Two articles about the Neocon movement in the Democratic Party

[Guest guest]

From SpidelBlog

http://spidel.net/blog/?p=660

 

Would love your thoughts about this. The Third Party

movement folks sent this to me this morning.

 

If you all want to know what I feel about third party

movements in the current climate you can read here:

http://spidel.net/blog/?p=638

 

But, these two articles did indeed catch my eye:

 

From the Los Angeles Times

Neocons in the Democratic Party

 

Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to

beef up the military and won’t run from a fight.

By Jacob Heilbrunn

 

Jacob Heilbrunn, a former Times editorial writer, is

writing a book on neoconservatism.

May 28, 2006

 

DON’T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a

comeback — and not among the Republicans who have made

it famous but in the Democratic Party.

 

A host of pundits and young national security experts

associated with the party are calling for a return to

the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a

war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter

Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book,

calls “The Good Fight.”

 

The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places

such as the Progressive Policy Institute, whose

president, Will Marshall, has just released a volume

of doctrine called “With All Our Might: A Progressive

Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending

Liberty.” Beinart’s book is subtitled “Why Liberals —

and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make

America Great Again.” Their political champions

include Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and such

likely presidential candidates as former Virginia Gov.

Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman

of the Democratic Leadership Council.

 

This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the

existing war against terrorism, beefing up the

military and promoting democracy around the globe

while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of

the Bush administration. They support a U.S.

government that would seek multilateral consensus

before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to

use force when necessary.

These Democrats want to be seen as anything but the

squishes who have led the party to defeat in the past.

Interestingly, that’s how the early neocons saw

themselves too: as liberals fighting to reclaim their

party’s true heritage — before they decamped to the

GOP in the 1980s.

 

Indeed, the credo of the new Democratic hawks is

eerily reminiscent of the neocons of the 1970s, who

ran a full-page ad in the New York Times called “Come

Home, Democrats” after George McGovern’s crushing

defeat, in a play on his campaign slogan “Come Home,

America.” In it, early neocons such as Jeane

Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz called for a return

to the principles of — you guessed it — Truman and

President Kennedy.

They lamented the fact that their party had been taken

over by the forces backing McGovern’s run for the

presidency in 1972 and wanted to purge the party of

the McGovernites. They didn’t want self-abasement

about U.S. sins abroad but a vigorous fighting faith

that promoted the American creed of liberty and human

rights abroad and at home.

 

Now, a generation later, as the crusading Republican

neoconservatism espoused by Weekly Standard Editor

William Kristol and others lies in the smoking rubble

of Baghdad, a new generation of Democrats wants to

dust off and rehabilitate those traditional Democratic

principles, which they believe were hijacked by the

Bush administration.

 

They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that

originally brought the neocons to prominence, the

beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals

such as Democratic Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic

war, of course. Just as Republicans are being riven by

debates between realists and Bush administration

idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness

its own battle.

 

Just as the old neocons wanted to expel the

McGovernites, so the new ones want to rid the party of

the Moveon.org types and move it to the right. As

Beinart puts it, “whatever its failings, the right at

least knows that America’s enemies need to be fought.”

In “With All Our Might,” scholars Larry Diamond and

Michael McFaul — both Democrats — outline a

comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For

example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the

1975 Helsinki accords, which insisted upon human

rights monitoring in the former Warsaw Pact nations,

to the Middle East. “Freedom,” they exhort, “is the

fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror

and oppression.”

 

Other Democrats, who call themselves the “Sept. 11

generation,” have formed what is known as the Truman

National Security Project, whose avowed aim is to

revive the “strong security, strong values of the

Democratic Party — for Democrats of all ages.”

Does this simply sound like Bush-lite? To the right

and the left, it probably will, but the main

opposition facing the would-be Truman successors will

come from the latter. The battle will come from the

generation of Democrats who came of age during the

1960s and who were instrumental in finishing off “Cold

War liberalism” because of its failures in the jungles

of Vietnam.

Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative,

war, undertaken by warrior intellectuals who were

liberal at home but saw falling dominoes everywhere

around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the

Bush administration, which has been trying to depict a

global kind of Islamic totalitarianism, when the foe,

as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse and less of

a monolith than American leaders are prepared to

believe.)

 

The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down

without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the

imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left —

are poised for their greatest influence in the party

since the McGovern era.

 

The new Democratic hawks, like the old

neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an

insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment.

And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to

do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman

and Co.

 

PNAC Co-Founder Endorses Dems in ‘08

by BooMan

 

Sun May 28th, 2006 at 08:31:22 PM EST

 

Robert Kagan is the co-founder with William Kristol of

the Project for the New American Century and he thinks

it will be better for America if the Democrats win the

2008 contest for the Presidency. If that surprises

you, you haven’t been paying attention. As far as the

PNAC crew goes, power isn’t about being a Republican

or a Democrat, it’s about owning both parties. And,

fortunately for us, Kagan is spectacularly upfront

about this. To understand his mindset it’s important

to understand that he doesn’t divide the world up into

left and right, but into interventionist and

isolationist. Kagan has representatives in the

Democratic Party. They can loosely be described as the

members of the Democratic Leadership Council and the

writers at The New Republic. These opinion leaders

consider America to be the ‘indispensable nation’ and

they consider it vital to world peace and security

that America maintain its role in the world. For

example, it’s critical that we maintain military bases

from Okinawa, to Tashkent, to Kandahar, to Baku, to

Turkey, Baghdad, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, to

Eritrea. From the outside, it looks like they benefit

from their association or investments in the companies

that do business in those countries, or the companies

that arm our military to defend themselves in foreign

lands and equip our home defenses to protect against

the resentment our occupations cause. But, from the

inside, it’s more complicated. It’s about the evils of

communism, or fascism, or Islamo-fascism, or whatever

is required as a rhetorical tool next week.The way

Kagan sees it is actually quite interesting to read.

He thinks it is natural for a party too long out of

power to become accustomed to opposing our foreign

policy and therefore drift into a dangerous

isolationism. Of course, it isn’t entirely clear for

whom this drift presents a danger. It’s certainly not

a threat to the American taxpayer, just for one

example. But, it is definitely a threat to those that

make their living hawking military and homeland

security equipment. That’s why Kagan says the

following:

 

The next president, whether Democrat or Republican,

may work better with allies and may be more clever in

negotiating with adversaries. But the realities of the

world are what they are, and the imperatives of U.S.

foreign policy are what they are. The diffuse threats

of the post-Cold War world simply don’t unite and

energize our European allies as the Soviet Union did,

and even a dedicated “multilateralist” won’t be able

to get them to spend more money on defense or stop

buying oil from Iran. A smarter negotiating strategy

toward Iran might or might not make a difference in

stopping its weapons program. Soft power will go only

so far in dealing with problems such as North Korea

and Sudan.In fact, the options open to any new

administration are never as broad as its supporters

imagine, which is why, historically, there is more

continuity than discontinuity in American foreign

policy. If the Democrats did take office in 2009,

their approach to the post-Sept. 11 world would be

marginally different but not stunningly different from

Bush’s. And they would have to sell that not

stunningly different set of policies to their own

constituents.

 

Kagan is part of a literal cabal of people in

Washington (in Congress, in thinktanks, in this case,

the Washington Post’s editorial pages) that assure

that any new administration’s ‘options’ are limited

and that their approach will not be stunningly

different from Bush’s. These are the folks that

brought you the stalemated Korean War and the need for

permanent bases in the south, the disastrous Vietnam

War, the Committee on the Present Danger, and Team B.

They employ journalists like Judith Miller to write

about anthrax, and journalists like Peter Beinert to

advocate a tougher foreign policy line from Democrats.

They love and contibute to politicians like Joe

Lieberman, Joe Biden, Diane Feinstein, and Jane

Harman. As long as they can control the debate, assure

a centrist nominee from the Democrats, and keep the

level of fear in the public high, their racket is

safe, even if the people in the World Trade Center

were not.

 

Some may see this as a typical leftist critique. But

it’s more than that. This is how Washington works, how

power wields itself, how the Democrats are co-opted,

and how we keep repeating our mistakes by involving

ourselves in costly foreign entanglements.

Perhaps the most flamboyant and successful of their

campaigns was the one they used to convince us that we

defeated the Soviet Union through military spending.

It had nothing to do with the superior example our

society made to the world through our civil liberties,

personal freedoms, prosperity, and human rights

advocacy. Nor did it have anything to do with the

Soviets poor example and lack of these things. No, no.

We brought the Soviets to their knees by spending

billions on a failed missile shield and the V-22

Osprey.

 

Ask yourself something. How much did the wars and

proxy war in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua,

Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and Grenada do to

contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union? How is

Iraq helping today? Being out of power for a while

does tend to focus the mind when you ask yourself that

question. And that is a major threat to people like

Kagan. That is why at least half of PNAC now considers

it desirable that a Democrat (like Hillary or Biden or

Richardson or Bayh or Vilsack or Warner) becomes the

next President. They think they can control them, and

they are probably right.

 

The Democrats need to take ownership of American

foreign policy again, for their sake as well as the

country’s. Long stretches in opposition sometimes

drive parties toward defeatism, utopianism,

isolationism or permutations of all three. What starts

off as legitimate attacks on the inevitable errors of

the party in power can veer off into a wholesale

rejection of the opposition party’s own foreign policy

principles.

 

It’s precisely the foreign policy principles of our

nation’s leaders and arms merchants that have led us

to where we are today, and it is precisely the

utopianism of the Project for a New American Century

and their neo-conservative allies that litter the

halls of power that has undermined the consensus for

permawar and a permawar footing among the left.

 

Kagan gives away the game in this column. His

assumption is that the causes of threats to the

homeland have no causal basis in American imperialism,

occupation, or double standards. The only potential

cause for a threat comes from those that don’t

advocate doing more of the same, spending more of the

same, and doing it with more bellicosity, fewer

allies, and less national unanimity.

 

At least, it seems that way. But, in reality, it’s

more complicated. How can you explain that a man that

was Deputy for Policy under Bush-pere-pardoned Elliott

Abrams, Principal Speechwriter for Secretary George

Schultz and foreign policy advisor to Jack Kemp would

write a column advocating the Republicans be swept out

of the White House? The answer is that he fears the

Democrats will move so far to the left if they do not

elect a DLC Democrat in 2008 that it will endanger the

consensus within this country that allows us maintain

bases all throughout Asia and an enormous military

budget.

 

Somewhere in the depths of his mind, Kagan probably is

asking the same questions we are asking. Isn’t is

possible that we could erode the theat of terrorism

more effectively, and at an acceptable cost in

treasure, by finding a new consensus within the

community of representative democracies and advanced

economies of the world? One that isn’t opposed by

everyone but the bribed and the coerced? One that

shares the burdens of collective security, as well as

the limitations of international organizations and

efforts? One that might limit the scope of American

power but also its attendant blowback?

 

It must have occurred to Kagan, and he knows it is

occurring to a growing majority of the left. Kagan

throws this heretical thinking aside and states:

…the imperatives of U.S. foreign policy are what they

are. The diffuse threats of the post-Cold War world

simply don’t unite and energize our European allies as

the Soviet Union did…

 

In other words, this Zarqawi/Zawahiri/bin-Laden

bullshit just isn’t working with the left, and if we

don’t give them a Hillary or Biden or Lieberman to

rally around, they’ll leave the reservation for

good.Better to avoid permanently losing one of two

American power parties than for the GOP to win in ‘08.

What better example could we have of what’s at stake,

who’s on our side, and how big our potential for

positive change really is.

 

Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment

when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the

neocon credo in the Republican Party, it’s being

revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it

to life.