After 9/11, Democrats, like all Americans, united in support of the war
on terrorism. In fact, Democrats have even criticized the president on
this subject when they felt the administration was not going far enough
in protecting the homeland and reforming intelligence agencies.
On the issue of Iraq, however, Democrats have been divided. The rhetoric
coming from the anti-war faction of the party has raised troublesome echoes
of the Vietnam era, when Democrats failed to draw bright lines between
valid anti-war arguments and the blatantly anti-American sentiments of
student radicals and the hard left. The guilt-by-failure-to-disassociate
during the Vietnam War helped keep Democrats in the political wilderness
for two decades. Democrats shouldn't let that happen again.
Differences of opinion on Iraq among Democrats are not surprising. Enforcing
U.N. mandates may not seem as clear a reason for war as the 1991 decision
to reverse Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. Indeed, if it were not for
the kind of party-line enforcement that only a White House can impose,
there would be serious differences of opinion among Republicans, many
of whom vocally opposed an easier decision by President Clinton to use
force in Kosovo.
Moreover, Democrats mistrust President Bush for good reason. The administration's
multiple diplomatic blunders in the run-up to the war naturally undermine
confidence in its ability to win the peaceful struggle for democracy in
Iraq that must follow victory in war. Worse yet, it's already clear that
Republicans will use the war to distract attention from the administration's
manifold domestic policy failures.
But Democrats must overcome both their own and the opposition's partisan
instincts, and act in the national interest. The president's decision
to prosecute this war without explicit authorization from the United Nations
was a close call, but it was the right call.
The case for disarming Iraq. Allowing Saddam Hussein to once again
defy the world community, after 12 years of flouting U.N. demands that
he disarm, would inflict potentially terminal damage to international
law and the idea of collective security in one of the world's first post-Cold
War challenges. It would represent a green light to Saddam and other potential
aggressors.
Moreover, Iraq is clearly involved in both the quest for weapons of mass
destruction and in fomenting anti-Western terrorism, whether or not there
are direct links between Baghdad and Al Qaeda. The risks of war are eclipsed
by the risk of tolerating a conjunction between terrorists and weapons
of mass destruction, in a country ruled by a bitter enemy of America,
and in the most volatile region of the world.
And finally, Saddam's regime is an ongoing humanitarian disaster, the
closest thing imaginable to a fusion of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's
Russia. About this there can be little doubt. In sharp distinction from
previous wars, few of the millions of anti-war protesters around the world
dare say anything positive about Saddam Hussein. If it was right to use
military force to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s, it
can hardly be wrong to use military force to stop the systematic brutalization
of Iraqis -- and periodically, of Iraq's neighbors.
Democrats who have trouble accepting George W. Bush's sometimes confused
and inarticulate case for military action to disarm Saddam should listen
to Tony Blair. His argument rings like a bell.
"I understand why people hesitate before committing to conflict
and to war," said Blair in his March 27 joint press conference with
President Bush. "War is a brutal and bloody business. But we are
faced with a situation where Saddam Hussein has been given 12 years to
disarm voluntarily of weapons of mass destruction, that the whole international
community accepts is a threat, and he has not done so. Instead, what we
have had is 12 years in which he has remained in power with these weapons
intact and brutalized his own people.
"Now, we felt we had come to the point where if we wanted to take
a stand against what I believe to be the dominant security threat of our
time -- which is the combination of weapons of mass destruction in the
hands of unstable, repressive states and terrorist groups -- if we wanted
to take a stand, then we had to act."
Democratic internationalism. We respect the right of other Democrats
to disagree with our and Blair's conclusions about Iraq. But we cannot
accept the claim that being against the war in Iraq is the only authentic
and principled stand for Democrats -- for what anti-war presidential
candidate Howard Dean calls "the Democratic wing of the Democratic
Party." And we reject the idea that Democrats who voted for the use
of force in Iraq -- including Sens. John Edwards, John Kerry, and Joe
Lieberman, and Rep. Dick Gephardt -- are unprincipled opportunists.
On the contrary, they represent the true Democratic tradition of muscular
internationalism, and should be respected for passing up the temptation
of opportunistically appealing to liberal and anti-war activists, especially
in Iowa, the first stop in the presidential nominating process.
The entire edifice of 20th-century U.S. leadership in the world was built
on the shoulders of Democratic leaders, especially Wilson, Roosevelt,
Truman, and Kennedy. Wilson led the United States into World War I, and
tried to build a durable set of international institutions to promote
peace, security, and democracy in the wake of victory. Roosevelt led the
country into World War II, and he, too, worked to commit all the resources
of the victors to peace and stability, in part through the United Nations,
which began as simply another name for the wartime Allies. His successor,
Truman, led America into the Cold War, and built the institutions, including
the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Bretton Woods organizations, that sustained
the West through that long struggle. Kennedy explicitly extended the reach
of our democratic ideology to the entire world.
And lest we forget, the most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton,
worked hard with our allies to recalibrate Cold War institutions like
NATO to deal with the kind of challenges we would face in the 21st century -- the
kind of challenges we face today.
The tradition of Democratic internationalism combines the willingness
to use force with the recognition that America is always stronger when
we act with and through alliances and multilateral institutions that reflect
our values and interests. That's the tradition that led Edwards, Gephardt,
Kerry and Lieberman to vote to authorize the use of force on the condition
that the administration pursue multilateral support.
The claim that an anti-war position is required of "real Democrats"
or the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is nothing
more than an assertion against the evidence of history -- and against
the political interests of the Democratic Party today.
Credibility threshold. Public opinion research during the last
year showed that a consistent majority of Americans supported the position
that we, and most Democratic congressional leaders, proposed in the build
up to war with Iraq: It favored military action to disarm Iraq, but also
favored making every effort to achieve international support and U.N.
sanction for this military action.
Now a large majority of Americans supports the position that we, along
with Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry, and Lieberman, support: a military victory
in Iraq. A recent Pew Research Group poll showed that self-identified
liberal Democrats are isolated from other categories of U.S. voters in
their lack of support for this war.
We think it's important that the small majority of self-identified liberal
Democrats who oppose this war not dictate the position of the entire party,
which will need the votes of moderate Democrats and Independents to send
George W. Bush back to Texas in 2004. The audience that Democratic presidential
candidates address between now and then must be vastly broader than the
activists of Iowa, or of any other state. Democrats already face persistent
fears that they aren't tough enough to defend American interests -- fears
that the Republican Party is going to spend roughly a quarter of a billion
dollars trying to fan next year. Democrats can ill afford to reinforce
these fears in their own campaigns.
As a matter of principle and of tradition -- of policy and of politics -- Democrats
need to stand resolutely in support of successful prosecution of the war.
There will be plenty of disputes with the administration to pursue in
the aftermath of military victory, and plenty of stark differences of
opinion on domestic issues that will inevitably come to the fore when
the guns fall silent. But in the election of 2004, the Democratic nominee
must cross the threshold of credibility as America's next commander in
chief.
