The RAD blog began February 23, 2005 with an extensive post mortem of Pacific University’s 23rd Annual 2005 Tom McCall Forum, held on February 17, 2005 featuring Howard Dean v. Richard Perle debating the topic - ‘American Foreign Policy Post 9/11’ - held at the Arlene Schnitzer Performing Arts Center, Portland, Oregon.
Four years later our nation stands at another major foreign policy cross roads waiting for a decision by a Democratic President, Barack Obama, about what we should do about Afghanistan. The questions raised in the McCall Forum in 2005 are eerily parallel the questions which our new President needs to ask of himself and of us.
I’m reprinting my analysis since I think it stands the test of time. We still are searching for a foreign policy doctrine relevant to the challenges of the post-9/11 era. The readers of course will make their own judgments but I find the current debate going on behind the scenes very much as Yogi Berra would say “déjà vu all over again! I sincerely hope four years from now we won't wake up feeling Barack Obama has been morphed into LBJ circa 1965!
Who won, who lost?
As the founder and faculty coordinator of this event, I’ve often been asked whom did I think won the great debate. However, I’m so busy during the event that I can’t focus as much as I’d like on the comments of our speakers. So, I have to wait to view the debate on videotape a day or so later in the quiet of our living at home in the Grove.
Now that Dietrich von Behren has so kindly set up the RussDondero.com blog – I can share my assessment with anyone who has access to the World Wide Web. As you will see these are rather extended comments – more in the style of an essay in The New Yorker. As you all know – brevity is not my strong suit… So make a hard copy, get yourself a cup of java, find your favorite chair and enjoy a RAD rant, as one of my GOP ‘political’ offspring is want to say.
First let me highlight the essence of both Perle and Dean arguments, picking the ‘high hanging fruit’ of their comments.
“Perles” of Wisdom:
As one of the current administration’s intellectual architects of pre-emptive war one could sum up Richard Perle’s take on the topic for the night as “have gun will travel”. Perle, an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan years, argued that US timidity in responding to previous terrorist attacks caused our adversaries “to believe we were weak”. After 9/1l “President Bush shifted American foreign policy in a radical way” by declaring that the US would no longer distinguish between terrorist organizations and countries which harbored them.
Perle defended the doctrine of pre-emption arguing, “Acting before it is too late is prudent, it’s common sense, and it’s entirely consistent with international law”. The principle of self-defense justified our actions. Perle argued that the war was justified based on the intelligence we had at the time. Even minus WMDs - to argue we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq is akin to arguing that a person who buys house insurance is not making a wise decision simply because his house does not catch on fire.
He argued, as President Bush has, that creating a stable democracy in Iraq in the long run will be far more important than the argument over WMDs. The evil that 9/11 represented was not caused by poverty but by political oppression. Fostering democracy is the best long-term strategy for defeating terrorism. But Perle acknowledged, “Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable to others.”
RADspeak:
As was asked by the panel of Mr. Perle – what, if any, are the limits of the doctrine of pre-emption? President Bush has recently put Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Russia on our ‘watch list’ along with Iran and North Korea. Will the pre-emptive shoe be dropped on one of these nations next? Or is this mere swagger? Also, is this administration’s willingness to go it alone over? Did we confer with allies regarding the additions to the ‘watch list’? When President Bush looks into ‘Putin’s eyes’ – does he still see a kindred spirit?
The great empires of the past from Persian to the British Empire all collapsed because they became geographically overextended and became internally corrupt under the pressure of their imperium. What’s to say our hegemony will not suffer the same fate? Regarding the causes of terrorism – it’s a complex phenomenon. But oppression often has three faces – political, economic and social repression. The military option might address the political dimension in a narrow sense, but only ‘soft’ power can confront the other two dimensions of securing liberty and freedom.
The Dean ‘Scream’:
Unlike Mr. Perle, Governor Howard Dean’s comments, as the newly elected chair of the DNC, are not easily put in the form of a bumper sticker – violating Mary Matalin’s rule for political communication she introduced to the Forum audience in the 2000. This may be the essential difference between Mr. Perle and Chairman Dean – and also the difference between the GOP and the Democrats.
Dean argued that while he and other Democrats supported earlier conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia and even the first campaign against Iraq in 1991 – the current war “was not justified by the information we had at the time”. He accused the administration of failing to develop a long-term strategy to defend our vital security and global interests. He argued focus on Iraq ignored more dangerous threats to US security. “We picked the low hanging fruit in Iraq” while ignoring the nuclear proliferation threat in Iran and North Korea.
Dean argued that our national security is not strengthened by running up “trillions of dollars in deficits and have the paper held by the Saudis and Chinese”. Cutting “veterans health care benefits” is also not a strong position. By invading Iraq unilaterally and without a clear post-war strategy “we have lost the moral high ground we’ve had since the end of World War I”.
“Defense is a lot broader than swaggering around saying you’re going to kick Saddam’s butt.” We need a ‘big picture’ view of American foreign policy. We should embrace freedom and opportunity, at home and abroad. But that depends on more than the use of military might. A strong defense policy requires trade agreements, which create an integrated world economy good for multi-national corporations but which also creates good jobs for workers and renewable energy. He argued we all should hope democracy succeeds in Iraq. But a political struggle in Iraq between moderates and fundamentalists may end up with a Shiite leadership favorable to Iran.
RADspeak:
If the Democrat’s foreign policy position is primarily a critique of the current Iraq war and occupation, then what happens if the emergence of democracy in Iraq is realized? Mr. Dean said that Democrats should hope such turns out to be the case, even though he argued that we shouldn’t make book on it. As Dean said, Iraq could just as easily splinter into a 3-way civil war between – Sunni, Shiite and Kurds. Look at the partition of Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947.
Perhaps like our experiment with democracy in Afghanistan – the evidence of success is merely skin deep. The warlords are back, President Karzi cannot travel in Kabul let alone outside without an American military escort and Afghanistan’s traditional cash crop, the opium poppy is back. On North Korea our refusal to enter bi-lateral talks is akin to a youngster holding his breath until Mom or Dad give in. We should never fear to negotiate. On nuclear proliferation, what about the old Soviet stockpiles? Thankfully, Bush and Putin are talking about them now. But as Nixon once said – “don’t watch what we say, watch what we do.” The devil is in the details.
The Election Myth:
Having watched and listened carefully to President Bush’s inaugural speech and his State of the Union address (it’s tough duty, but somebody has turn on the remote) – I’m taken aback by his idea that ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are action verbs not nouns. He and Karl Rove seem to feel that the mere act of having an election makes these principles actionable. Well, let’s wait a minute here. Back in the dark days of the Vietnam War – I remember elections. Our guys won much like Mayor Daley (the father) used to win elections in Chicago. But on the way to victory Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City a few short years later. We’ve had elections in Haiti and their shelf life was short too.
The rather mechanistic belief that elections are an example of democracy having taken root is problematic at best, illusionary at worst. Our own nation had 200 years under British colonial administration to develop the social, economic and institutional conditions of a modern democracy – and yet events from 1776 to 2000 prove that we are still a work in progress. After all, election 2000 was settled by a judicial coup. The only question was which court would decide, the Supreme Court of Florida or Renquist’s Supremes. Fortunately, 2004 brought us back to settling affairs in the old fashioned way.
The elections in Iraq were a curious affair, not unlike elections in Chicago under the guiding hand of ‘His Honor’ Mayor Richard J. Daly circa 1960 – the other time in American history when a political party ‘stole’ an election for their presidential candidate!
As Yale’s Robert Dahl in Preface to Democracy points out credible elections 1) should be transparent; 2) should involve choices; 3) should be regular and 4) the results should be accepted by all. Clearly the 58% of Iraqi’s who voted were heroic. And the turnout was impressive even by US standards. However, there was no real campaign under the conditions of occupation, voters didn’t really know who or what they were voting for on the various slates. And the election was boycotted by the Sunni community out of fear of reprisal and/our loyalty to the insurgents.
Are elections per se a short cut to democracy? The road to democracy is paved with many potholes – look at France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany through much of the 20th century. The road to democracy was painful and costly, to partisans within their borders as well as allied citizen soldiers. The most recent convert, Russia is sliding into traditional Russian autocracy under Putin. President Bush in Brussels noted such this week. And that public square in Baghdad to be named after President Bush predicted by Perle will have to wait. The intellectual hubris of assuming the words liberty and freedom are actionable would best be tempered by a reading of Arendt, Crick, Lipset and Verba.
The chance for Afghanistan and Iraq making this leap into modernity is even more problematic. The history of independence movements in the 3rd world doesn’t evidence a straight-line movement from colonialism to democracy, from civil war to stability. Look at China, Central Africa, Indonesia, and Pakistan. And even where success has been achieved such as in South Africa – while procedural democracy has taken root – social and economic justice has not. Look at our own geographic back yard. Brazil, a democracy by most standards, is allowing the Amazon to be deforested along with the removal of indigenous peoples. The road to democracy is a slippery slope to say the least – look at Cuba, Columbia, Peru?
If the public square in downtown Baghdad is to be more than PR window dressing then Iraqis must do the serious heavy lifting of building civil institutions before our brothers and sisters in Iraq sing “God Bless America”. Before that – the bricks and mortar of a civic infrastructure must be in place – such as electrical power, water systems, safe roads, schools. As Chairman Dean said it would be spiteful to not wish them success. After all the American taxpayers are footing the bill or more correctly – their children and grandchildren are. God speed.
Rhetoric vs. Reality:
Republicans are willing to put their ideas out in black and white rhetoric – such as “axis of evil.” The Democrats chastened by their own debates over the Vietnam War are less easily stereotyped as witnessed by John Kerry’s inability to explain why he voted for the war in Iraq (during the authorization process), and then voted against it (in the appropriations process). One suspects Senator Kerry was caught in a delicate balancing act - trying to be a viable contender against a war president (being virile is a must) while seeing Howard Dean becoming the front-runner based upon his criticism of the war and occupation of Iraq. The Democrats, like Kerry often seem to be caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
In the Forum, Mr. Perle had the easier task – to defend the current administration’s aggressive military posture in Afghanistan and Iraq in light of 9/11. From the very first, the Bush team seemed intent of smiting the evil ones, not playing “let’s make a deal” to avoid another Middle East war and what’s now become a very costly occupation. Remember the restraint George H. Bush showed in the Persian Gulf War of ’91? We didn’t go all the way to Baghdad for precisely the reasons that have become very clear – it’s a huge throw of the dice – in American and Iraqi casualties and lives and in cost to civil liberties and economic dislocation on the home front.
What Foreign Policy?
Of course showing a reluctance to pull the trigger post 9/11 would presume that the Bush team had in fact a coherent foreign policy at the time of the attack. Such would presume a willingness to use the full range of diplomacy – political and economic power – the so-called ‘soft power’ - which Mr. Perle dismissed. The evidence of a well thought out strategy in the months prior to 9/11 is scant. As the testimony of Richard Clark and the investigation of the events leading up to 9/11 indicate – our government was caught flat-footed having ignored many clues, which might have uncovered or at least blunted the plot to attack America.
The President being primarily focused on a domestic agenda of tax cuts, NCLB and faith based social programs did not have foreign policy in his range finder. So, the turnaround of the administration seems more reactive than well thought out. A point made again and again in the debate by Chairman Dean.
Of course with the considerable foreign policy expertise to draw upon within the administration as well as from outside such as Mr. Perle – the administration was able to get it’s footing quickly. But the inner circle of the GOP returned to familiar ground worked out in the Reagan years – focus on a very visible enemy and move from there. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were ideal personifications of the ‘evil doers’.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s duplicitous speech before the UN provided cover for taking out Saddam Hussein by military means and silenced the loyal opposition because of Powell’s credibility. If he said there were WMDs in Iraq – then there must be! And as Perle said, one need not confer with Democratic leadership, because Colin Powell was there and had access to the West Wing. Of course we all now know – it was window dressing at best.
Such a truncated vetting process is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind as advice and consent on matters of national security. I guess being ‘soft’ in any sense is not a manly thing in this administration. One hears echoes of the old “Cold War” while listening to Mr. Perle. The enemy is now the Islamic fundamentalism not godless communism. But the rhetorical hyperbole sounds much like the ‘old’ clichés of the Cold War.
A Democratic Foreign Policy Vision?
However, this is not to suggest that the Democrats have articulated a clear foreign policy. Again, the evidence of campaign 2004 is that they haven’t. John Kerry had a credible critique of the war and occupation of Iraq – but he didn’t have a clear roadmap out of Iraq – but then again neither does the Bush team. Where’s evidence of the n-game, which the GOP constantly beat up Clinton about during the lead up to Bosnia? But worse to me is that John Kerry often tried to out Bush Bush on the campaign trail – using his Vietnam Vet status appearing ready to go into mortal combat one on one with the terrorists a la The Terminator!
Let me raise an obviously controversial question - why must Democrats endorse as Dean did - Gulf War I and the War in Afghanistan?
As a student asked in the Campus Q&A – did the sacrifice of American blood and treasure help Kuwait become a democracy – a ‘shining city on a hill’? The best Mr. Perle could come up with is that Kuwait is a work in progress. Really – how long must we wait to see our investment pay off, Mr. Perle? I vividly remember seeing young male Kuwaiti nationals in bars in Cairo on American TV celebrating the American liberation of their countrymen. Sunshine patriotism, Kuwaiti style?
Was the ‘allied’ game plan in Desert Storm proportionate to the task of containing Saddam? US planes bombed Iraqi and others leaving Kuwait City on a highway which became a killing field of burned out tanks, trucks and cars. Was the slaughter necessary? But at least that war was based on a multi-lateral coalition of economic and military burden sharing. In fact, the great debate in the US Senate over that war ironically gave the Bush I team time to orchestrate a very successful coalition unlike the motley crew in the current war.
And the diplomatic settlement of that war created a buffer zone, which allowed the Kurds to create their own independent self-governing state under the protection of the allies no fly zone. It also created what turned out to be a very successful clampdown and albeit often opaque monitoring regime on WMDs in Iraq!
In Afghanistan a week before we went to war, the Taliban government, admittedly a vicious regime which gave safe haven to Osama Bin Laden and his minions, was hemming and hawing about whether it would release him to American custody. Who knows what might have been? But why not play the string out? Why the rush to war? Also, why demand Bin Laden be given to US officials as opposed to a multi-lateral entity to be tried by the World Court as is the butcher of Bosnia, Milosovitch?
Would one more week have made a difference to call the Taliban’s bluff? Or were the dogs of war in the West Wing so thirsty for revenge or as a cover for incompetence in the lead up to 9/11 that we no longer cared for even the semblance of negotiations with a vile regime – even if it meant getting custody of Osama? We’ll never know – but we do know despite the spending of American and Afghan lives, he’s still at large and we are not safe.
Even Howard Dean, as Chair of the DNC has to be retrospectively virile, manly – not to be accused of being soft on terrorism? As in the 1950s, Democrats swallowed the bi-partisan party line during the Cold War as the price for being considered patriotic – i.e. anti-communist?
Where did this bi-partisanship get us – JFK’s aborted effort with the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the near nuclear meltdown over the Missiles of October, again Cuba, the dismembering of sub-Saharan Africa from the Congo to Angola. And then step by step it led us into the Vietnam quagmire – with Truman helping France save face by keeping her Asian colonies; the Ike/Dulles refusal to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords (sound familiar – Kyoto, World Court, North Korea?); followed by JFK/LBJ and Nixon expansion of the war in Indo-China. Check out classics such as David Halberstam’s The Best & The Brightest or Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Imperial Presidency.
The Price of War:
How many American soldiers must die to hide a strategic mistake or groupthink? Even in the case of my own choice of a ‘just’ war – Bosnia - we used air power instead of boots on the ground which caused large-scale collateral damage. Granted our European allies were remiss in waiting too long to stop ethnic cleansing but they eventually put troops on the ground. We didn’t until our air campaign was over and the former Yugoslavia was turned into rubble from American air and missile power. .
Let’s also remember that those who are making the ultimate sacrifice for us and for what may be a long shot – democracy in Iraq – are there because our President sent them in our name whether we support the war or not. While the death rate in this war is proportionately lower than in Vietnam – the casualty rates are significantly higher largely due to our advanced medical assistance in the field of battle. As a result many vets are going to come home with major psychological and physical traumas unlike any previous war. We owe them our gratitude for their service and taxpayer support to help them put their lives, that of their families and their communities back together on their return.
Living in a Dangerous World: :
What the world needs is not American unilateralism and pre-emptive war, but an international and multi-national diplomatic, economic and military strategy to blunt, stop, or respond to regional and sub-regional conflicts. Richard Falk at Princeton has spent a lifetime detailing such an option. Some of Pacific’s older alums may have heard him speak when I brought him to Pacific. That’s what was in place in Iraq with the No Fly Zone, as imperfect as it was.
If we need troops in the air or on the ground, then why not an international peace keeping force to enter the world’s hot spots – such as Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, and Sri Lanka before the genocide takes its toll. That would shield us from the economic and diplomatic burden of being the world’s policeman and from becoming the poster child (The Great Satan) of worldwide terrorism’s propaganda machine.
With all due respect to Mr. Perle and many others despite the fact it took place on our territory, the attack on 9/11 was not merely an attack on Americans, but an attack on modernity or the emergent global village as we know it. That’s why the world rallied to our side. People from Ireland to Kenya, from Lebanon to Japan, from Columbia to Italy have been victims to this scourge, which has its origins in the French Revolution (read Edmund Burke’s brilliant and chilling Reflections on the Revolution in France).
As with Korea and Vietnam, 9/11 caused a new generation of Americans to lose their veil of innocence, a reality we haven’t fully absorbed. We live in a very dangerous world and the unthinkable can happen, anytime, any place. There is no quick fix to and no guaranteed safe haven against such unspeakable acts. To understand the dynamics of this process today read Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber. To meet the challenge of this new world order as Chairman Dean suggested we need a long-term view and plan. We need to be proactive not merely reactive.
Where did this new ‘Cold War’ begin? For Americans it began on 9/11 at the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. But how did this happen? Who trained and armed our enemy in the ‘70s and ‘80s? Who continues to bankroll them now? What events give oxygen to the fire of modern terrorism? And where is Osama today? Why Iraq and Afghanistan? What nation has 10% of the world’s untapped oil reserves? What two nations are in the geographic epicenter of the Middle East, Russia, China and South Asia?
And can we deal with the root causes of Islamic fundamentalism until the Palestinian question is settled by the creation of a Palestinian ‘state’ on the West Bank, in Gaza and with a shared capitol in Jerusalem – the home of three great religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity? Too bad this question never came up in the Forum last week. An opportunity missed.
Thomas Friedman, a very informed journalist on the Middle East is more optimistic than I about the chances for positives to come out of this region. Clearly, we are at a critical moment – in Iraq, in Palestine, in Lebanon. He hopes for a Baghdad Spring:
“…But we have to be sober about what is ahead. There will be no velvet revolutions in this part of the world. The walls of autocracy will not collapse with just one good push. As the head-chopping insurgents in Iraq, the suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia and the murderers of Hariri [Lebanon] have all signaled: The old order in this part of the world will not go quietly into the night. You put a flower in the barrel of their gun and they’ll blow your head off…” Winning the war for the Arab Street, The Oregonian, Tuesday, February 22, 2005, p. B 7.
A Choice not an Echo – A Prelude to 2008?
The GOP suffers from a major brain or memory cramp now that the shoe is on their feet. What’s the Bush exit strategy? Are we crippling terrorism in Iraq or giving it more oxygen? But don’t bother with such questions. The ‘man’ in the White House has will, determination, resolve. That was enough for the American voters this time around. Americans wanted, at least by a narrow margin, the comfort of President Bush’s black and white certitudes not the slippery nuances of a John Kerry.
Memories are short in the USA. As Bill Clinton knew “it’s all about tomorrow.” Or as Reagan commercials designed by Mike Deaver used to say “it’s morning in America”. As Chair Dean said it’s time for the Democrats to frame the debate.
Chairman Dean in the debate offered important outlines of a Democratic foreign policy. Hopefully his Democratic friends were paying attention. Rather than muzzle Dean as DNC chair by having him focus only on fund raising, candidate recruitment and base mobilization - hopefully congressional leadership will join him in building the edifice of an alternative foreign policy vision to that of the GOP. As the party out of power that’s the moral and political responsibility of the loyal opposition. Starting last Thursday at the 23rd annual Tom McCall Forum Chairman Dean began developing the outlines of “that vision thing”.
Gentlepersons “start your engines” - 2008 is just around the corner!
Score: Perle/Dean deuce.
Who won – Pacific University of course!
PS: The last McCall Forum was in 2007. Upon my retirement from Pacific that year Pacific has been "assessing" the future of the Forum, the most prestigious public affairs event in the Pacific Northwest. Hopefully Pacific's new President will see the wisdom of reinventing it again. We're bringing back football - why not the Forum?
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:54AM