mid-20th-century heroes was shattered 35 years ago, and the question of patrimony remains bitterly contested.

It is useful, in this regard, to consider the career of Henry M. Jackson, the last of the so-called cold-war liberals. Jackson was a senator from Washington, a contemporary of Kennedy who shared Kennedy's liberalism but also his hard-line views on the Soviet Union. The Democrats got clobbered in the 1956 election, when their presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, who represented the liberal wing of the party, proposed ending the draft and unilaterally halting tests on the hydrogen bomb. Kennedy, Jackson and others began to chart a new direction right away by suggesting -- speciously, as it turned out -- that President Eisenhower had allowed a ''missile gap'' to open between American and Soviet forces. (Dean presumably hopes to emulate Kennedy's political success rather than his commitment to the truth.) There was nothing paradoxical about this Democratic stridency: one hallmark of the cold-war liberals was a chafing impatience toward the principle of ''containing,'' rather than challenging, the Russians. When Kennedy became president, he built up the stocks of Polaris subs and Minutemen missiles. (''Dr. Strangelove'' was released in 1964.)

After Kennedy's death, Jackson continued to carry the mantle of cold-war liberalism. He compared early protesters against the Vietnam War with Hitler's appeasers, and he championed virtually every new weapons system that came along. By 1968, however, when the Tet offensive began moving the Democratic Party sharply to the left on issues of war and peace, Jackson was increasingly isolated. In 1969, he led the charge for President Nixon's antiballistic missile. Virtually all Northern Democrats opposed the weapons system, which was given Congressional approval thanks to a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. The debate, as one of Jackson's biographers, Robert Gordon Kaufman, notes, ''symbolized the dramatic transformation since 1960 in the outlook of the Democratic Party on foreign policy and national defense.'' Liberal Democrats ''now considered that the prime danger to U.S. national security was the arrogance of American power rather than the menace of Soviet Communism.''

The Vietnam War spelled the end of cold-war liberalism. Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972 but lost to George McGovern, the leader of the peace wing, who had opposed almost all the weapons systems that Jackson supported. The battle inside the party continued with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, who divided his foreign-policy team between the dovish Vance and the hawkish Brzezinski; the contest reached its theatrical climax when Carter nominated Paul Warnke, a former McGovern adviser, as chief negotiator on the 1979 SALT II arms talks. Warnke had stated that he would be willing to make unilateral cuts to the American nuclear arsenal. Jackson, who opposed the negotiations altogether, used Senate hearings to depict the nominee as an enemy of military prepared-ness. He brought in witnesses from the Committee on the Present Danger, an assemblage of Democratic hawks, many of whom would soon be known as ''neoconservatives.'' Warnke was confirmed, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year derailed the arms talks and helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan years institutionalized the Republican advantage on national security issues. Reagan adopted a policy of saber-rattling toward the Soviets unheard of since the Kennedy administration. Many of the Democratic neocons defected to Reagan, though Jackson remained a Democrat, and a cold-war liberal, to the last. (He died in 1983.) The rest of the party opposed Reagan's verbal posturing, his ''anti-Communist'' proxy fights in places like Grenada and El Salvador and the enormous increases in defense spending that, combined with tax cuts, were producing enormous deficits. Democrats depicted the MX missile and then Star Wars as symbols of an unhinged determination to counter an increasingly feeble Soviet threat.

It remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact, spend the Soviets into the ground. Nevertheless, the cold war ended on the Republicans' watch, and so Reagan's unyielding stance was given much of the credit for bringing it to a close. And while the G.O.P. emerged from that era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of fecklessness -- a status brought home in the most mortifying possible manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

V.

The habits of thought shaped by the cold war appeared to become irrelevant almost as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. United States security was no longer threatened by a single foe apparently bent on countering America's every move; for a while it seemed that U.S. security was no longer threatened at all. Americans learned soon enough that the world would not permit this peaceful, mercantilist fantasy, but the great questions of war and peace that did arise revolved around humanitarian crises -- in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere -- rather than strategic ones. The burning issue of the day was summed up in the title of an article by Richard Haass, then a scholar at the Brookings Institution: ''What to Do With American Primacy.'' How, that is, was America to deploy its extraordinary power? How were we to adjudicate between the competing claims of ''interests'' and ''values''? Do we intervene to prevent genocide? What about subgenocidal violence? And if we intervene, do we operate through the U.N. Security Council or through a ''posse'' of our own devising?

The words ''dove'' and ''hawk'' took on entirely different meanings in the 90's, for it was the hardheaded realists, many on the right, who wanted to limit the use of force to the protection of key national interests and the morally driven idealists, many of them liberals, who favored intervention. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who remained chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first eight months of the Clinton administration, describes in his memoirs a briefing in which Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the United Nations and pushing for an American role in the wars inflaming the former Yugoslavia, burst out, ''What are you saving this superb military for if we can't use it?'' (Powell writes that he almost had an ''aneurysm.'') Albright cites the same story in her own memoirs to make a very different point, for she was a ''hawk'' on the Balkans, a liberal interventionist fighting what had become the institutional reticence of the military. During the 2000 campaign, Bush's foreign-policy advisers were much given to ridiculing Albright's description of America as ''the indispensable nation,'' and it was her brand of moral activism that Bush vowed to curtail.

The attacks of 9/11 ended the brief post-cold-war interval and recreated elements of both the psychological and the strategic environment of the cold-war 1960's. Once again, it was we who were targeted; once again, we would be engaged on many fronts against an ideologically committed foe. And Americans probably feel more vulnerable today than they have at any time since the depths of the cold war. President Clinton once observed that at such moments, Americans prefer a message that is ''strong and wrong'' to one that is ''weak and right.'' But Clinton, who inoculated the Democrats against attacks on so many domestic issues, never had the opportunity, or perhaps never saw the need, to do so in terms of national security. The terrorist attacks made the moral quandaries of the 90's look like luxuries and restored the old party stereotypes with a vengeance. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans enjoyed an astounding 40-point advantage on the question of which party was best at ''keeping America strong''; the election was understood as a referendum on national security policy, and the G.O.P. swept the board.

Democratic strategists initially expected to concede the issue of national security in 2004. Howard Dean said that he planned to conduct his campaign on ''balancing the budget and having a health insurance program for everybody.'' Other candidates, like Representative Richard Gephardt, barely mentioned foreign policy at all. But when Bush tried and failed to get a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, decisively alienating almost all of our European allies in the process, foreign policy was back in play. Candidates and their chief aides began beating a path to the well-padded refuges of Clinton administration officials -- the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy School. ''Everyone talks to Sandy Berger,'' Robert Orr says. ''But now they're calling the second-tier people like me.''

When Bush submitted a resolution to Congress authorizing his war aims in the fall of 2002, he posed the first litmus test on the use of force in the age of terror. (The war in Afghanistan had enjoyed near-universal support.) Whether out of conviction or a fear of failing that test, many leading Clinton administration officials, including some who considered Iraq a Level 2 issue, came out in favor of the war. And so, despite their misgivings, did Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Senator John Edwards. But Dean, out on the hustings, discovered that the war was extremely unpopular among many Democrats. Back in the fall, he supported a slightly more restrictive form of the resolution that ultimately passed Congress; now, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, he uncorked an applause line that reshaped the campaign: ''What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq.''

Dean had happened upon a very large gulf between the Democrats in Washington and many of the party's most passionately engaged members. He was already becoming the tribune of the virulently anti-Bush wing of the party on domestic policy, and now he plumbed equal depths on the question of the use of force. ''Dean made Iraq a political manhood test,'' laments Will Marshall, a well-known Democratic centrist and head of the Progressive Policy Institute. ''His conflation of anti-Bush sentiment and antiwar sentiment ratcheted the debate toward what has at least echoes of the old antiwar stance.'' By the time President Bush submitted his request for an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan in September, the politics of the war inside the party had shifted drastically. Conventional wisdom had it that no candidate seen as pro-war could get a foothold among the highly liberal primary voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, even though polls found that Democrats in both states preferred a candidate who had approved of the war but criticized its conduct. Kerry and Edwards voted against the appropriation, Gephardt and Lieberman for it. Lieberman found that he was encountering such hostile audiences in Iowa that he decided not to contest the caucuses there.

The litmus test for nomination, it seemed, was incompatible with the litmus test for election -- a predicament the Democrats knew all too well. And the candidates who tried to split the difference only confirmed the impression that the party was willing to play politics with national security. Democratic strategists began to use the expression ''heading over a cliff.'' And some of them began to cast about for a savior.

VI.

The opening speaker at the Center for American Progress's foreign-policy symposium was Gen. Wesley Clark, who had been invited long before he declared himself a candidate for president. Clark was speaking from New Hampshire, and he appeared on two giant screens. His hollow cheeks, his banked intensity, his palpable sense of solemnity and the sheer immensity of his image gave an air of almost desperate urgency to his words. He spoke angrily of the way Bush had destroyed the international relationships and undermined the institutions that previous presidents nurtured and that he himself, as NATO commander during the war in Kosovo, used as instruments to forge a sense of common purpose. The war in Iraq, he said, was a mistake of historic proportions -- ''a disastrous turn of events in our history.'' And then, his mien grave and gaunt, Clark said something that produced an audible murmur in the room: ''There is no way this administration can walk away from its responsibility for 9/11. You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers.''

This was not the Wesley Clark who struck such a spark of hope from both senior Democrats and ordinary voters when he joined the race only a month before. Theodore Sorenson, the Kennedy speechwriter, had introduced Clark by saying, ''He does not have to dress up as a flyboy to be called commander in chief.'' Clark was supposed to be the irrefutable answer to all those Rocky the Flying Squirrel jokes. He had fought bravely in Vietnam, as John Kerry had, but rather than going on to oppose the war, he had dedicated his life to the military, and he had capped his career by fighting and winning a war that exemplified the virtues of multilateralism. Clark's resume made him the object of wildly varying strands of political enthusiasm. The filmmaker Michael Moore, a self-proclaimed Dennis Kucinich Democrat, wrote an open letter in September urging Clark to run. ''The general versus the Texas Air National Guard deserter!'' Moore fantasized. ''I want to see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.'' And that soldier's soldier Col. David Hackworth -- Hack to Larry King and the CNN audience -- described Clark on his Web site as a fearless warrior and a brilliant thinker.

And yet here was the former Supreme Allied Commander positioning himself slightly to Howard Dean's left. Indeed, the central paradox of Clark's campaign, which in recent months has neither gained nor lost much altitude, and remains fixed in a flight path well below Dean's, is that a candidate whose chief virtue was his credibility on national security issues has proved to be such a peacenik. People around Clark disagree as to the source of his surprising politics. One figure who has given Clark substantial advice says that Clark has moved left owing to the ''political dynamic'' fostered by Dean. Clark himself says that he's just angry at the commander in chief's failure to take responsibility. When Clark and I spoke in November, I said that those of us in the audience at the conference assumed that he believed the Bush administration could have and should have stopped the terrorist attacks -- a terrible charge, almost a calumny. No, he said; he meant that the administration had refused to conduct ''an after-action review,'' as he would have done. Of course, if that's what he meant, he could have said so. It seemed, rather, that he had decided to mine the vein that Dean had worked so effectively.

Clark embodies what is most powerful, but perhaps also what is most vulnerable, about the Democratic critique of the Bush administration's national security strategy. Clark's first book, ''Waging Modern War,'' is a minutely detailed account of the Kosovo air campaign, the first, and so far only, war fought by the NATO alliance, which Clark conducted as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander. You could easily read the book as a primer on the futility of multilateral warfare, for Clark describes his endless battles with the Pentagon, the White House and our 18 allies. On several occasions, the war effort almost collapsed from dissension. But it didn't: the Serbs ultimately withdrew, the Kosovars returned home and for several years now an uneasy peace has reigned in Kosovo. ''The real lesson of Kosovo is this,'' Clark writes: ''To achieve strategic success at minimal cost, a structured alliance whose actions are guided by consensus and underwritten by international law is likely to be far more effective and efficient in the long term.''

Clark wrote those words in a preface composed after the terrorist attacks, and what he meant was that acting in concert will be more effective than the unilateralism he already saw emerging. He often tells the story of meeting a senior official in the Bush Defense Department (Donald Rumsfeld himself, Clark told me), who said to him, ''We read your book -- no one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb.'' Iraq was the anti-Kosovo: the Bush administration orchestrated a breathtakingly successful military campaign by more or less acting alone, but not only sacrificed the legitimacy that comes from joint action but also inherited virtual sole responsibility for the postwar mess. Clark argues that the very consensus war-fighting strategy that produces terribly inefficient wars also greatly increases the likelihood of a successful postwar outcome -- which is what the whole effort is supposed to be about. ''It's not where you bomb and what building you blow up that determines the outcome of the war,'' Clark said to me. ''That's what we teach majors in the Air Force to do -- make sure you hit the target. It's the overarching diplomacy, the leverage you bring to bear, what happens afterward on the ground, that gives you your success. And for that you need nations working together.'' That, in a nutshell, is the Wesley Clark alternative paradigm of national security.

Clark is the seniormost member of a younger generation of soldiers formed not by Vietnam, though he fought there, but by the humanitarian wars of the 90's -- by Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. What makes modern war modern for Clark is not just high-tech gadgetry but both the limitations and the opportunities provided by public opinion, international law and multilateral institutions. When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 -- we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane -- he said, ''You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,'' thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ''You could then have gone to NATO and said: 'O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.''' NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war.

On Iraq, Clark said that he would have tried ''another diplomacy round,'' and then, if Saddam Hussein failed to comply with inspectors' demands, he would have returned to the Security Council to secure an international coalition for multilateral war. (But Clark has also said that invading Iraq, rather than continuing to press the war on Al Qaeda, was ''a strategic mistake.'') After we finished talking, in fact, he flew to South Carolina, where he laid out his alternate plans for Iraq, which feature a Bosnia-type interim government with representatives from Europe, the U.S. and neighboring states and a NATO peacekeeping operation run by an American general.

Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different -- the post-9/11 world. Clark argues persuasively that the NATO ''consensus engine'' forces member governments to ''buy into'' joint decisions. But what if the French or Germans don't want to buy into Iraq or, say, to a tough posture should Iran start violating critical nuclear safeguards? A key aspect of the neoconservative argument on terrorism, most associated with the analyst Robert Kagan, is that Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch. Clark's answer is that if we take the concerns of our allies seriously, they will rally to our side. But they may not; Frenchmen may consider the United States, even under a benign President Clark, a greater threat to world peace than Iraq. It may be that in his years with NATO, Clark so thoroughly absorbed the European perspective that he has trouble recognizing how very deeply, and differently, Americans were affected by 9/11.

All this, of course, is airy theorizing; the immediate question for Democrats is whether all of Clark's medals can act as a flame retardant if and when Karl Rove starts to roast the general as a Europeanized peace-lover. We can't know, of course, until the experiment begins. James P. Rubin, the former press aide to Madeleine Albright, who is now advising Clark, opines, ''He doesn't have to show that he's a tough guy; he doesn't have to check the boxes.'' That's the whole theory behind Clark's candidacy. But is the litmus test really about toughness -- or is it about understanding the transformative effect of 9/11? Will Marshall says that Clark has already stumbled into ''the red zone.'' Marshall says that he still believes that with the right candidate ''we can go toe to toe on this and win our argument.'' He was hoping that Clark would be that candidate. Now, he says, ''we'll see.''

VII.

Conservative intellectuals have taken to arguing that Democrats, far from being lost in a funk of pacifism, have in fact signed on to President Bush's national security strategy, albeit with some important quibbles over Iraq. Robert Kagan recently observed that the 2004 election is unlikely to offer ''a national referendum on the fundamental principles of American foreign policy in the post-cold-war, post-Sept. 11, 2001, world'' so long as the leading Democratic candidates, including the supposedly dovish Howard Dean, fully embrace the war on terror that President Bush has declared -- unlike the McGovernites, who believed that ''America was on the wrong side of history.''

Surely this is at least partly right. The foreign-policy debate is no longer ideological, if ideology has to do with differing conceptions of ends, rather than means. The Democrats are not really a peace party. Defense spending, once the great threshold issue separating hawks from doves, has been laid to rest. You have to go as far to the left as Dennis Kucinich to find a candidate who wants to cut, rather than increase, defense spending.

But Kagan is wrong to think that only ends, not means, amount to fundamental, or at least essential, principles. The difference between the idea that international law, multilateral institutions and formal alliances enhance our power -- the Wilson-F.D.R.-Truman-Kennedy idea -- and the view that they needlessly constrain our power, is a very important difference indeed. In an article last spring in World Policy Journal, Dana H. Allin, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon, foreign-policy thinkers from the conservative side of the Democratic spectrum, proposed a doctrine of ''nationalist liberalism,'' which would ''consciously accept the critical importance of power, including military power, in promoting American security, interests and values,'' as the neoconservatives had in the 1970's. But the doctrine would also recognize that America's great power ''will create resistance and resentment if it is exercised arrogantly and unilaterally, making it harder for the United States to achieve its goals.'' The authors laid out a ''generous and compelling vision of global society,'' which would include ''humanitarian intervention against genocidal violence; family planning; effective cooperation against global warming and other environmental scourges''; foreign aid; free trade; and large investments to combat AIDS.

All the major Democratic candidates could be considered nationalist liberals. And it's no surprise: since this is more or less the consensual view of the foreign-policy establishment, practically everybody the candidates have been consulting takes this view. With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did.

O.K., then, it doesn't. And yet it sure feels as if it does. Iraq has, in fact, become the Democratic manhood test. One of Howard Dean's 30-second ads in Iowa showed Gephardt standing next to President Bush in the Rose Garden while an announcer said, ''October 2002: Dick Gephardt agrees to co-author the Iraq war resolution, giving George Bush the authority to go to war.'' Dean is running as the candidate who stood up to the president and his own party on Iraq, just as Wesley Clark is running as the candidate whose whole experience demonstrates the madness of Iraq. Dean may well be a nationalist liberal, but his audience members -- the activists, the students -- often are not; he is exploiting that deep discomfort with the exercise of power, the skepticism about American legitimacy that Condoleezza Rice was writing about. (A candidate who says, as Dean does, ''We're all just cogs in a big machine someplace,'' is not catering to the middle.) This is the cliff that Democratic thinkers fear the party is heading over. As one Senate aide tells me, ''I don't see how a Democrat who is easy to stereotype as soft, even if it's unfair, is going to win.''

The Democrats seem trapped between two irreconcilable impulses, or litmus tests. This is especially obvious, and painful, with figures like John Kerry, who has tried to have it both ways. In the run-up to the war, Kerry harshly criticized President Bush for alienating our allies and then voted for the resolution authorizing war. Then he voted against the $87 billion appropriation, complaining that the president lacked a clear postwar plan. As Baghdad plunged into chaos and Dean worked his magic, Kerry began to sound more and more like an antiwar candidate. And then when Saddam Hussein was captured, Kerry criticized Dean for failing to acknowledge the full magnitude of the achievement. It's no wonder that Chris Matthews tied Kerry into a pretzel when he pressed him on ''Hardball'' to supply a ''yes or no answer'' on Iraq.

You can imagine two very different solutions to the irreconcilable-litmus-test problem. If the capture of Saddam Hussein leads to a rapid improvement of conditions in Iraq, the Democratic litmus test could change, and the party could nominate a candidate who couldn't be stereotyped as soft. And if, alternatively, conditions in Iraq fully disintegrate, the general election litmus test could change, and Howard Dean could prove to have been prescient. But there is a sizable body of opinion that argues that the Democrats cannot overcome their historic reputation with a candidate who opposed the war, or perhaps even opposed the $87 billion appropriation -- no matter what his other views or his resume.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: ''Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?'' In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn't. ''Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?'' O'Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that ''the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.''

Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that's the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement.


James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about politics and international affairs.

[John D Harris]

TL, long read - mindnumbed into mush 4/5ths the way through.
Bottom line we'll know for sure in Nov. 2004, until then it's all a horse and pony show.

[khazadman]

Traub seems to give too much credence to the Clintinistas who got us into much of the trouble we're experiencing in regards to Bin Ladin and North Korea.

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by John D Harris: TL, long read - mindnumbed into mush 4/5ths the way through. Bottom line we'll know for sure in Nov. 2004, until then it's all a horse and pony show.

Yep, the article wasn't exactly "satisfying" was it?

[John D Harris]

What's the line from Bettlejuice...
Oh Yeah it read like it was in stereo [img]smile.gif[/img]