{"id":349,"date":"2004-02-15T17:15:20","date_gmt":"2004-02-15T17:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","slug":"more_on_democratic_and_american_foreign_policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=349","title":{"rendered":"More On Democratic – And American Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Matt Yglesias<\/a>, an awesome article<\/a> by George Packer in the New Yorker (I may actually have to subscribe…) about the struggle for a Democratic foreign policy. Go read the whole thing, but if the Republicans want to know one of the basic reasons I haven’t pulled the lever for Bush, given my obvious and loudly-stated discomfort with Democratic candidate’s positions, here it is, brilliantly expressed:<\/p>\n

But there is a problem with the language of Bush the son: his actions rarely measure up to his rhetoric. A case in point was the President\u2019s November speech at the National Endowment for Democracy\u2019s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. After the fall of Baghdad, an institute funded by the endowment sent a team to Iraq to organize a series of focus groups so that Iraqis could talk about their collective future. The institute wanted to follow up with workshops that would train Iraqis in forming moderate civic groups and political parties, but its money soon ran out. Despite repeated requests, the funding wasn\u2019t replenished until last month.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It happens often enough to form a pattern: the President talks of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan at the Virginia Military Institute in April, 2002, and then he fails to include any dollars for Afghanistan in his 2004 budget proposal; the President gives a landmark speech at the American Enterprise Institute in February, 2003, proposing a democratic Iraq as a model for the transformation of the entire Middle East, and within two months the Pentagon\u2019s minimalist planning for postwar Iraq has that country in chaos, its state institutions gutted, its people demoralized; the State Department sets out to improve public diplomacy in the Islamic world, then puts the campaign in the hands of Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenue executive, who produces a slick video about Muslims in the United States that is widely ridiculed; the Administration vows to get tough on Saudi sources that finance terrorism and the spread of extremist ideology, then suppresses the section of a congressional report on September 11th having to do with Saudi Arabia; after the Iraq war the President vows to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only to stand aside a few months later.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t think this is a uniquely Republican failing; we’re the culture that puts “No Blood For Oil” bumper stickers on SUV’s, and believes in liposuction over exercise. There’s some frightening American adverse response to actually bearing the costs of our decisions.<\/p>\n

We can’t afford that here. Listen to Packer some more:<\/p>\n

…Biden went to Kabul, where he toured a new school…one that was bitterly cold, with plastic sheeting over the windows and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. You cannot leave.”<\/p>\n

“I promise I\u2019ll come back,” Biden told her.<\/p>\n

“You cannot leave,” the girl insisted. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.”<\/p>\n

As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, “Don\u2019t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His wrapup nails it for me completely.<\/p>\n

It has been much remarked that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. Nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we\u2019re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” Biden said. The tax cuts haven\u2019t just left the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity has been terrible for morale. But the President\u2019s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice followed directly on the governing spirit of the modern Republican Party. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could stand up and ask what Americans can do for their country. We haven\u2019t been asked to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies..or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. The war\u2019s burdens are borne solely by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this was a shrewd political intuition on Bush\u2019s part..a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11th, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It\u2019s fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours is likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we can export liberal democratic values when our own version shows so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we can expect to muster for Afghanis and Iraqis when we\u2019re asked to feel so little for one another. <\/p>\n

“Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion?” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked in
\n‘The Vital Center,’ his 1949 book about totalitarianism and America\u2019s anxious postwar mood. “Why is freedom not a fighting faith?” The only hope (Schlesinger turned to Walt Whitman for the words…who else?) lay in “the exercise of Democracy.” The process of struggling for freedom, accepting conflict, tolerating uncertainty, joining community…this would allow democracy to survive and not die. What if we now find ourselves, at this stage of thickening maturity, in the middle of a new crisis that requires us to act like citizens of a democracy? It\u2019s impossible to know how the public would respond to a political party that spoke about these things…because, so far, no party has.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Matt Yglesias, an awesome article by George Packer in the New Yorker (I may actually have to subscribe…) about the struggle for a Democratic foreign policy. Go read the whole thing, but if the Republicans want to know one of the basic reasons I haven’t pulled the lever for Bush, given my obvious and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}