The Democrats' Dean Dilemma

...I hope we would have done something," Dean mused aloud, vaguely echoing the bizarre-o conspiracy theory he'd floated a week before, "had we known Osama bin Laden was going to run planes into the World Trade Center...

...That "capture of Saddam has not made America safer" remark earned him three days of stinging criticism from his presidential-primary rivals and from an increasingly skeptical press corps...

...And three, though only "in some instances, when other world bodies fail," it's okay for the United States to intervene militarily in order "to stop genocide...

...It can't work...

...With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century...

...The war with Iraq, he says, was "really about" control of Middle Eastern oil, consistent with a long-ago-hatched plot by a cabal of neoconservative defense intellectuals...

...And Dean's actual text, though it hardly represented a Weekly Standard view of things, might certainly, most of it, have been written by Christopher himself...

...Whereupon Dean apparently decided that he'd made a mistake even attempting to reposition himself as a national-security moderate...

...As we say, we don't understand how a frontrunning, major-party presidential candidate could have come to think like this...

...The speech was advertised as a reassuring demonstration that Dean's overall thinking about world affairs, notwithstanding the spicy antiwar rhetoric that has propelled his campaign so far, lies safely within the bipartisan consensus that's governed American politics for 50-plus years...

...The capture of Saddam"—announced the day before—"has not made America safer," Dean sniffed...

...At one point, in fact, he seemed to suggest that the United States might ultimately and legitimately have "found no alternative to Saddam's ouster...

...The "Washington Politics-as-Usual Club"—not just the Republicans, but also all those "Washington Democrats" who "fell meekly into line" over Bush's ghastly foreign war—must be swept aside...

...Two, if we know we're about to be attacked...

...The engagement of American arms should be "confined," Dean said, to three sets of circumstances only: One, if we've already been attacked, as with Afghanistan...

...Dean casually allowed, "but those occurred 11 years ago...

...David Tell, for the Editors...

...Men like Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs might believe such stuff...

...Shouldn't she and all the other "Washington Democrats" at the very least refuse to surrender without a fight...

...Nor, it seems, would Saddam's associations with terrorism and determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction have prompted President Dean to take action, even had the evidence been contemporaneous and undebatable...

...The choreography was designed this way: Dean delivered his address to a sober think-tank audience in Los Angeles on December 15, with none other than Warren Christopher, the Ghost of Democratic State Departments Past, looking over his shoulder...

...But even if true, that still wouldn't explain the corollary mystery: How could it be that the very "Washington Democrats" who so recently "fell meekly into line" over war with Iraq are now just as meekly acquiescing in the institutional conquest of their party by a presidential candidate who openly derides them for it—and who openly repudiates, in the process, foreign policy views to which the vast majority of them remain personally and politically committed...

...And let's face it: Howard Dean really doesn't want to...

...Tonally, at least, all this was very new for Howard Dean...

...military power abroad...

...And "we cannot make it work," and "we need to just get out...

...What genuinely serious figure in the national Democratic party, for example, believes that the United States must never undertake an overseas military initiative unless Howard Dean's strictly delineated conditions have first been met (or unless Kofi Annan has "given us permission...

...the defenestration of the Taliban from Kabul counts for nothing...

...Why, come to think of it, should even so partisan, politically sophisticated, and overwhelmingly popular a Democrat as Hillary Clinton have so far proved unwilling to dissociate herself from the outlandish-ness of foreign-policy Deanism...

...We need to leave, not reconstruct," Sachs told a teach-in audience as recently as December 17...

...I think the Democratic party has to offer a clear alternative to the American people," says the new, new Howard Dean...

...Saddam Hussein, of course, would not have qualified for American attention under the "Dean Doctrine...

...But you can't make him think from the center if he really doesn't want to...

...Toward the end, Dean said the war was "ill-considered...

...So why, then, have they, too, seen fit—just like crazy Jeffrey Sachs—to lend their names and reputations to the Dean crusade...

...But Sachs, one of the 15 "distinguished experts" now advising the Dean campaign on foreign policy, is, not to put too fine a point on it, a crank...

...The most interesting theory we've heard— and it's only a theory...

...North Korea, after all, "may or may not possess nuclear weapons, but surely, at least at this time, is not an imminent threat...

...Not only is America no safer for the capture of Saddam, he growled at a subsequent press conference in New Hampshire, but "we are no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center...

...no one can know for sure—is that sometime in the 1990s, French intelligence agents snuck into Dean's bedroom in Burlington and brainwashed the poor man...

...And yet, there was that single, striking sentence that wasn't new, tonally or in any other respect, the one where Dean's ferocious vanity and corresponding inability to concede even the tiniest speck of credit to George W. Bush peeked through...

...Democrats like Clinton administration national security adviser Anthony Lake and Carter administration CIA director Stansfield Turner, by contrast, cannot possibly believe such arrant, irresponsible nonsense...

...In the best interests of her party—and her nation— shouldn't Senator Clinton say so...

...There he was, in his force-averse, neo-isola-tionist skivvies, advancing a semi-coherent and alarmingly stingy "Dean Doctrine" that would circumscribe the exercise of U.S...

...Not this year, anyway: "I would have supported intervention during the Shiite massacres," the doctrinaire Dr...

...But nowhere in his Los Angeles speech did Dean say the war was essentially unwarranted...

...Don't buy their claim that now we're there we have to make it work...

...Indeed, even on Iraq, the former Vermont governor appeared eager to recast himself as something other than a baying full-mooner...

...Nevertheless, "I would not have hesitated to go into Iraq," Dean concluded, despite having just ruled it out as a matter of principle, "had the United Nations given us permission...

...Judging from her own recent major address on the subject—delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, on the same day her husband's would-be legatee was speaking in Los Angeles—Senator Clinton's views could not be less like those of Howard Dean...

...Furthermore, reverting to instinct during the Q&A session that followed his carefully scripted Los Angeles pronouncement, Dean wasted little time stripping himself bare of precisely that "moderate" image it had been intended to win him...

...Why, for that matter, is it only now, when it may already be too late to deny him the nomination, that Dean's intra-party rivals have finally (and fal-teringly) begun to offer Democratic voters a sustained and pointed warning about the defense-policy program he's outlined—and about the general-election risks that program clearly entails...

...You can drag a man to the foreign-policy center with a big, subtle, ghostwritten speech...

...Toward the beginning of his remarks, Dean said the war was launched "in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at unbelievable cost...