Peter Beinart’s “The Good Fight” – A Whitewash of Bush’s Iraq War Motives

[Time for change]

Peter Beinart’s new book, “The Good Fight – Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again”, is quite an enigma. By describing the many crucial flaws in the Republican approach to foreign policy in general, and the Bush administration’s approach to the “War on Terror” in particular, Beinart provides an excellent starting point for one of the main themes of his book – how the Bush administration is screwing up our response to the 9-11 attacks on our country and thereby greatly reducing our chances for success.

In light of that, Beinart’s eagerness to attribute to Bush nothing but good motives for his decision to invade Iraq, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, some of which Beinart simply ignores, and some of which he presents but apparently feels doesn’t reflect on Bush’s motives – is very perplexing. Worse yet, Beinart’s repeated use of Republican manufactured clichés and stereotypes to characterize mostly unnamed liberals as being insufficiently engaged in the “War on Terror”, is egregiously lacking in supporting argument, and does a great disservice to many liberal Democrats who today are faced with the extremely difficult task of trying to deal simultaneously with the threat of terrorism abroad and impending dictatorship at home.

In this post I will deal only with the former flaw (I am still working on what to say about Beinart’s criticism of those whom he considers to be excessively dovish liberals.) To do that I will start by noting some of the many excellent points that Beinart makes in support of his main contention – that in general, the liberal approach to foreign totalitarian threats is much more effective than the conservative approach – because it is those discussions that make it difficult to understand why Beinart is so eager to present Bush’s motives in the best possible light and to disparage liberals in the way that he does.


Why the liberal approach to totalitarian threats is superior to the conservative approach

Going back to the Cold War, liberals were right about what was probably the biggest mistake made during that era – the Viet Nam War. Liberals recognized, while conservatives did not, that the Viet Nam War was unnecessary and immoral. That was the central lesson of the Viet Nam War, a lesson that is still not understood by today’s Republicans, many who thought and still think that the mere fact that a country had a Communist government justified making war on it.

With regard to today’s “War on Terror”, an issue that Beinart discusses in some detail is the need for self-restraint on American power as a necessary element in our fight against terrorism. He notes that:

Given the extraordinary power disparity between the United States and every other nation, if America assigned itself the right to intervene in countries that posed no immediate threat, it would breed deep fear and resentment, no matter how high-minded its stated motives…. ‘The best way to advance our interests without provoking anti-American coalitions,’ wrote Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall in 2000, ‘is to work through thickening networks of alliances, international institutions, and rule-based regimes that promote global cooperation. It’s time to drop breast-beating rhetoric about being the world’s sole superpower and instead think of ourselves as first among equals, willing to play by the same rules we hold others to’….. America should not fall in love with the supposed purity of its intentions. Rather than blaming other countries for fearing that America might be corrupted by its overwhelming power, America should fear that corruption itself. And it should guard against it by giving other democracies a voice in its decisions, as it did at the dawn of the cold war.

And as a corollary to the need for restraint on American power, Beinart devotes a lot of space to discussing the fact that we cannot simply assume that our country has good intentions and that everyone should recognize that. Rather, we must have the humility to examine our intentions and make sure that our actions reflect the good intentions that we claim. For it is only by recognizing our capacity for evil that we can guard against taking actions that that may have evil consequences.

Beinart also discusses in much detail why we need to express in words and action our concern, not just for democracy, but for justice and economic opportunity, of the world’s population – as an essential element of our “War on Terror”. This crucial element of our fight against totalitarianism is one that is well understood by liberals but almost completely discounted by conservatives.

Finally, Bienart’s biggest criticism against Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks is Bush’s failure to impose any restraints on American power because of his belief that America (and he himself) is incapable of bad intentions. And Bienart describes some of the most disastrous consequences of that attitude:

After 9/11, the government detained 1,200 foreign nationals, some for months, without charging them with crimes (almost none had committed any), without notifying their families, and without any independent judicial review. The National Security Agency has spied on thousands of Americans, in violation of a 1978 law that requires a court order to do so…. The consequences of America’s shadow prison system have become hideously clear….operating in almost total darkness, virtually every one of these camps has produced credible allegations of torture.

George W. Bush… has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak. He has denied America’s capacity for evil, in an effort to bolster American’s faith in itself. And in the process, America has committed terrible misdeeds, which have sapped the world’s faith in us – and ultimately, our faith in ourselves.

Beinart’s strange eagerness to credit George W. Bush with good motives with respect to the Iraq war

In light of all the above, it is difficult for me to understand why Beinart seems so naïve about Bush’s intentions, and impressed by his leadership. His statement regarding the 2004 election that “Americans … gravitated to the man (Bush) with a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had in a very long time” I found particularly disturbing and difficult to understand. How can one characterize such an unsupported and ridiculous statement other than as an echo of Bush administration talking points?

His eagerness to attribute good motives to the Bush administration’s decision to rush to war in Iraq is even more perplexing. That requires both an ignoring of relevant facts and a twisting of logic – and Beinart uses both to provide an aura of good intentions to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.

In the first place, Beinart appears to believe that the idea of invading Iraq never occurred to the Bush administration until the United States was attacked on 9-11:

Conservative foreign policy before 9-11 represented a partial reversion to the Taft-style isolationism of the late 1940s. America would oppose international restraints on its power, but since it had little desire to remake the world in its image, America would restrain itself. In its first eight months in office, the Bush administration repudiated the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an enforcement mechanism for the Biological Weapons Convention, and a treaty on the sale of small arms…. and ended high-level U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and disarmament talks with North Korea… Rather than projecting American power, President Bush seemed content to hoard it. That all changed when the twin towers fell.

Actually, there are two serious and related problems with the above excerpt. First, it implies that Bush’s repudiation of the above noted treaties and processes indicated a reluctance to project American power, when in fact it indicated nothing of the sort. What it really indicated was Bush’s reluctance to cooperate with the rest of the world in the search for peaceful solutions to serious international problems. And the other serious problem with the above excerpt is, contrary to Beinart’s assertions that the Bush administration had no interest in invading Iraq until after 9-11 (repeated several times in his book), it demonstrated such an interest from its very first days.


Secondly, Beinart implies that the Bush administration really believed that the Iraq invasion was necessary because of their weapons of mass destruction:

In 2002, as the Bush administration began its campaign for war, the intelligence assessments grew more confident and more alarming…. Iraq had chemical weapons in 1990, and the United States thought it had them in 2003.

Yet Beinart fails to discuss the abundant evidence that the Bush administration took every opportunity to twist intelligence reports in order to make them fit a pattern that would justify an invasion, as meticulously described by Seymour Hersh and others.


Thirdly, Beinart implies that Bush really was sincerely interested in democratizing Iraq:

As the Bush administration has rightly recognized…. America’s long-term safety requires that its clients evolve in a democratic direction, even if it means they prove less compliant….

President Bush’s campaign for Islamic democracy was not inevitable…And it has been driven by strange, unforeseen events – above all, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush’s growing democratic zeal, coming just as his primary justification for overthrowing Saddam collapsed, has struck many liberals as suspiciously convenient. But… if liberals dislike Bush’s happy democracy talk, they should consider the alternative: the pessimistic, sometimes racist, tradition that led early cold war conservatives to say America was fighting not for democracy but for Western civilization….

Whatever Bush’s initial motivation for taking up democracy’s banner, his sincerity is now transparent. And although he has coddled his share of dictators, his rhetoric has pressured his actions….

Hasn’t Beinart heard of the term ‘rationalization’? And doesn’t he recognize that Bush has lied about virtually everything since he became pResident? Isn’t he familiar with the “Clear Skies” initiative?


And fourthly, Beinart appears to believe that the Bush administration really meant to leave Iraq after they overthrew Saddam Hussein:

In the run-up to the Iraq war, veterans of those efforts – in the military, nongovernmental organizations, the State Department, and the CIA – urged the Bush administration to learn from their experience. They warned about the dangers of postwar chaos, the necessity of careful planning, and the importance of sufficient troops. But administration officials told them that since Iraq was a liberation, not an occupation, those lessons didn’t apply... To the Bush administration’s credit, it soon shifted course, shelving its initial plans for a quick exit.

But somehow the Iraqis weren’t fooled

Despite Beinart’s stance that the Bush administration’s motives for war were relatively pure, he does go on to admit not only that the Iraqis didn’t share that view, but that they had very good reason for their belief that the Bush administration’s actions were less than honorable:

In reality, Iraqis didn’t believe the United States had invaded with only the purest of motives. Instead, after some initial gratitude, they quickly began worrying that America intended a long, colonial stay. This was entirely predictable. Historical studies suggest that one of the keys to the success of any foreign occupation is convincing the occupied population that they will get their country back…. The great advantage of a UN-led multilateral occupation was that by its very nature, it looked less permanent. A study of Iraqi public opinion proposed handling over control to the UN…

The Bush administration in Iraq exuded a complacent confidence in American virtue, a complacency that not only blinded it to Iraqi skepticism, but kept it from proving that skepticism wrong. The White House dismissed accusations of imperialism as absurd, but it never publicly stated that it would not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. Indeed, U.S. officials suggested they might do just that. And they never took clear steps to show Iraqis that the United States was not after their oil. Instead, during the looting that followed Saddam’s fall, American troops guarded only the oil ministry…

The problem, in other words, wasn’t merely that America failed to convince Iraqis it had their best interests at heart; it’s that America did not always have Iraqis’ best interests at heart. And because American officials didn’t recognize that, they failed to quickly share power, which might have reduced the corrupting temptations of colonial rule…. It was frequently our interests that were driving decisions we were trying to impose.

In other words: Beinart admits that the Bush administration failed to give an appearance that their occupation was not meant to be permanent, by doing such things as refusing UN assistance and hinting that it might seek permanent military bases in Iraq; he admits that by, among other things, rushing to guard only the oil ministry during the initial chaos after Saddam’s fall, they gave the appearance that oil may have been a prime motive for the invasion; he admits that Bush trotted out the Democracy rationalization for the invasion only after the weapons of mass destruction argument was proven to be invalid; and he even admits that we did not always have Iraq’s best interests at heart. Yet with all that, he imputes relatively pure motives to the Bush administration with respect to their decision to invade Iraq.

And even with all that he admits, he leaves out some key issues: he fails to acknowledge the abundance of evidence that the Bush administration knew before the invasion that their weapons of mass destruction rationale was a fraud; he fails to acknowledge that an Iraq invasion was contemplated long before 9-11; and he fails to mention the highly lucrative no-bid contracts that were given to Bush administration benefactors such as Halliburton.


Why consideration of motives is important

Some may read my criticisms of Beinart for his eagerness to attribute good intentions to Bush and his administration and say, “Who cares? After all, he did appropriately criticize the Bush administration for its numerous mistakes. Isn’t that all that is important? Isn’t my insistence that Beinart refrain from attributing good motives to Bush and his administration just part of my partisan agenda?

I answer NO to all those questions. An understanding of motives IS important – both for a proper understanding of history, and for facilitating an ability to predict the future actions of the current leaders of our nation. By sweeping this issue under the rug we imperil our ability to understand what is going on around us, and therefore impair our ability to respond appropriately to prevent further damage to our country and to the world. In fact, the importance of understanding motives is lucidly illustrated by Beinart’s own words, as he explains how he was taken in by Bush’s rationalizations for invading Iraq:

I supported the (Iraq) war…. I was wrong…. I could not imagine that the Bush administration would so utterly fail to plan for the war’s aftermath….I could not see that the morality of American power relies on the limits to American power. It is a grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most.

I admire anyone who is willing to publicly admit a big mistake – and so I admire Beinart for saying this. Yet, he appears not to have learned the central lesson of his mistake. If he had understood the motives of the Bush administration prior to the war – motives for which there was an abundance of evidence – he would have been far less likely to have been suckered into supporting the war in the first place. But by failing to learn this lesson even after writing his book, he is all the more likely to make the same mistake again – perhaps even with regard to this very same Presidential administration.

[Time for change]

1. "Neocons in the Democratic Party"

That was the title of an article in the LA Times that emphasizes Beinart's book. The author of the LA Times article, Jacob Heilbrunn, considers the opinions expressed by Beinart to be part of a "Neocon" movement within the Democratic Party, and believes that this will lead to intra-party warfare. Reading that article is what led me to get and read Beinart's book. Here is the article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-heilbrunn28may28,0,6411415.story?coll=la-home-commentary


The article was posted last week by DeepModem Mom and Kevin Spidel. Here is Spidel's DU post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=2653216


After reading the book, it seems to me like a real stretch to say that Beinart expresses a Neocon point of view. In fact, a good part of the book is spent criticizing the Neocons, as I describe in my OP.

Yet, his whitewashing of Bush's war motives, and his disparaging of those (mostly un-named) liberals whom he considers to be too dovish, is very hard for me to understand. There may be something going on here, but I don't know what it is, and I would really like to know.

[Time for change]

2. Eric Alterman also referred to Beinart's foreign policy ideas a Neocon

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050110/alterman

I have a great deal of respect for Alterman. I love his articles, and his book, "What Liberal Media?" But I don't understand why he refers to Beinart as a Neocon, when he criticizes the Neocon philosophy so thoroughly. :shrug: