- Oct 13, 2000
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Bystanders
by the Editors
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Post date 09.12.02 | Issue date 09.23.02 E-mail this article
It has been a long time since this journal felt so despondent about the Democratic Party. The United States is today engaged in perhaps the most important foreign policy debate in a generation. In response to a reverberating catastrophe and a terrifying threat, the administration of George W. Bush has proposed a radical new doctrine to govern America's role in the world, one that commits the United States to war in Iraq and perhaps beyond. Foreign leaders warn that by assuming the right to attack sovereign states on the basis of a potential threat, the Bush administration is rewriting the rules of the international system and lifting a taboo that has kept large chunks of the globe at peace. Retired American diplomats and generals worry that war with Iraq could radicalize much of the Muslim world. The highbrow press increasingly writes and talks of little else. And yet with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman, the leaders of the Democratic Party have nothing serious to say.
Oh, the party's leaders speak: They appear on talk shows; they write op-eds; they convene congressional hearings. But most of what they say is best understood as highly articulate evasiveness. They have devised a series of formulations designed to make the party appear to be offering a clear response to the president's proposed war, when it is actually doing the opposite. In fact, Washington's leading Democrats have neither taken a forthright position on an invasion of Iraq nor seriously answered the Bush administration theory of preemption that justifies it. No one today can honestly say he or she is a Democrat because of what the party believes about the greatest threat facing the United States. The Democrats are a party of bystanders, a party without a position on the issue that matters most.
The Democrats' evasions come in several forms. The first, and most naked, is the contention that the Iraq debate should wait until after the November elections. This is what Senator Ted Kennedy meant when he argued last week that "we can't let it [Iraq] replace the domestic agenda," and it is what Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe meant when he declared hopefully that "people are going to vote on the kitchen-table issues we've talked about for eighteen months." But if the Democrats succeed, if they make this fall's election a referendum on prescription drugs and pension reform, they will have done the voters a disservice. Elections should be about the most urgent issues facing the country; and compared with war with Iraq, the Democrats' litany of poll-tested standbys is frankly trivial.
The Democrats rationalize their efforts to keep Iraq off the campaign trail by insinuating that the Bush administration, by proposing a congressional vote on Iraq before Election Day, is exploiting the war for political gain (see "Hidden Profit" by Michael Crowley, page 18). But in fact, the real cynics are the Democrats, who are trying to conceal their views on the war until after November 5 and, thus, deny their constituents the information they need to cast an intelligent vote. As a matter of democratic process, the party's position is untenable. And it is self-defeating even as a matter of crass political self-interest. Today's polls may show the Democrats with an advantage on the domestic issues the public supposedly cares about most, but ultimately that advantage will not matter if the party is timid and irresponsible on questions of war and peace. Do today's Democrats really need to be reminded of the political history of the last two decades of the cold war?
The second evasion is that Democrats need not take a position on Iraq because President Bush has not yet "made the case" for war. But the case is clear: Saddam Hussein is pursuing nuclear weapons, and the only way to make sure he does not use them against the United States or its allies is to remove him from power. It is true that the Bush administration has not spelled out how close Saddam is to nuclear capability and exactly what weapons of mass destruction he currently possesses. But the case for war does not require that level of certainty. All it requires is confidence that Saddam is aggressively pursuing nuclear capability and that he could achieve it in years rather than decades. Given that, it is precisely the uncertainty about when Saddam will get the bomb upon which the pro-war argument relies.
That is why the Democrats' suggestion that they need not take a stand until the Bush administration provides empirical evidence misses the point. The empirical evidence is necessarily limited. More importantly, it acquires meaning only in light of a theory about international affairs. The Bush administration's case for war is its theory of preemption. And it is the Democrats who have declined either to embrace that theory or to refute it in the name of containment and deterrence. Prominent Democrats could argue that Saddam has been contained over the last decade and that sanctions and U.N. inspections can contain him in the future. They could insist that if the Soviet Union could be deterred by the threat of mutually assured destruction, so can Iraq. Those are not the views of this magazine, but they would at least be forthright responses to the theory underpinning the Bush administration's prospective war. But the Democrats do not make these arguments, either because they don't know what they think or because they consider it politically wiser not to say. Instead they keep insisting that the Bush administration has not adequately begun the debate over war. But the debate will begin the moment those who disagree with Bush begin it. The obstacle to democratic deliberation is not just the secrecy of the administration but also the silence of the opposition.
The third Democratic evasion is multilateralism, the insistence that the United States should not go to war if the rest of the world says no. But the important question is not whether other countries agree with the United States but whether those countries are right. Gerhard Schroeder opposes war because he does not think September 11 changed the world. He thinks that the old principles of containment and deterrence still work in an age when petty tyrants and fanatical terrorists can obtain weapons of mass destruction. Unlike President Bush, he does not hear a ticking bomb. If Tom Daschle agrees, then he should say so. If he doesn't agree--if the rationale for war is as strong as Bush says it is--then surely that rationale outweighs the costs of going it alone. But instead Democratic leaders are hiding behind the alliance's skirts, using Europe's opposition to avoid explaining how they see this dangerous world. Multilateralism, in the hands of today's Democrats, is not a foreign policy vision; it is an absence of foreign policy vision, an abdication of the party's obligation to think for itself.
What would a Democratic foreign policy vision look like? It would start with the realization that preemption is not alien to the Democrats' best traditions. Consider the party's 2000 platform, which defined a foreign policy doctrine called "forward engagement." "Forward engagement," the document explained, "means addressing problems early in their development before they become crises, addressing them as close to the source of the problem as possible, and having the forces and the resources to deal with these threats as soon after their emergence as possible." When that document was written, its authors in the Gore campaign may have been thinking primarily of civil wars like those in the Balkans. But after September 11 it is clear that the gravest danger the United States must address is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of dictators and terrorists. "Forward engagement" (a version of the old strategic concept of "forward defense") is itself a recognition that containment is no longer enough, that the prerogatives of sovereignty can no longer give countries the right to hatch plans that will eventually spread mass destruction beyond their borders.
Of course, there are other ways to "engage" looming threats apart from military force. Indeed, few threats are best engaged militarily. But for more than ten years now the United States has been pursuing an economic and diplomatic strategy aimed at preventing Saddam from developing biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that could endanger the world. And for more than ten years--despite sanctions that have ravaged his country--Saddam has developed those weapons anyway. The evidence of the last decade, and of the last several weeks, suggests that Saddam will never allow weapons inspections that impair his obsessive pursuit of nuclear and other dangerous weapons. There may be tactical reasons for raising the weapons-inspections issue again, but they will likely only defer America's hour of reckoning. And as the Democratic platform of forward engagement recognized, postponing such moments too long is the most dangerous course of action of all.
Only once the Democrats accept that under certain conditions preemption--including the preemptive use of military force--is not alien to their traditions can they credibly develop a broader vision for combating the nuclear and terrorist threat. That broader vision would involve an equal commitment to the many nonmilitary ways in which the United States can prevent dangers from becoming catastrophes. It would challenge the Bush administration's strangely passive approach to securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and beyond, and challenge the White House's disastrous opposition to peacekeeping, which has badly undermined efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and to ensure that it never again becomes a haven for terrorists. It would recognize that if the United States demands the right to infringe upon the sovereignty of other countries--by ferreting out their unsafe nuclear materials or uprooting their terrorist cells--in the name of preemption, it cannot obsessively reject even minor infringements upon its own sovereignty, as many Republicans today do. It would understand, in short, what the Democratic Party understood in the early years of the cold war--that the United States needs not only the resolve to meet its enemies on the battlefield but also the generosity and liberal spirit to help keep fragile societies from becoming battlefields. These are the principles for which the Democrats could once again stand, but not if they continue to hedge, dissemble, and evade on Iraq. The party's behavior in this first great debate of a new foreign policy era will have consequences far beyond this midterm election. In the coming weeks the Democrats must decide: Will they be present at the creation once again?
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