Not ready yet

The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart HarperCollins, 304 pp., $25.95)

IN an age of hyper-partisan book marketing a title can be just a way to attract buyers. So at first I didn't take the subtitle of Peter Beinart's new book at face value: "Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." I figured it was a way to make a book mostly devoted to chastising the Left for not taking the War on Terror seriously enough more palatable for liberal readers. I was wrong; Beinart really means it.

But it is an argument that ultimately he doesn't manage to support, which is why this book--impressive in so many ways--ultimately fails. I want to dwell on the reasons I think it fails, but before I do I should note all that I like about it.

First, I admire Beinart, who recently stepped aside as editor of The New Republic, as a writer and a person. He is brilliant and fair-minded. The Good Fight is marvelously written and briskly paced, and often subtle and profound. Unlike most deep-think foreign-policy books, it is a pleasure to read.

Beinart is right about much. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off. Beinart excoriates the "doughface" liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism.

Beinart wants to revive the bygone anti-totalitarian liberalism that, in contrast to Bush's policy today, channeled U.S. action through multilateral institutions; realized the importance of economic development overseas to the anti-totalitarian cause; and acknowledged the fallibility of the U.S., and therefore allowed other countries to restrain our behavior and pursued domestic reforms within the U.S.

When it comes down to it, however, all of this need only mean tweaks to a mainstream-conservative foreign policy, which is why it would be wonderful if the Democrats adopted Beinart's approach and why they probably won't. But Beinart tries to inflate his proposed adjustments into a full-blown doctrine and it is here where he falls down.

Consider Iraq. Beinart supported the war initially but bailed out when our intelligence on WMD turned out to be flawed and the war wasn't as easy as he had hoped. In The Good Fight, he tries to make one of his problems with the Bush administration's handling of Iraq--its dismissiveness of the U.N.--into a matter of first importance. But it's just not. Yes, the U.N. has expertise in nation-building. Our troubles in Iraq are nonetheless attributable foremost to the opposition of jihadists and Sunni rejectionists to the new order, and to the primitive state of Iraqi society. Our enemies in Iraq didn't give a damn about the level of U.N. support we had.

East Timor is a nearly ideal intervention from Beinart's perspective. It was admirably multilateral, as we supported an Australian detachment there and the U.N. was heavily involved. But around the time of the publication date of Beinart's book East Timor began to fall apart, the victim of the forces that have so hurt us in Iraq: violent factionalism and weak governmental institutions. Alas, the U.N. can't miraculously make those go away.

We can try to spin new foreign-policy doctrines around events in Iraq all we like, but a lot of the difficulty there has been a matter of circumstances and historical contingency. For example: If we had had a version of Afghanistan's Karzai in Iraq, a leader with local legitimacy who was an ally and could have been put in power immediately, at least some of our problems would have been averted.

A lot of foreign policy comes down to a matter of touch. The foremost reason not to have invaded Iraq in retrospect would have been that it wasn't as practical as we thought. But it is hard to set down clear doctrinal markers for what's going to work. If Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation right off the bat and lost several border states from the Union, thus damaging the war effort, he would have been considered a fool for doing it instead of a giant.

Similarly, there was nothing wrong in principle with the Iraq war. If there had been, Beinart surely would have noticed beforehand. It's just that it hasn't yet worked as intended. That is not to minimize Bush's mistake if the war ultimately proves a failure. He then will have been shown to lack the intuition and prudence any successful wartime leader needs to complement his boldness and resolve, qualities Bush has in buckets.

Even as he regrets supporting the Iraq war, Beinart backs the major pillars of the Bush foreign policy. He supports vigorous American leadership and efforts to change the politics of the Middle East. His dissent from Bush is put in harsh terms, but ultimately doesn't amount to much.