Liberal Hawks, an Endangered Species

One by one the liberal Iraq hawks died out. They backed away from Iraq, inch by inch, until they could no longer support an American presence in that embattled country. In November 2005, Jack Murtha, who had voted for the war, pronounced that it was lost and that American troops should return home as quickly as possible. In 2006 the most prominent and consistent liberal Iraq hawk, Joe Lieberman, lost his state party’s primary to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont. So far in 2007, Congress has passed an emergency defense supplemental appropriation bill mandating that troops begin withdrawing from Iraq by October 1. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has said Murtha is right and America has lost in Iraq. The most famous liberal Iraq hawk, British prime minister Tony Blair, has announced he will retire from office on June 27.

Meanwhile, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, refuses to apologize for her vote to authorize the use of force. But she, too, has discarded her willingness to continue the fight. She’s joined antiwar senator Robert Byrd in calling for the repeal of the congressional authorization for war. And on May 16, 29 Senate Democrats, including the formerly pro-war Clinton, Reid, Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Chuck Schumer, voted to end debate on a motion to cut off funding for the war by March 31, 2008.

The liberal-Iraq-hawk intellectuals are no different. As the war went on, they grew tired of conflict and death. They began to see America as the problem in Iraq, not the solution. Pundits who had written books calling for Democrats to embrace an assertive foreign policy suddenly penned columns defending George McGovern. Columnists who had advocated the invasion of Iraq said the situation was hopeless and began stressing the looming dangers of global warming. The advocates of American power to stop genocide in the nineties argued that the lessons of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo were inapplicable to the sectarian conflict in Iraq.

Some conservative and moderate Iraq hawks have reversed course and now oppose the war, but not many. A few endangered liberal Iraq hawks remain in captivity, but none occupies a position of influence or prestige. The partisan lines have been drawn. While the former liberal Iraq hawks want to move beyond Iraq, the conservative Iraq hawks argue that Gen. Petraeus must be allowed time to implement his new counterinsurgency strategy. While the former liberal Iraq hawks ignore, discount, or dismiss the possible consequences of a U.S. withdrawal, the conservative Iraq hawks argue that the repercussions for American interests, ideals, and honor would be disastrous. The Iraq debate has gone from one in which elite support for the war transcended partisan identification to one in which partisan identification trumps everything.

Animal populations expand, remain in equilibrium, or suddenly vanish. Political animals are no different. The liberal Iraq hawk is extinct. Through the process of political selection, it has mutated and been replaced by another subspecies. Where once there were liberal Iraq hawks there are now liberal Iraq doves.

In early May 2003, a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the 2004 Democratic presidential field met in South Carolina for its first debate. Nine candidates appeared on stage. At the time, the three major contenders for the nomination were senators Lieberman and Kerry and congressman Richard Gephardt. All had voted to authorize the war, and each defended his vote in the debate. One other candidate, Senator John Edwards, also supported the war, bringing the total number of Iraq hawks to four. At the time, the five antiwar candidates were all second-tier. Within the antiwar group, however, there were only three candidates who wanted America to leave Iraq–Rep. Dennis Kucinich, former senator Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton. They were the outliers.

Four years later, in late April 2007, the 2008 Democratic presidential field met in South Carolina for its first debate. There was a reason Kucinich was beaming from the podium that night. What had once been marginal had become mainstream: All eight Democrats on stage supported a withdrawal from Iraq. The major differences were between those who wanted American troops to leave immediately and those who wanted to conduct the withdrawal over a year. That’s not exactly what you call diversity of opinion.

What’s striking is that the 2008 Democratic presidential field has more candidates who supported the war initially than the 2004 field had. Five of the eight Democrats running for president supported the war in 2002: senators Clinton, Edwards, Biden, and Dodd, and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. Now these former liberal Iraq hawks have joined Kucinich and Senator Barack Obama, who were against the war from the beginning, in calling for withdrawal. And to demonstrate the degree to which sentiment on the war has shifted left, the 2008 field has a candidate who makes Kucinich seem almost statesman-like: former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, a McGovernite dinosaur who has risen from the tar pits of obscurity.

The same shift has occurred in Congress. In the House, 81 Democrats voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein in 2002. Back then, the Democrats were in the minority and the pro-war, midwesterner Gephardt was their leader. Today the Democrats are in the majority, the antiwar, Pacific Coast representative Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House, and a third of the Democrats who voted for war against Saddam have left Congress, Gephardt among them. More remarkable is the fact that, of the 57 onetime Democratic Iraq hawks who are still in the House, all but 3 voted for the recent supplemental defense appropriations bill calling for withdrawal from Iraq.

The Senate is no different. There, 29 Democrats voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam. Of those, 20 remain in the Senate as Democrats–8 no longer serve, and Lieberman is now an independent who caucuses with Democrats. And of the 20, all except one–Tim Johnson, who has been incapacitated since his stroke last December–voted last month to end the war.

The Democrats’ unanimity of opinion on Iraq is stunning. For now, it is matched by a similar unanimity among Republicans that Bush’s new strategy must be given a chance to succeed. There were only two Republicans in each chamber who joined the Democrats to call for withdrawal. But there is probably more internal discussion within the GOP about what to do in Iraq than there is within the Democratic party. Most Democrats have made up their mind about what to do in Iraq: Get out.

A cynic would say the Democrats are following the polls, or that the public is once again following cues from elites. But this theory doesn’t explain the disappearance of the liberal-Iraq-hawk intellectuals, whose jobs do not depend on election returns. In December 2002 the New Yorker‘s George Packer wrote about the liberal hawks for the New York Times Magazine. The Balkan wars of the 1990s, Packer wrote, had created a new class of liberal intellectuals who argued that military force was the only way to oppose mass slaughter. With the Cold War over, these intellectuals began to see the world not through the prism of defeat in Vietnam, but through the prism of appeasement at Munich. American power, they argued, could be put to good uses, such as the protection of minority populations from genocidal regimes.

The Iraq war presented these liberals with a dilemma. Saddam Hussein had invaded two countries, massacred minority populations within his borders, launched missiles at Israel, kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, and defiantly pursued weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration argued that if Saddam were not disarmed he would pose a grave threat in a post-9/11 world. The question facing the liberal hawks was whether they should side with a Republican president and advocate armed intervention in Iraq, or argue that containment and inspections remained the best policy. In his article, Packer focused on five intellectuals. Each had supported the American interventions in the Balkans. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, three of them–Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, and Leon Wieseltier–were pro-Iraq war (as was Packer). Two of them–David Rieff and Michael Walzer–opposed an invasion.

It may seem as though the Bosnia analogy is more applicable to Iraq today, where coalition forces are the only thing keeping the various sectional, sectarian, and political factions from slaughtering one another. Not to Rieff, who wrote in a New Republic symposium last year that the United States should leave Iraq as “quickly as possible.” In the same symposium, Walzer called for negotiations between Iraqi political factions, between America, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and others, between America and Europe, and between Bush and the Democrats.

By 2006, most of the liberal Iraq hawks Packer wrote about had been chastened by four years of bloody war. In the New Republic symposium, Wieseltier wrote that the United States needed to “try anything” to create the conditions for a stable and decent Iraqi society. For his part, Packer skirted the issue of how America should leave Iraq, but wrote that getting out should be our goal, coupled with a generous refugee policy for those Iraqis who had assisted the coalition. Of those Packer had profiled in 2002, only Hitchens and Berman continue to defend the initial intervention.

When you examine the remains of the now extinct liberal Iraq hawks, you discover that all of them, politician and intellectual alike, went through the same evolution. Whether it is Jack Murtha or Harry Reid, John Edwards or Hillary Clinton, George Packer or Jacob Weisberg, on the way to becoming doves the former liberal hawks expressed similar emotions and voiced similar ideas. Just as there are five stages of grief, there are five stages of liberal disavowal of the war.

First comes anger at the Bush administration for its missteps in prosecuting the war. When John Kerry delivered a speech announcing he would vote against the $87 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in October 2003, he repeated several times that it was “imperative that we succeed in Iraq,” but he could not authorize the funds because Bush had mucked things up.

In a 2004 Slate symposium on the Iraq war, Jacob Weisberg wrote that while the Iraq war may have been morally justified, he wasn’t “at all sure it was worth the costs.” Weisberg didn’t blame Bush entirely for the costs of the war, but he did write that those costs “could have been reduced substantially” if President Bush hadn’t “gratuitously alienated so many potential allies” and if “arrogance and ideology hadn’t prevented his Pentagon team from properly planning for the occupation.” And when Hillary Clinton confronted Donald Rumsfeld at an Armed Services Committee hearing in August 2006, she gave a litany of the administration’s mistakes: There were not enough troops, the Iraqi army should not have been disbanded, there was little postwar planning, and so on.

The second stage of liberal disavowal is bargaining. Democrats in this stage believe that negotiating with Syria and Iran is the only way for America to extricate itself from Iraq. They believe that Syria and Iran want to stabilize Iraq, even though those regimes show no signs of doing so. Foreign fighters traveling to Iraq go through Damascus, and figures associated with the Quds brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps are conducting offensive operations against American soldiers. Those in the bargaining stage believe negotiations will produce results in the future even if their track record has been lousy. “We need to engage in the robust diplomacy that we haven’t been engaged in,” Chris Dodd told Brian Williams at the first Democratic presidential debate. “This administration treats diplomacy as if it were a gift to our opponents; a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength.” Meanwhile, Bill Richardson wants to convene conferences with Iran and Syria, and with international donors for reconstruction. And Joe Biden wants to do the same, except the focus of his conference would be Iraqi federalism.

The third stage is depression. When Jack Murtha renounced his support for the war in November 2005, he painted a grim picture. “The future of our military is at risk,” he said. The military is “stretched thin.” The Army is “broken.” Recruitment is down. There are shortfalls on U.S. bases. The cost of health care is skyrocketing. Other former liberal Iraq hawks say similar things: Casualties continue to rise, there is no end in sight, America has alienated our friends and reenergized anti-Americanism throughout the globe, the “real war on terror” in Afghanistan has been neglected, Iraq is a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, other nonproliferation threats such as Iran and North Korea have been neglected . . . and so forth. It’s more than enough to leave anyone depressed about the state of the world. And if you are a liberal Iraq hawk going through Democratic disavowal, it’s more than enough to make you think that the American presence in Iraq is causing more trouble than not.

Next comes acceptance of American defeat. “Iraq cannot be won militarily,” Murtha said back in November 2005. In fact, the “presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.” The only alternative is to withdraw. “This war is lost,” Harry Reid said in April. “It is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible,” Hillary Clinton said this month while introducing legislation that would sunset the authority for war. “America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war,” Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate. “The United States has only one card left to play in Iraq,” writes Peter Beinart in the New Republic. “The threat to leave immediately. . . . We must wield that threat as dramatically as possible, and, if Iraq’s leaders don’t respond, leave as fast as we humanly can.”

The final stage of Democratic disavowal is denial. Democrats in this stage deny that America is fighting al Qaeda in Iraq. They deny that America has used its power to stop civil wars from getting out of hand in the past, and can do so again. They deny that the new “surge” strategy has produced some tenuous positive results. They deny that an American withdrawal from Iraq would be interpreted as a defeat. “This is not America’s war to win or lose,” Hillary Clinton has said; “This is not win or lose,” Biden has echoed. The denials pile up. Democrats in this stage deny the possibility that the situation in Iraq might get worse if America leaves.

Surveying the Democratic foreign policy landscape, one might be tempted to conclude that not only have the liberal Iraq hawks disappeared. So have liberal hawks in general. Public opinion data show that Democratic partisans are far more reluctant than others to deploy American force in the defense of American interests or in the pursuit of American ideals. The energy in the Democratic party is found on the antiwar left, whether on lefty blogs, at Democratic think tanks like the Center for American Progress, or on cable talk shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Because of Iraq, Democrats no longer see the world through the prism of Munich. They’ve gone back to seeing the world through the prism of Vietnam.

It may not be this simple, however. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to increase the size of the Army, a policy on which John Kerry and John Edwards campaigned for the White House in 2004. Obama has said that “all options are on the table” with respect to the Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. During the first Democratic presidential debate Obama defended this position against attacks from Kucinich and called a nuclear Iran a “major threat.” He reminded his audience that Iran is the “largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

Meanwhile John Edwards says NATO should send troops to police the conflict in Darfur. And Hillary Clinton’s moderate hawkishness is no secret. She continues to receive briefings from former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, one of the architects of the president’s Iraq surge policy. Hers was one of the most important voices urging President Clinton to begin bombing Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis. And she, too, says no option should be taken off the table with regard to Iran.

In an important sense, then, the Democratic presidential candidates have not gone the way of Kucinich and Gravel. Unlike many on the left, the top contenders do not argue that the United States is the cause of the world’s problems. Rather, they argue that the United States can help–ought to help–solve the world’s problems. At least publicly, they do not rule out the use of force. They are not antiwar. They are antiwar-in-Iraq.

So the common distinction between liberal hawks led by Clinton and liberal doves led by Obama is misleading. One of Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers is Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard lecturer Samantha Power. No one can argue that Power favors a noninterventionist foreign policy. Nor can anyone argue, upon reading Obama’s recent speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, that the Illinois senator is reluctant to embrace the use of force. As Robert Kagan has pointed out, perhaps the key line of Obama’s speech was his assertion that “no president should ever hesitate to use force–unilaterally if necessary.”

Nonetheless, there is a foreign policy divide in the Democratic party. It’s the divide between those one might call Transcendentalists, who are more concerned with transnational threats–failed states, nuclear proliferation, global epidemics, narcotraffickers, and global warming–and Statists, who are more concerned about the behavior of nation-states. A key exchange during the recent Democratic presidential debate illustrates this divide. When moderator Brian Williams asked Obama what he would do as president if the United States experienced another 9/11-style attack, Obama said he would make sure “we’ve got an effective emergency response.” Then, Obama went on, he would look at intelligence data “so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.”

This is classic Transcendentalist reasoning. In the Transcendentalist view, al Qaeda is a loose terrorist group without any state affiliation. Its cellular, decentralized composition makes it difficult to unravel. To Transcendentalists like Obama foreign-policy advisers Tony Lake and Susan Rice, the way to fight groups like al Qaeda is through intelligence and Special Forces operations.

Islamic terrorism, in other words, isn’t a problem arising from state activity. The Transcendentalists look beyond the nation-state toward supranational (crime, proliferation, global warming) and subnational (failed states leading to ethnic cleansing) phenomena. To the Transcendentalists, American security is a collective enterprise. America should join the “international community” in multilateral arrangements that limit American power in the pursuit of global goods.

The Statists have a different view. When Brian Williams asked Hillary Clinton how she would respond to another 9/11, the first thing Clinton said was, “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate.” She said, “If there are nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.” When discussing America’s enemies, Clinton used harsh rhetoric. “Let’s focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them,” she said. It was the only time the word “destroy” was uttered during the debate.

The important thing here is that Clinton mentioned “nations.” She was referring to state support for international terrorism. She rejected the idea that al Qaeda and its ilk exist without the aid of governments. In her own way, she has internalized a key tenet of the Bush Doctrine: that the United States ought to make no distinction between terrorists and the states that support them. The emphasis on states is the mark of a Democratic Statist. When Brian Williams asked Joe Biden what three nations posed the biggest threat to the United States, Biden wasted no time and said North Korea, Iran, and Putin’s Russia. He did not add global warming to the list.

There are Statists who sympathize with some of the Transcendentalists’ arguments and even see merits in the Transcendentalist outlook. At the end of the day, though, the Statists have a more traditional view of American interests than the Transcendentalists. One of the few books Clinton has cited in her major foreign-policy speeches is Ethical Realism, coauthored by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman. “Ethical realism points towards an international strategy based on prudence,” they have written. “A concentration on possible results rather than good intentions.” The Statist engages in “close study” of other states–their “nature, views, and interests.” She exhibits a willingness to accommodate the interests of those states “when possible.” She is an American patriot who also understands the limits “on American power and on American goodness.”

Notice what is missing from Transcendentalism and Statism. There is no grand ideological crusade to promote democracy or liberalism in the Middle East and beyond. There is no argument that America is an exceptional nation that has much to offer and teach the world. There are few mentions of the war in Iraq except to say that it has gone on for too long. There still may be hawks in the Democratic party, but they have moved beyond the most important issue of our time. They have . . . evolved. And they are willing to leave Iraq to a horrible fate.

Matthew Continetti is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.