Can Liberalism win the War on Terror?

[Mazer]

Seeing as how the Democrats have won a slim majority in Congress, carried on the backs of conservatives running as Democrats, the more extreme liberal elements of our political system will now have the chance to influence and even alter United States foreign policy. The question is this: can they hack it? Now I'm not just talking about rectifying the situation in Iraq, though it would be nice if that came to pass, but the poorly named War on Terror involves Islamic fundamentalists from all parts of the world, even those living in the West. That culture on the fringe of Islam epitomizes totalitarianism, the enemy of liberalism, and yet we find liberal Democrats decrying the West's intervention in the Middle East and its attempts to take power away from the autocrats and tyrants in that part of the world. I won't ask why, I'm not going to ask rhetorical questions here. What I'd like to know is what the Left's plan is for dealing with the threat of Islamists and Jihadists.

A couple articles have come to my attention that pose two opposing views, one that liberalism is incapable of dealing with terrorism, and the other that liberalism is the only way to deal with terrorism. Here are excerpts from both.

Liberalism and terror: the chronic guilt that defines modern liberalism makes liberal politicians fundamentally unable to deal with terrorists

LIBERALISM and terrorism appear as opposing concepts. But they have something in common. Both belong to the large and heterogeneous family of the devotees of freedom. Freedom is the most powerful and the most ambiguous of abstract ideas. There are two main divisions within the massive ambiguities. There is freedom combined with order and limited by law. This is the freedom of England's Glorious Revolution and of the American Constitution. This is the "manly, moral, regulated liberty" which Burke defended in Reflections on the Revolution in France. This is the freedom of the mainstream liberal tradition in the English-speaking world. And it is also the freedom of the mainstream conservative tradition in the same world. In their philosophy of freedom, the common ground between the two traditions is more important than the differences. Edmund Burke belongs to both those traditions, and no one should seek to wrest him from one of them in order to monopolize him for the other.

Outside the zone of ordered freedom, now more or less coextensive with the Western world, the idea of freedom and the love of freedom take starker and more elemental forms. Freedom is thought of as the appurtenance and rightful heritage of a particular group of people defined by nationality, religion, language, ancestry, or territorial affiliation, and usually by some combination of several of these elements. Some other group or groups of people are felt to be denying freedom to us, who must have it. Freedom so understood is one of the most powerful of human motivating forces and the most destructive, impelling large numbers of people to risk their lives for it and to take the lives of others, the enemies of freedom. Serbs and Croats cut one another's throats, and all for freedom's sake.

***

Compromises are possible, of course, but only with terrorists who are willing to become ex-terrorists, like Michael Collins in the 1920s or Arafat now. But terrorism survived the compromises. In the current case, Israel surrendered territory to Arafat, hoping to get peace in exchange. But unreconstructed terrorists, ignoring Arafat, have been able to use the territory surrendered as a base for attacks on Israel.

To seek to end terrorism by compromise is a fallacy in logic, because it misrepresents the nature of the phenomenon with which it attempts to cope. But beneath the fallacy lies a powerful emotional force: guilt (exceptionally strong in Gladstone, for example). British Gladstonian liberals -- to be found today among both Tories and Labourites -- feel chronically guilty about Britain's past treatment of Ireland. Israeli doves -- the liberals of Israel --feel guilty about Israel's treatment of Palestinian Arabs. In both cases, there are some reasons for guilt. Unfortunately, feelings of guilt are of no help in the struggle against terrorism. On the contrary, they are a resource which the terrorist knows he can exploit, and he does so with a savage satisfaction.

FIGHTING FAITHS
Can liberal internationalism be saved?

A few weeks after John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 election, Peter Beinart published an essay in The New Republic, the magazine he then edited, called “A Fighting Faith.” The phrase originated with Whitman and was lifted from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,’s 1949 book “The Vital Center,” a battle cry of mid-century liberalism against the twin dangers of Soviet totalitarianism and its American apologists on the left, and hidebound business conservatism on the right. Beinart invoked Schlesinger, and other founders of the liberal anti-Communist organization Americans for Democratic Action, in order to throw down a challenge to the Democratic Party: “In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions—most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn—that do not put the struggle against America’s new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world.” Just as liberal Democrats of Schlesinger’s era fought and ultimately purged the fellow-travellers in their ranks, Beinart was spoiling for a struggle to wrest the Democratic Party away from its latest generation of “softs.” Defeating the new Islamist threat, he wrote, “must be liberalism’s north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.”

The essay created the stir that its author no doubt intended. Conferences were held in Washington, denunciations and defenses were issued, and then Beinart went on leave to turn his essay into a book, which has just been published. But some of the fight went out of “A Fighting Faith” on its way to becoming “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again” (HarperCollins; $25.95). Michael Moore and MoveOn hardly get a mention; Beinart no longer wants to provoke a battle for the soul of the Party. In the course of two hundred fluently argued pages, he reviews postwar history and shows how the Democrats gained (with Truman and Kennedy), and then lost (after Vietnam), and then began to recover (with Clinton), and then lost again (after September 11th) the ability to offer the public “their own narrative of American greatness.” He urges liberals to take the new ideological enemy seriously. But taking it seriously turns out to mean doing what already comes (or ought to come) naturally to liberals: working with democratic allies and international institutions, doing more to help poor countries where jihadis breed, demonstrating American virtue rather than merely asserting it, connecting the quest for freedom and justice in the Muslim world with the same quest at home.

Beinart’s proposals make good sense as policy and as politics, though he doesn’t deal with some of the vexing dilemmas that almost always come up in practice: What if foreign aid (for example, America’s billions to Egypt) doesn’t tamp down extremism? What should we do in countries where the only real political choice for now is between secular dictatorship and elected Islamism? And his silence on Israel and Palestine suggests that he considers some acutely relevant subjects to be off limits. If there’s anything controversial about his general proposals, though, that’s more a symptom of the etiolated quality of the Democratic Party than a token of Beinart’s audacity. He’s simply asking liberals to muster some energy for the ideological fight against jihadism, in the belief that they are more likely to succeed than the Republican Party of George W. Bush, and in the related belief that they will never be entrusted with power until they do. Beinart is putting history and philosophy at the service of strategy—thus all the talk about a new liberal “narrative,” a favorite word among political consultants.

The first quote is from an article written by Conor Cruise O'Brien for the National Review in April of 1996 (link). O'Brien wrote this article one year after the Oklahoma City bombing when some people feared that the militia movement would foster the next terrorist movement to plague the United States. Then in 1998 the United States embassy bombings happened and everybody's focus shifted to international terrorism. The second quote is from an article written by George Packer for the New Yorker in July of 2006 (link), well before the "referendum on president Bush" that was the November general election. I get the distinct feeling that in their minds people weren't so much voting for Democrats as they were voting against Bush's policies. If the Democratic party takes the reigns in that same spirit then bipartisan dialog is doomed.

Anyway, which side is right, the realists or the liberal internationalists? More importantly, which side will guide the policies of the 110th congress? My gut tells me that, for the next two years at least, the juveniles in the Democratic party will have their say, opposing Bush at every turn, making him their whipping boy and blaming all of America's and especially Iraq's woes on him. What kind of constructive dialog can possibly take place in that environment? It won't be until the next president takes power that people will realize the anti-Bush wing of the Democratic party never had any solutions, just criticisms, and then it will be up to the rational element of the party to take control or risk losing congress to the Republicans again. I wonder what the chances of that happening will be.

[floydian slip]

War on Terror is oxymoronic.

[Mazer]

Self contradictory or not, that phrase is the common currency used in the media. The New Yorker article proposes a more useful 'war on radical Islamism' which I would use myself, except that nobody else speaks in those terms. People often make the mistake of believing that all Islam is radical; they don't see the important differences between Islam and Islamism. It's just simpler to identify people by the tactics they use than by their beliefs, hence the phrase 'War on Terror.'

Just go with it, the term isn't meant as an assault on your intelligence.

[Nicobie]

Can Liberalism win the War on Terror?

No,

but Libertarianism might.