Iraq's future
Jr, E J Dionne
OF SEVERAL MINDS E.J. DIONNE Jr. IRAQ'S FUTURE What do the Democrats propose? Our foreign-policy debate right now pits radicals against conservatives. Republicans are the radicals. Democrats are...
...Much has changed since the United Nations was founded more than fifty years ago...
...And, yes, winning the trust of the world also requires an administration that levels with potential friends and fellow citizens...
...Instead of simply defending the old institutions, this means that those who support them should insist on their reform...
...We now learn from the president's speech that it was less a war about immediate threats posed by Saddam than a bold experiment in support of a grand theory...
...Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," Bush said, "because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty...
...That jarring but shrewd perspective, offered by Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's former national security adviser, explains much that is strange in our national discussion...
...Indeed, the first President Bush resisted overthrowing Saddam Hussein and reshaping Iraq out of that great conservative impulse known as prudence...
...They also want to preserve old alliances and the old institutions of international cooperation...
...How often is it the case that democracy can be made to grow from the barrel of a gun...
...Lake himself, when he worked for Clinton, proposed the idea of "democratic enlargement" as the underlying principle of American foreign policy...
...All this, says Lake, now a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, is why Democrats are today's conservatives...
...Democrats have been in a box ever since the Iraq debate began because they have always identified with the emphasis on spreading democracy that is at the heart of Bush's rhetoric, but they are deeply uneasy with the use of military force to impose new regimes, even democratic ones, on other nations...
...The United States and Europe need to come to terms on agricultural subsidies that make a mockery of their claims of standing for either free or fair trade...
...The original mission of the NATO alliance died with the Soviet Union...
...His son's democratic imperialism is genuinely radical...
...The United States and its European allies need to work out a new division of labor in facing terrorist threats and humanitarian disasters...
...There's a lot to be said for that...
...His opponents-Democrats and a growing group of increasingly squeamish Republicans-should be bold enough to answer it...
...2003, Washington Post Writers Group...
...The spread of democracy since 1945 was fostered by the very global institutions and alliances toward which this administration seems so disdainful...
...By thrusting war on the rest of the world, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made unconditional surrender and their long postwar occupations inevitable...
...The global financial institutions need change...
...Democrats find themselves opposed to "the radical turn of unilateralism, fractured alliances, the disruption or trashing of international organizations and alliances, and a disdain for negotiations...
...In his speech, Bush explicitly rebuked a narrowly realist worldview...
...By contrast, the war in Iraq was an optional war for the United States...
...Lake is also critical of his own party's newly discovered conservatism...
...The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East," Bush said, "will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution...
...Democrats, Lake argues, "need to be thinking large, and they're not...
...The United States, the president added, must promote democratic change even in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, nations ruled by America's longtime friends...
...Proposing a theory of democratic change is much easier than carrying out the practical, dangerous, and expensive work of war, occupation, and reconstruction...
...Democrats are the conservatives...
...But Lake is right to say that conservatism in foreign policy is not enough...
...This is not his father's foreign policy...
...The Democratic critique," Lake continued in an interview, "is that every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt- Republican or Democrat-has conserved alliances and built multilateral approaches....They're trying to conserve the traditions of the last fifty years...
...You'd want new plans for new conditions...
...Bush has thrown down a radical challenge...
...And although Lake is critical of President George W. Bush's policies, he does not use the word "radical" to make a partisan point...
...In Bush's November 6 speech on the need to promote democracy, particularly in the Arab world, the president embraced much of what liberal human-rights advocates have been saying for years...
...What Bush 43 calls for is very different from the transformation of Germany and Japan after World War II...
...He offers a useful metaphor: "If you had a house that was being knocked down, in whole or in part, you probably wouldn't just use the old plans to rebuild it...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 20
