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This Week on the Right | Tom Barry
What’s New | Profiles: Progressive Policy Institute, Democratic Leadership Council, Will Marshall, Stephen Cambone

This Week on the Right

Liberal Hawks: Flying in Neocon Circles
By Tom Barry

In the heat of Iraq the neoconservatives are seeing their visions of Pax Americana turn into nightmares and headaches. But they are not alone. Liberal hawks like Ivo Daalder, Robert Kerrey, and Will Marshall also find themselves discredited as the quagmire in Iraq swallows up all their arguments supporting the invasion and occupation.

In the mid-1990s neoconservative ideologues Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the cofounders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), proposed that post-cold war U.S. foreign policy be guided by the precepts of a new “conservative internationalism”­-which in theory and practice was hardly conservative--but an unapologetic call for the U.S. global vigilantism. Such internationalism would combine military might and moral purpose, intervention and idealism. Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were held up as model conservative internationalists.

Without the support of the liberals, President George W. Bush’s plan to invade and occupy Iraq may have foundered in Congress. The support of our closest allies and the United Nations wasn’t as important as was the buy-in by Democratic Party leaders. In the lead-up to the war, President Bush also received critical support from well-known writers and analysts who hailed from the center-left.

Brandishing arguments that the invasion of Iraq would spark a democratic revolution in the greater Middle East, the neocons managed to forge a powerful political coalition that sidelined Republican realists like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft as well as anti-war Democrats like Robert Byrd and Paul Wellstone. As the invasion plans advanced, both the neocons and the liberal hawks dismissed the opponents of the war as being reflexively pacifist and hopelessly naïve.

For most of the 20th century, it was the liberal internationalists, not the conservatives, who led the fight against isolationism and rallied the country to war. Again and again, the liberal elite argued that the United States had a special mission to protect and promote freedom around the world. While it was the neocon’s conservative internationalism that provided the ideological underpinnings for the war against Iraq, it was liberal internationalism that provided the ideological backdrop for World War II, the Vietnam and Korea wars, and the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.

The neocons have long been adept at forging bipartisan coalitions. Having roots in Trotskyism, the neocons are skilled organizers of front groups. Once Democrats themselves, the neocons know how to engage liberals. At first, PNAC focused on consolidating a foreign policy agenda among Republican Party cohorts. However, in the advent of the Iraq invasion, PNAC began reaching out to the liberal hawks in and around the Democratic Party. Having been successful in forging an interventionist coalition that brought together neocons, militarists like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and social conservatives like Donald Quayle and Gary Bauer, PNAC then sought to bring in leading representatives of the liberal hawks around their larger agenda to restructure and democratize the Middle East.

Two PNAC letters in March 2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. PNAC and the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy. With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit strategy in Iraq. In their March 19th letter, PNAC stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq for the long haul: "Everyone--those who have joined the coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors--must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long as it takes."

Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC’s first letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton’s top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by PNAC on March 28 called for broader international support for reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, and brought together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another Brookings foreign policy scholar, Michael O’Hanlon.

The PNAC letters clearly demonstrated the willingness of liberal hawks to bolster the neocons’ overarching agenda of Middle East restructuring. But it was not the first time that leading Democrats joined hands with the neocons. In late 2002 PNAC’s Bruce Jackson formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that brought together such Democrats as Senator Joseph Lieberman; former Senator Robert Kerrey, the president of the New School University who now serves on the 9/11 Commission; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council; and former U.S. Representative Steve Solarz. The neocons also reached out to Democrats through a sign-on letter to the president organized by the Social Democrats/USA, a neocon institute that played a critical role in shaping the National Endowment for Democracy in the early 1980s and in mobilizing labor support for an interventionist foreign policy.

In a recent article in the Financial Times entitled “Portrait of a President Bent on Conflict” [online at www.brookings.edu/views/articles/daalder/20040423.htm], Ivo H. Daalder has praised Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and Bush At War as “the first definitive drafts of this presidency’s history.” Daalder writes that Woodward “makes it clear that Mr. Bush is very much the master of his own administration, swayed not by a neo-conservative conspiracy but by his determination to do what he knows is right.” Mr. Bush himself is sticking to his guns as are the neoconservatives that have shaped his foreign policy agenda. But Daalder and other liberal hawks are backtracking, caught with their pants down and hoping that the definitive history of the Bush presidency doesn’t include their own war-mongering role.

Daalder notes approvingly that Woodward’s new book “raises even more serious questions about the president’s original decision” to invade Iraq. But at the onset of the invasion, Daalder, a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, signed the two statements issued by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century calling for removal of Saddam Hussein, advocating that NATO help “secure and destroy all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” and arguing that the invasion “can contribute decisively to the democratization of the Middle East.”

The liberal hawks not only joined with the neocons to support the war and the post-war restructuring but have published their own statements in favor of what is now widely regarded as a morally bankrupt policy agenda. Perhaps the clearest articulation of the liberal hawk position on foreign and military policy is found in an October 2003 report by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is a think tank closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The report, entitled Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy, endorsed the invasion of Iraq “because the previous policy of containment was failing,” and Saddam Hussein’s government was “undermining both collective security and international law.”

PPI President Will Marshall said that the progressive internationalism strategy draws “a sharp distinction between this mainstream Democratic strategy for national security and the far left's vision of America's role in the world. In this document we take issue with those who begrudge the kind of defense spending that we think is necessary to meet our needs, both at home and abroad; with folks who seem to reflexively oppose the use of force; and who seem incapable of taking America's side in international disputes.”

“We also argue,” said Marshall, “that a strong international leadership should not be equated with a kind of toothless multilateralism that puts the quest for consensus above the hard and risky business of grappling with chaos, of dealing with real conflicts, and confronting real enemies and aggressors. And we warn against an anti-globalization agenda that not only hurts our economy but that condemns developing countries in the world to poverty. So, however troubling the Bush record is, we think that the pacifist and protectionist left offers no viable alternative.” Among the other liberal hawks who contributed to the Progressive Internationalism report include Bob Kerrey; Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution and the National Endowment for Democracy; and Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

An open question facing the presumptive Democratic Party leadership and the presumptive party nominee John Kerry is whether they will align themselves with the militaristic and supremacist foreign policy advocated by the liberal hawks. Kerry, a member of the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, has thus far failed to outline a national security policy that sets him apart from such discredited liberal hawks as Bob Kerrey and Will Marshall.

For more information about the liberal hawks, see the following Right Web profiles from the IRC:

Will Marshall
Progressive Policy Institute
Democratic Leadership Council
Social Democrats/USA

(Tom Barry is Policy Director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), online at: www.irc-online.org.)

What's New on Right Web

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"Vital Center between neo-imperial right and non-interventionist left.". Progressive Policy Institute criticizes "left-wing activists who routinely call for deep cuts in military spending, reflexively oppose the use of force, and embrace an anti-trade, anti-globalization agenda that would damage the U.S. economy and condemn developing nations to perpetual poverty."

Right Web Profile: Progressive Policy Institute

“Saving the Democratic Party?” When the DLC gets to the specifics of foreign policy, such as supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there seems to be little separating its "progressive internationalism" from the "neo-imperial foreign policy" of the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers it criticizes.

Right Web Profile: Democratic Leadership Council

Voice for Liberal Hawks.Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute is closely tied to the organizations and radical agendas of the neoconservatives.

Right Web Profile: Will Marshall

Rumsfeld’s Henchman. Before taking over as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in early 2003, Stephen A. Cambone, considered one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s key aides, served on a number of influential government and nongovernmental defense review studies. He served on both the National Institute for Public Policy’s Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control study team as well as the Project for the New American Century’s 2001 “Rebuilding America’s Defense” report team. Both studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the administration of George W. Bush. Cambone also served on two Rumsfeld-chaired studies commissioned by Congress dealing with space weapons and the missile threat to the United States.

Right Web Profile: Stephen A. Cambone

Letters and Feedback

(Please send your comments to rightweb.irc-online.org)

Not Independent, Not Impartial

[Ed. Note: This letter was published by Asia Times in response to an article written originally for Right Web, "When Democracy Promotion Turns Partisan," by Andrew Wells-Dang, April 5, 2004]

Re: Republican Group Meddles in Cambodia
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0404iricambodia.php)

Andrew Wells-Dang may be working for the so-called independent non-profit Fund for Reconciliation and Development, but his article Republican Group Meddles in Cambodia [republished from Right Web in Asia Times, April 6] is anything but independent and impartial. He lets his imagination run wild, out of hand in fact, when he writes, "It is reasonable to conclude that without IRI [International Republican Institute] prodding and 'technical and material support', the eight-month political deadlock in Cambodia could have been resolved much sooner." Many level-headed observers of Cambodia politics beg to differ.

The fact is that everybody, including Andrew Wells-Dang, has been meddling in Cambodia, jockeying to establish their influence over a gullible government that needs foreign handouts year in and year out just to breathe. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the country every year for more than a decade, yet the Cambodian human-development indicators are worsening. Wells-Dang's long-winded, one-sided analysis--full of selective facts and speculations--simply shows that he has a different ax to grind.

It is indeed too naive and presumptuous to conclude that, without the IRI's "meddling," the current deadlock could have been resolved much sooner. Regrettably, Wells-Dang fails to appreciate the real reason behind the impasse. He is so used to the bankruptcy mentality he has come across in his contacts with some of the government officials that he could not grasp a tiny possibility that there may still be other Cambodians who do really care for the country. If he could accept a simple fact that Cambodia has one of the world's worsening human-development indicators in the last decade, then he might perhaps agree that Cambodia needs a different government. It is definitely not the kind of government of expediency like the current one that has done so much damage overall to the country in the past decade.

- Sinourn Sim
Melbourne, Australia (Apr 26, '04)