Tough Liberalism

[gilliam]

I am not a Liberal, nor part of the Democratic Party, so I don’t know how accurate this is. But it is definately an interesting read:

By Peter Beinarthttp://www.creators.com/opinion_writetheauthor.cfm?pg=write&columnsname=rno

When John Kerry lost in 2004, I started in my despair reading about the late 1940s, the first years of the Cold War. That was the last time America entered a new era in national security. It started very fast in 1945 and 1946. And it was the last period where the country trusted liberals and Democrats to defend it.

As Will Marshall has pointed out, if you look at all presidential elections since the Vietnam War, the disturbing reality is the Democratic Party has only won in those moments when the country turned inward. Carter won in 1976, when the country turned inward after Vietnam. It was the first election since 1948 when national security was not the issue that people told pollsters they were most concerned about. Then Clinton won in 1992, in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The truth is this: Unless the Democratic Party can change its image on national security, its only realistic hope of winning the White House is the hope that the war on terrorism is a passing phenomenon that will be over in a few years. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t believe that. Most experts don’t believe that. Most people see this as a generational struggle. And yet, you have to go back pre-Vietnam to find a precedent for how the Democratic Party can respond in a way that will win the country’s trust.

That’s why I started reading about the early Cold War. Between 1946 and 1949, the Democratic Party engaged in a huge internal fight. It was not a fight against Republicans, but first and foremost a fight within the Democratic Party. In state after state, the state parties ripped themselves apart over the issue of anti-communism. The issue was fundamentally about whether liberal Democrats would define liberalism only in opposition to the right wing or whether anti-communism would be placed at the heart of what it meant to be a liberal.

read the rest

Peter Beinart is editor of The New Republic. He is currently on leave to write a book on national security and a new liberalism.This piece originally appeared in Blueprint Magazine.

 

[David_Paul]

Harry Truman knew Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents. He stunned his aids by refusing to admit the truth about Hiss at a press conference. He is said of have told them:

Everyone knows Hiss is an (expletive deleted) traitor but I’m not going to give those (expletive deleted) Republicans the satisfaction of saying so.

That denial tore America apart and still lingers. To his great credit before his death Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented what was done and expressed the wish Truman (and then Eisenhower) had declassified the Venona transcripts and let the American people know the extent of the treason within the FDR adminstation (which continued on a small scale into the Truman years).

Many good people got sucked into believing Soviet propaganda. The shame is that the Democratic party as an institution refused to admit the truth and when individuals such as Bella Dodd, Elizabeth Bentley and Chambers did expose the lies, they were destroyed by the liberal establishment. We see the same attacks today on former communists such as David Horowitz.

 

[Lizzie]

During WW11 the American people were told over and over that Korea was to liberated from Japan and that it would be established as a unified independent country.

For some unexplained reason it was divided in two by the Truman administration with the north of Korea ceded to Russian control and later to Chicoms. Why did Truman or his handlers do this?

Promises were broken and our troops died because Truman did this.

 

[Philip_P]

I actually thought Kerry’s conceptual framework toward terrorism - comparing it to organized crime - was the right approach. You can’t ever eradicate crime, but you can bring it down to acceptable levels, where planes aren’t being flown into buildings and thousands aren’t being killed in subways. In fact I recall Pres. Bush making a slip of the tongue during a pre-election interview and saying something similar, that the “war on terrorism” can’t ever be won. They’re both right, hard as it is to say (which is NOT the same thing as saying that the terrorists will “win”, only to say that it’s unrealistic to expect that there will come a time when terrorist acts never occur).

I think there are Democrats who are strong on national security, and that this has been a consistent thread historically. However, I think it is also true that, especially since Vietnam, the Democratic party has been more closely associated with the turning inward counterculture. This is too bad, as the best antidote to what I (as a non-Republican) would characterize as the GOP’s often high-handed approach to foreign policy is not isolationism, but robust internationalism. Pacifist isolationism is not an option (to paraphrase, being against war makes about as much sense as being against glaciers). I’d like to see the return of FDR/JFK robust internationalist foreign policy.

 

[gilliam]

Philip P:

I actually thought Kerry’s conceptual framework toward terrorism - comparing it to organized crime - was the right approach. You can’t ever eradicate crime, but you can bring it down to acceptable levels, where planes aren’t being flown into buildings and thousands aren’t being killed in subways. In fact I recall Pres. Bush making a slip of the tongue during a pre-election interview and saying something similar, that the “war on terrorism” can’t ever be won. They’re both right, hard as it is to say (which is NOT the same thing as saying that the terrorists will “win”, only to say that it’s unrealistic to expect that there will come a time when terrorist acts never occur).

.

With all due respect to the President, we are not fighting terrorist acts. We are fighting an ideology: militant Islam.

Can you fight it like you would the drug trade or organized crime? I don’t know, the incentives for them to fight you are different. Organized crime and the drug trade are fighting for profit only. That is not true with militant Islam.

Militant Islam is an ideology and al-Qaeda is not only an ideoloty, but they are also after power (they want to build a Caliphate). Neither group is motivated by profit.

When you fight someone motivated by profit, you make it so it is too costly for them to continue to fight you. Then what they do is divert their energies to something you are not fighting them over.

When someone is trying to assimilate you into their philosophical world, or into their geopolitical environment, cost is really not an issue. So I don’t see how you can succeed with the same tactics.

Related post:
The Forever War Isn’t About Us

 

[Philip_P]

gilliam:

With all due respect to the President, we are not fighting terrorist acts. We are fighting an ideology: militant Islam.

Can you fight it like you would the drug trade or organized crime? I don’t know, the incentives for them to fight you are different. Organized crime and the drug trade are doing it for profit motives only. Militant Islam is an ideology and al-Qaeda is after power, not profit (they want to build a Caliphate).

Related post:
The Forever War Isn’t About Us

We’ve exchanged messages on this before, but I just don’t see the desire to establish a caliphate as even remotely credible, however stridently Bin Laden et al call for it. It ranks right around a restoration of feudalism in Europe or the return of legal slavery in America as far as likelihood of its ocurring.

The ones blowing themselves and/or others up are angry at the West and convinced they are fighting on behalf of Islam against the infidels, to be sure, but killing people is hardly the same thing as establishing a new political order. Their goal is disruption of the system. They’re anarchists, with more powerful bombs, but they’re not the new USSR and never will be.

 

[Lizzie]

gilliam:

With all due respect to the President, we are not fighting terrorist acts. We are fighting an ideology: militant Islam.

Can you fight it like you would the drug trade or organized crime? I don’t know, the incentives for them to fight you are different. Organized crime and the drug trade are doing it for profit motives only. Militant Islam is an ideology and al-Qaeda is after power, not profit (they want to build a Caliphate).

Related post:
The Forever War Isn’t About Us

Consider too that some are proposing ‘containment’. This pains me because that was the notion here in the US which meant almost a dozen Christian countries were ceded to persecution by Joe Stalin and caused a 50 year plus Cold War.

 

[gilliam]

Philip P:

Their goal is disruption of the system. They’re anarchists, with more powerful bombs, but they’re not the new USSR and never will be.

They say their goal is to restore the caliphate. I tend to believe people when they tell me what their goals are.

I don’t think their goal is simply to disrupt the system. They have never said that. They are not anarchists. Anyway, there is ample evidence that they want to build a caliphate. Here is one recent example:
If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly-according to how it appears to us-in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices-God permitting-are a large step directly towards that goal.

So we must think for a long time about our next steps and how we want to attain it…
From: a letter between two senior al Qa’ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

 

[Philip_P]

Lizzie:

Consider too that some are proposing ‘containment’. This pains me because that was the notion here in the US which meant almost a dozen Christian countries were ceded to persecution by Joe Stalin and caused a 50 year plus Cold War.

But the world didn’t blow up, which is certainly a plus. I think there’s a tendency to think that “superpower” means “all-powerful.” There are limits to what any country, even the US, can accomplish. I doubt the Cold War could have been avoided, and while we could have done better, we could also have done much much worse. Have to be careful, though, once you start getting into counterfactuals, anything goes…

 

[gilliam]

Lizzie:

Consider too that some are proposing ‘containment’. This pains me because that was the notion here in the US which meant almost a dozen Christian countries were ceded to persecution by Joe Stalin and caused a 50 year plus Cold War.

I am not sure how you “contain” an ideology in a free world.

 

[gilliam]

Philip P:

There are limits to what any country, even the US, can accomplish.

I agree. I would suggest reading:

Thomas Barnett’s Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating.

 

[Philip_P]

gilliam:

They say their goal is to restore the caliphate. I tend to believe people when they tell me what their goals are.

I don’t think their goal is simply to disrupt the system. They have never said that. They are not anarchists. Anyway, there is ample evidence that they want to build a caliphate. Here is one recent example:If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly-according to how it appears to us-in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices-God permitting-are a large step directly towards that goal.

So we must think for a long time about our next steps and how we want to attain it…

From: a letter between two senior al Qa’ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Again, I don’t doubt the sincererity of those at the top, but sincerity and ability are two vastly different things. I’ve run across some scary folks here in this country who have an extremely racist, frightening view of the society they’d like to create. I believe the FBI and other law enforcement agencies need to watch them carefully, but I’m not scared that the US is going to turn into the Fourth Reich.

 

[gilliam]

Related post:
CIA: Fictional Scenario: A New Caliphate

 

[jjwilkman]

gilliam:

Can you fight it like you would the drug trade or organized crime? I don’t know, the incentives for them to fight you are different. Organized crime and the drug trade are fighting for profit only. That is not true with militant Islam.

the us is winning the war against drugs and crime? news to me…

 

[wabrams]

gilliam:

They say their goal is to restore the caliphate. I tend to believe people when they tell me what their goals are.

I don’t think their goal is simply to disrupt the system. They have never said that. They are not anarchists. Anyway, there is ample evidence that they want to build a caliphate. Here is one recent example:If our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet and if we expect to establish its state predominantly-according to how it appears to us-in the heart of the Islamic world, then your efforts and sacrifices-God permitting-are a large step directly towards that goal.

So we must think for a long time about our next steps and how we want to attain it…

From: a letter between two senior al Qa’ida leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

I say let them try to establish one in the middle east. When they do, stand back and let them fight amongst themselves for the next decade or two for power. Whoever is let, we go in and wipe them off the face of the earth. Problem solved.