October 25, 2005
Ceding Idealism to the GOP
By Richard
Cohen
WASHINGTON
-- About six months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre,
George H.W. Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft went
to Beijing and met with China's ``paramount leader,'' Deng Xiaoping.
Scowcroft said he communicated the president's unhappiness over
the massacre, to which Deng essentially said, mind your own business.
``And I said, `You're right. It is none of our business,''' Scowcroft
tells Jeffrey Goldberg in the current New Yorker. This
raises an obvious question: How many have to die before it is
our business?
That question
is at the heart of the dilemma now facing American foreign policy.
Scowcroft is a famous -- and now, after Goldberg, maybe infamous
-- realist. Not for him any grand, noble causes. He is parsimonious
with American lives and treasure and he famously opposed George
W. Bush's intention to go to war in Iraq. He found out this was
a different Bush with a different foreign policy. The younger
Bush's was infused with moralism.
It's clear
now that Bush's foreign policy, at least as it applies to Iraq,
has gone awry. With the U.S. closing in on 2,000 military deaths,
with no end in sight, with civil war looming, with Iraq becoming
a beacon for Islamic terrorists from elsewhere in the Muslim world,
with ... well, the list of calamities can go on and on, it's now
apparent that Bush should have at least wondered why Scowcroft
was so opposed to the war. After all, Scowcroft is no pacifist.
He not only favored the 1991 Gulf War, he was instrumental in
getting his boss to fight it.
Scowcroft's
remarks about his mission to China make him sound cold and unfeeling,
which is not the case at all. But his brand of realism is not
the stuff of TV speeches from the Oval Office and pronouncements
about good and evil. It is a dry, tasteless meal for the soul,
no matter what its intellectual or practical virtues, and it sorely
lacks the Kennedyesque call to service (``Ask not ...'') or even,
to go back some decades, Roosevelt's summons to a generation of
Americas who had, he told them, a ``rendezvous with destiny.''
Both JFK
and FDR were Democrats, of course, and the party has always been
associated with internationalism -- everything from the League
of Nations to the United Nations. Somehow, though, that moralism
-- that urge to do good abroad -- has drifted over to the GOP.
It is Republicans, particularly neocons, who talk the language
of moralism in foreign policy and who, weapons of mass destruction
aside, wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was a beast.
It mattered to them that he killed and tortured his own people.
It says something about the Democratic left that it cheered Michael
Moore's infantile ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' even though the film made
no mention of Saddam's depredations, not even his gassing of Kurdish
villages. Moore's morality stops at the water's edge.
It is probably
no accident that so many Middle East hands supported the war.
They had seen enough to be appalled and to think, probably incorrectly,
that ridding the region of Saddam would have a beneficial effect.
The supposed afterthought about democracy -- the apparent fallback
position once WMD proved not to exist -- was in fact the top priority
for many neocons. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair
in 2003, WMD was just one reason to go into Iraq. Democracy and
human rights were not only others, but possibly more important.
In 1984,
to my consternation, I heard the New Deal theme song ``Happy Days
Are Here Again'' played at the Republican National Convention
in Dallas. That swipe of political icon -- Ronald Reagan had earlier
borrowed FDR's ``rendezvous'' phrase for his famous speech praising
Barry Goldwater -- has been followed by a more serious one: the
theft of altruism. It is now Republicans, at least neocons, who
often speak most forcefully about right and wrong in the world.
Just as Scowcroft is doing, it is the Democrats now who often
speak the cold language of realism that sometimes seems downright
uncaring.
Bush's soggy
religiosity clearly should not be the basis of a foreign policy.
(In The New Yorker, Goldberg quotes Condi Rice as saying
before the war, ``The world is a messy place, and someone has
to clean it up.'') But neither can a cold refusal to recognize
the role that morality can play. The trick for the Democrats is
to strike a balance, to honor their party's tradition of internationalism
and appeal to the American desire to whack the bad guys. America
-- as it ultimately did in Bosnia -- can still do some good in
the world. That's realism, too.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
