Do liberals need to stake out a position on Islamic extremism? Yes, particularly if we want to run for political office. TNR editor Peter Beinart suggests in this week's magazine that liberals should join in World War IV. Corn argues the liberal position should challenge—not embrace—the idea that Islamic militants pose an existential threat to the United States.
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
As a columnist and blogger, I generally do not obsess (in print) over what other journalists are writing. I do make an occasional exception—say, for William Safire. But a few days ago, Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic , sent me an e-mail and asked for my thoughts on his cover story, “An Argument for a New Liberalism: A Fighting Faith.” Well, Peter, since you asked….
Beinart, in an ambitious (6,200 words!) fashion, has set out to define what makes for a good left, and for him there is one—and only one—ultimate measure: devotion to the war on terrorism. “The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush,” he writes, “should be the litmus test of a decent left.” And guess what? Most present-day liberals fail his test. By most liberals he means Michael Moore and MoveOn—which he depicts as leaders of a “soft” left reminiscent of the lefties of the 1950s and 1960s who did not define themselves first and foremost as anticommunists. In fact, Beinart is attempting, in a way, to reprise the bitter catfight that dominated (or, to some, consumed) the left in the post-World War II decades, during which anticommunist liberals battled with leftists who were communists or who were sympathizers or who were willing to work with communists or who were not willing to mount witch-hunts to toss commies out of their organizations.
Beinart’s heroes are the members of the Union for Democratic Action, a liberal outfit that banned communists from its ranks and renamed itself Americans for Democratic Action. Its leaders included John Kenneth Galbraith, Eleanor Roosevelt and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The ADA declared that vigorous opposition to communism—an ideology “hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy”—was the first duty of liberals. Beinart approvingly quotes the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop who proclaimed that “the great political reality of the present” was “the Soviet challenge to the West.” At the time, other liberals—such as the editors of The Nation and The New Republic —eschewed militant anticommunism
I’m not interested in replaying the fights of the 1940s and 1950s. It’s clear that some on the left were slow (or unwilling) to see the evils of the Soviet Union. But the direct threat to the United States and its citizenry was certainly exaggerated by the anticommunists of the Cold War years. Beinart gripes that “three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not ‘been fundamentally reshaped’ by the experience.” He hails many on the right for dropping their isolationism and embracing George W. Bush’s war on terror. But American liberals, he writes, care more about health care, gay rights and the environment and have no “passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda—even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions” and would “reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.”
Defining The Threat
The nature of the Al Qaeda threat is a key matter. Does it trump all else? Beinart says it does. And this is an interesting question. I view it with the perspective of one who works in an office a half a block from the U.S. Capitol, a possible target on 9/11. I take the threat of a terrorist attack quite personally and believe I have a very direct interest in neutralizing the mass murderers of Al Qaeda and their allies. But their goal, to be precise, is not to kill millions of Americans but to topple what they consider to be apostate regimes in the Middle East and create a pan-Arab theocratic state based on repressive principles of Islamic extremism. That’s nothing to be happy about. But it does define the challenge—and threat—in different terms. As a report recently produced by the Defense Science Board notes, "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies [in the Middle East]."
To provoke argument—or in this case, counter-argument—it’s useful to ask, how does the Al Qaeda threat compare to the threat of global warming? Or the threat of global AIDS? Or the threat of drunk drivers? AIDS and DWIers kill far more people than Al Qaeda has. Global warming could lead to death, disease and dislocation affecting millions. Al Qaeda clearly has considered attacks with the most deadly weapons that could cause horrific casualties. Could it pull off such a strike? Perhaps. But should that possibility alone be the basis of a new political reality? And how close is Al Qaeda to establishing a repressive Islamic state in greater Arabia? Should that possibility cause us to put aside other pressing issues?
Beinart argues that the threat from Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism ought to compel all liberals to declare the fight against Al Qaeda the top agenda item. He assails Moore and MoveOn because they “do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world.” Moore and MoveOn can defend themselves. I do think Beinart has a (minor) point when he notes that MoveOn, in its opposition to the Iraq war, erred in the heat of battle by promoting the antiwar work of International ANSWER, a group tied to the World Workers Party, which has defended Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il. But Beinart grants Moore more status than he deserves. He writes, “when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian.” Really? It’s my hunch that most Americans think of Moore as (A) an obnoxious and spiteful opportunist or (B) a funny and creative Bush-basher. I would wager that few outside the TNR offices see him as a posterboy for non-anti-totalitarianism. Beinart ignores the fact that Moore was supportive of presidential candidate Wesley Clark, whom Beinart describes as one of “the three candidates who made winning the war on terrorism the centerpiece of their campaigns.”
Twisting The Issue
Beinart truly trips up when he castigates liberals for being more concerned with the ills of Bush than the dangers of Al Qaeda. It is Bush who perverted the debate on how to thwart Islamic extremism. He did so by claiming that invading and occupying Iraq because it possessed WMDs and was in cahoots with Al Qaeda —two false assertions--was essential to thwarting Al Qaeda and its allies. He was the one who trumped the war against al Qaeda with the war against Iraq. He changed the issue. So now we have a situation in which more than 1200 Americans have been killed in Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians (perhaps more than 100,000) have been killed, and a mess (perhaps an intractable one, though I hope not) has ensued. And as many have noted—including the Defense Science Board—the invasion has transformed the United States’ relationship with the world, especially the Muslim sector. This unnecessary war is the “great political reality of the present.”
Beinart maintains that Kerry lost because of terrorism, not moral vales. I don’t argue with that. Kerry failed to convince enough voters he could handle terrorism better than Bush. And Bush won the political battle by conflating the war in Iraq with the war on terrorism. But the connection (or lack thereof) between the two was the critical question of the campaign. Kerry rightfully noted the distinction. Consequently, he was in no position to prove his anti-Islamic-totalitarianism credentials by cheerleading Bush’s war in Iraq. Beinart notes that “Kerry's criticisms of Bush's Iraq policy were trenchant, but the only alternative principle he clearly articulated was multilateralism, which often sounded like a veiled way of asking Americans to do less. And, because he never urged a national mobilization for safety and freedom, his discussion of terrorism lacked Bush's grandeur.” But what should Kerry have done? What would such a “national mobilization” include? Taxing rich Americans to pay for the war in Iraq? Bush wouldn’t do that, and Kerry did demand such a sacrifice when he voted against the $87 billion for the war—a vote for which Beinart excoriates him. Bush’s act of grandeur was launching a war without merit.
Which brings us to this: What is the war on terrorism? Bush’s version—initiating a misguided war—is well-known. But Beinart does not offer much of an alternative that can be considered by the liberals he scolds. He refers somewhat vaguely to such notions as an updated Marshall Plan and an expanded Peace Corps for the Muslim world. But since 9/11, softie liberals have suggested that one way to prevent terrorism is to address the desperate conditions in the Muslim world and elsewhere. For liberals, Beinart writes, “Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan affair—defined in the liberal mind not by images of American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false claims about Iraqi WMD.” But aren’t these images accurate? Cheney’s false claims and the war they fueled—sad to say—were more fundamental defining acts than the actions of those GIs in Afghanistan. Yet Beinart complains that silly liberals just can’t get over Bush’s war in Iraq: “The left's post-September 11 enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda—epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA—was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war.” Beinart misses the point. The Iraq war was not a bungled enterprise; it was a wrong enterprise. And a wrong war is a rather immediate issue.
Spoiling For The Wrong Fight
Beinart, a friendly fellow in person, is looking for a fight. “An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack [the Bush] tax cuts,” he writes, “not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless, but, above all, as long-term threats to America's ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today, however, there is no liberal constituency for such an argument in a Democratic Party.” So for Beinart, it’s not enough for left-of-center citizens to fight the Bush tax cuts on these other grounds; all political debate must flow from a single source: the campaign against Islamic totalitarianism. But why? Can we not chew gum and develop an effective foreign policy to counter Islamic extremists at the same time? And Beinart wags his fingers at those liberals who express concern about civil liberties being trampled by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terrorism. “One of the hallmarks of ADA liberals,” he maintains, “was their refusal to imply—as groups like MoveOn sometimes do today—that civil liberties violations represent a greater threat to liberal values than America's totalitarian foes.” Some liberals have overstated the civil liberties troubles presented by the PATRIOT Act (that’s another article). But this is not a zero-sum game in which concern for civil liberties comes at the expense of concern for terrorism.
It’s just that Americans have more control over their government’s response to 9/11 than the actions and policies of Al Qaeda. And unions, Beinart argues, should sign up for a larger role in the war against totalitarian Islam. After all, Muslim fanaticism is not good for unions in the Middle East. True, but American unions face a crisis at home and have been targeted for extinction (or emasculation) by the Bush administration and its conservative allies. To be practical, how much time and energy should they throw into a movement for reform in the Muslim world? And what does this movement entail? Challenging Musharraf in Pakistan? Advocating the end of the Saudi family rule? (The Defense Science Board report notes, "Today we reflexively compare Muslim 'masses' to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies—except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends.")
Beinart, seeking an idealistic guiding principle for liberalism in the 21st century, writes, “Islamic totalitarianism—like Soviet totalitarianism before it—threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star.” But this is a simplistic formula for liberalism. And history is not as strong a guide as he suggest. Some of the ADAers and their favored John Kennedy (whom Beinart holds up as a role model) followed their north star right into Vietnam. Islamic extremism is indeed a threat to Americans and others. It should be addressed—smartly and vigorously. (A new Marshall Plan? Sure.) But, alas, there is much else going on in the world and at home. And a fixation with the war in Iraq—which does undermine the effort against global Islamic jihadism—is not misplaced; it is appropriate. In fact, it can be a sign that one is serious about dealing with the threat from Islamic extremism. Beinart ought to recognize that rather than propose a loyalty test for a decent left. The ADAers he cherishes excommunicated far-leftists who adhered to an ideology they opposed. Almost six decades later, Beinart advocates shunning leftists who do not share his priorities or who do not voice sufficient enthusiasm for a war on terrorism that Bush unfortunately has largely discredited. That’s not a very liberal attitude.
