A kinder, gentler war on terror

New Republic editor Peter Beinart admits he was wrong about Iraq -- but still calls for liberals to fight the "new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world." Yet many on the left don't believe his bogeyman even exists.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Illustration by Mignon Khargie / Salon.com

June 16, 2006 | We owe Peter Beinart a debt of thanks for his book "The Good Fight." Not so much for his alleged central argument, which is, as his ungainly subtitle declares, "Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." There are things worth hearing in that argument, which isn't quite as belligerent and neocon-like as it sounds, but Beinart carves away the ground under his own feet so effectively as he goes along that liberals, leftists or progressives (pick your label) who disagree with him can pretty much close the book with a shrug and go back to their Dick Cheney voodoo dolls.

Beinart's great accomplishment is to return the debate about Iraq, terrorism and the American left to the ground of civility. He lays out, as clearly as he can, his disagreements with the "anti-imperialist left" (his term, but it's probably fair), meaning those who oppose preemptive or preventive warfare by the United States in almost all circumstances. I don't think he always understands this position clearly or characterizes it accurately, but he never red-baits his left-wing opponents, never levels charges of stupidity or cowardice, never accuses them of coddling al-Qaida or hating America. (Ann Coulter's got all that covered.)

Furthermore, Beinart isn't a neocon in Birkenstocks. When he calls himself a liberal, he means it, in much the same way that Democratic Party dinosaurs like Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson would have embraced the term. He argues simultaneously for a hawkish anti-terror policy, broad acceptance of international restrictions on American power and an activist domestic policy aimed at combating poverty and inequality.

Unlike some of his peers among the so-called liberal hawks, Beinart reserves his angriest rhetoric for the current administration. Left-wingers who have long suspected Beinart's publication (he's an editor at large at the New Republic) of tending a not-so-secret flame for the manly men of the Bush-Cheney regime will be heartened by his lusty denunciations of its misdeeds and misguided ideology. In stripping away the restraints on American power, Beinart writes, Bush has made that power illegitimate. In insisting that America is incapable of evil, Bush has created an environment in which Americans kidnap, torture and kill without compunction. Setting himself apart from so many in mainstream politics, Beinart repeatedly uses the word "torture" to describe U.S. treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

Beinart is trying to clear some space, it seems, so that those in the center and on the left of American politics can speak frankly about our disagreements, while remaining focused on a broad set of shared priorities (i.e., rewinding and erasing as much of the 21st century as possible, except for the 2004 Red Sox and HBO's prime-time schedule). This is a noble and perhaps doomed endeavor, but after half a decade of enraged gasbag rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum, it's nice to see someone try it. Undoing the creeping right-wing coup of the last six years will require forging a common front among many different groups and individuals who don't agree about Iraq or Iran or Israel or a lot of other things, and God knows the Democratic Party -- grown putrid in some places and calcified in others, like an abandoned avocado -- doesn't seem capable of it.

Civility, you might say, is the handmaiden of humility, and for better or worse Beinart begins "The Good Fight" from a severely humbled position. In 2003, he was an ardent supporter of the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq. To his credit, he does not flee from this position or flail about seeking to justify it (à la Christopher Hitchens). Instead, he opens the book by serving himself a man-size helping of crow.

Beinart believed that a U.S. invasion was the only way to prevent Saddam Hussein from assembling a nuclear bomb, he explains, and he also believed "it could produce a decent, pluralistic Iraqi regime, which might help open a democratic third way in the Middle East between secular autocrats and their theocratic opponents." His armchair view of these positions is not complicated: "On both counts, I was wrong."

His errors, Beinart writes, were more than misjudgments of fact (many of us -- more than will ever admit to it -- were misled by the Bush administration's cooked intelligence). "I was wrong on the theory," he says. "I did not grasp the critical link between the invasion's credibility in the world and its credibility in Iraq. I not only overestimated America's capacities, I overestimated America's legitimacy." As someone who had supported the relatively effective U.S. interventions in Kuwait, the Balkans and Afghanistan, he continues, "I could not see that the morality of American power rests on the limits to American power. It is a grim irony that this book's central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most."

Anyone who opposed the war all along is entitled, I suppose, to a flash of bitterness on reading Beinart's mea culpa, which comes after so many thousands of lives lost and so many billions of dollars. But I couldn't sustain that reaction. Beinart and his fellow liberal hawks played no role in the Bush administration's misconceived war plans, beyond providing them some tiny amount of intellectual cover on the left. His candid admission that he failed to live up to his own principles during the rush to war evinces a quality of self-reflection sorely lacking in American public life; one could argue that this lends him more credibility, not less, as a spokesman for the embattled liberal tradition.

Beinart's recantation is far more direct than the murky half-apology offered by George Packer, another leading pro-war liberal, in his book "The Assassins' Gate." That's mostly because "The Good Fight" is an unavoidably personal account of a developing political philosophy, while Packer's book is a magisterial work of reporting, almost certainly the best thing yet published on the prelude, conduct and aftermath of the disastrous war in Iraq. Behind both authors lurks the specter of Paul Berman, along with Hitchens the leading so-called liberal intellectual to support the war. While Beinart seems to have backed away from Berman's analysis a bit more than Packer has, the fact that he calls the Islamic terrorist threat "totalitarianism" suggests he has not cut the cord altogether. Berman's declaration that al-Qaida, the Taliban and Saddam's Baathist regime (along with other groups, I don't doubt) all share the ideological DNA of Stalin and Hitler became the liberal hawks' one-size-fits-all justification for endless overseas warfare.

Still, Beinart's opening confession creates a problem that echoes throughout the length and breadth of "The Good Fight." He is defending a political ideology that, as he admits, led him to support an arrogant and ill-fated military adventure. The same political ideology, as he also admits, led an earlier generation of liberal hawks into a different arrogant and ill-fated military adventure, in Southeast Asia. (Earlier still, the same ideology led too many American liberals to equivocate from the sidelines for too long while Joe McCarthy persecuted suspected Communists and their families.) Perhaps only a liberal could find himself so consistently behind the eight ball, admitting his own team's flaws and hypocrisies while still arguing for its moral rightness.

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