On Tuesday, May 30, former New Republic editor (and current Editor-at-Large) Peter Beinart’s book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, was released. The book, whose title nicely sums up its contents, grew out of a controversial December 2004 cover story for TNR in which he argued that contemporary liberals should take a page from their Cold War forbearers for an idea of how to fight the war on terror.
Paul McLeary: Your book was foreshadowed by a somewhat controversial piece (at least in the liberal blogosphere) for TNR in December 2004, which held, in a nutshell, that Democrats need to take the threat of Islamic totalitarianism more seriously. Your book expands on that piece’s thesis. Were you working on the book when you wrote the piece, or did it spur you to start the book?
Peter Beinart: I decided to start writing this as a response to that piece. I wrote two follow-up columns in the New Republic about it, and one shorter version of the piece in the Washington Post.
PM: Did the vehement response from the liberal blogosphere and the pundit class surprise you at all?
PB: It didn’t surprise me that much, since I had gone after MoveOn.org, which is a popular and influential group among the Democratic base. The response kind of confirmed my suspicions and fears that there was a lot of confusion and lack of clarity about even the different positions that liberals have in the war on terror. Even the dividing lines were not at all distinct, and part of what I wanted to do was to articulate the position that I believed in, in greater detail, but also to be clearer about the alternative positions on the right and the left that I disagreed with.
PM: In writing about the postwar or early Cold War years, you outline how the left purged communists from their ranks. Obviously, we don’t necessarily have communists anymore, and there’s certainly no jihadist wing of the Democratic party, so how does the Cold War analogy compare to the Democratic party’s current position?
PB: There are a couple things. The debates in the late 1940s in the Democratic party were not only even mainly between what I would call anti-totalitarian liberals and communists. Henry Wallace was not a communist. Most of his supporters were not communists. The debate was really over whether anti-totalitarianism would be at the heart of what liberalism was; so the fundamental debate was about whether liberalism was an ideology defined only against the right, or whether it is what Arthur Schlesinger called the “vital center,” which is an ideology defined not only against the right, but also against totalitarianism. So that was not a debate between liberals and communists, it was a debate between anti-totalitarian liberals and liberals who did not see anti-totalitarian as important to liberalism.
So, you’re right, there is no jihadist wing of the Democratic party today, of course not. What there is, is a latent debate that needs to be had about the degree that anti-totalitarianism should be a critical principle for liberals today — which means liberals are engaged in an argument not only with conservatives, but the values of liberalism need to be defined not only in opposition to George W. Bush, but also very critically in opposition to this new form of totalitarianism.
PM: In the original TNR article and in the book, you make the case that you think many contemporary liberals don’t see defeating al Qaeda as a paramount national challenge.
PB: I try and make the case in the second-to-last chapter of the book that there has been a very long debate that you can trace back at least to where I started — which was the beginning of the Cold War — about the degree to which anti-totalitarianism should be at the heart of the liberal project. I think that idea was actually quite strong in the wake of 9/11, but it has grown weaker in the last two or three years because of the alienation from George W. Bush, the war in Iraq and the war on terror as he defines it. What I’m trying to argue in my book is that liberals need to try and imagine a different kind of war on terror, not just George W. Bush’s war on terror, but one that is consistent with liberal principles. It would be a mistake for liberals to turn away from the concept of a nationally focused struggle against totalitarianism itself. There is some reason to fear, particularly in the polling, that this is what’s starting to happen.
PM: You write quite a bit about the liberal belief that the United States isn’t a morally infallible nation, which conversely, you claim is a core conservative worldview. How do you think liberals can bring this idea back into the public sphere without being hit over the head with charges of anti-Americanism?
PB: The critical point is to say that Americans and America should not be complacent. Which is to say, we have the potential to be the greatest nation on earth, but only if we continue to struggle to make ourselves a better society. That greatness is not inevitable. If we think that we can act without having to confront our own capacity for injustice, then in fact I think we potentially could become a second-rate nation.
I think the conservative argument has always been “liberals don’t believe enough in the United States.” I think the liberal response, when it’s been effective, has always been, “Conservatives accept America as good enough as it is. Conservatives are complacent about America, whereas liberals, while challenging America to be better are recognizing that it is not inevitable that we’re going to be the most powerful, most respected country in the world.” But that takes effort, and that’s what’s makes America great. So it’s an argument against complacency.
PM: Here’s the question that you’re going to get asked a lot as you do press for the book, and an issue that bloggers will probably — and sadly — chew over. In the book you come out and admit that you were wrong in supporting the push for war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003, which is an issue many on the anti-war left have taken you to task for.
PB: What convinced me that [invading Iraq] was the right thing to do was my belief that Saddam Hussein would never abandon his nuclear weapons program. I wasn’t particularly concerned about chemical or biological weapons. Nor was I convinced that he had many ties to al Qaeda, but we did know that he had been involved in a crash program to try and develop a nuclear weapon before the [1991] Gulf War, and that he might have gotten one a year or two after that.
Given that we had not had international weapons inspectors in [Iraq] since 1998, it seemed logical to believe that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program. Many other foreign intelligence agencies seemed to think that as well. The CIA and the intelligence agencies were vague, but they generally seemed to think he did, and my view was that given the support for international sanctions was weakening and diminishing, it was very unlikely that we could assemble a sanctions regime that prevent Saddam from ultimately carrying that desire to fruition and getting a nuclear weapon, which I thought would be very destabilizing for the Middle East.
What I was not sufficiently attuned to was the evidence that began to dribble out in the first months of 2003 that suggested that this fairly widespread view about Saddam’s nuclear weapons program might in fact be wrong. Ironically, I actually wrote a column making the point that the claims about aluminum tubes and about uranium from Africa were very weak, but I assumed there was other evidence we had that he had a nuclear weapons program. I wasn’t sufficiently alive to the possibility that in fact we all could be wrong, but we knew enough by March of 2003 to realize that we should have been revising that view, which I think would have certainly suggested that we should have allowed the inspections to go on longer.
The New Republic did a special issue in 2004 called “Were We Wrong,” and I, as editor of the magazine, was thinking a great deal about it then. But over the course of 2005 I had the chance to step back in a way that you don’t have when you’re running a weekly magazine, to read a great deal about what we knew before the war, and during the course of the war, and also to read a lot about the liberal Cold War tradition that I had written about in my essay. The more I read, both about Iraq and about the core principles of containment as they applied to the Soviet Union, the more I began to believe that while there was an understandable moral instinct to want to overthrow this horrible tyrant and free the Iraqi people, that I had not been alive enough to the limitations of America’s capacities in the world, and the limitations of America’s good intentions. While you could argue that there were good intentions involved in trying to overthrow Saddam, we also could have shown good intentions by going into Hungary in 1956, and what I think Americans recognized in the 40s and 50s, was that there are limitations to what we can do abroad, and there are limitations to our moral judgment.
PM: To some degree, I get the sense, reading some far left and anti-war blogs, that there is something akin to revisionist history going on about the war, with bloggers saying “Of course we knew Saddam had no WMD, everyone knew that he didn’t,” when in fact in 2002 and 2003, while the administration didn’t fully make its case, it was still up in the air.
PB: Yeah, in fact before the war it was more common to hear people who were against the war say we shouldn’t go to war because we were likely to have chemical weapons used on us by the Iraqis than that they didn’t have it. So I think that’s true — there was a pretty widely held consensus that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, while I think there was less of a consensus about the state of his nuclear weapons program. The State Department’s intelligence agency, for instance, dissented from the overall intelligence community and said they couldn’t be sure that he had a nuclear weapons program. But I think it’s also important to talk about when you were making these assessments. In the fall of 2002 I think there were very few people who were saying they didn’t believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and in fact not even very many who were saying they didn’t believe he had a nuclear weapons program.
In February and March 2003, once they IAEA inspectors had been in there, and began to challenge some of the statements by the Bush administration and began not to find this stuff, then at least on the nuclear stuff I think you began to see some greater willingness to suggest that maybe this was wrong. But certainly not in the fall of 2002. On the terrorism tie I think there was greater skepticism, but on the weapons of mass destruction stuff I think it is dishonest to say that most opponents of the war opposed the war because they didn’t believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I think most who opposed it — and who turned out to be right — [did so] because they believed that Saddam didn’t represent an imminent threat.
PM: Were these people members of what you term he anti-imperialist wing of the Democratic party?
PB: I take some pains in the book to distinguish what I call the anti-imperialist wing of the Democratic party from opponents of the war. There were lots of opponents of the war who I would not classify in that category. I really associate the anti-imperialist wing of the Democratic party with people who opposed the Afghan war and who reject the whole notion of the “war on terrorism.” There were many people who were opposed to the Iraq war that I think opposed it because they wanted to do more in Afghanistan and other places. My concern is that some of the tendencies of the anti-imperialist wing of the Democratic party, which were very weak in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, have grown stronger in the last couple years because of the deep anger and alienation over Iraq and against George W. Bush.
PM: In the book, you call on liberals to take a greater role in pressuring the American government to work with the United Nations and other international bodies to demand — through economic incentives — that regimes in the Middle East embark on a program of reform. Do you think that the political climate is ripe for this kind of carrot-and-stick approach, given the creeping isolationism in the United States right now from both the right and some elements of the left?
PB: The right will never do that. There’s a long history of hostility toward international organizations on the right, but I think that liberals have not effectively made the case for international institutions. Polling actually shows that international institutions are quite popular with most Americans. Liberals need to make the deeper argument for international institutions. The argument for them is that in a globalized world, America cannot secure its prosperity and security alone — that’s an old liberal understanding that goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson, but certainly Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman … the liberal argument has to be that America cannot secure itself alone.
PM: Don’t you think it would be difficult for liberals to make this case currently, as even some on the left, as the scuttled Dubai Ports deal showed, are falling into a kind of knee-jerk isolationism?
PB: We really don’t know how long this isolationist mood will last. There’s no question that there is an isolationist mood to some degree in general in the country but most disturbingly to me as a liberal, it’s stronger amongst liberals and Democrats than it is amongst conservatives and Republicans. I think in the longer term that is going to be a problem. America won’t stay isolationist — it can’t afford to stay that way for very long — that’s been our history. We’ve always been jolted out of these things and forced to renew our commitments in the world.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.