Beinart’s argument

Beinart’s argument in TNR for the Democratic Party to adopt a tough liberal line against Islamic totalitarianism is making a tour around the blogs. Seems to me it’s a strong argument but just a bit too strong.

There is no question that Islamic totalitarianism is the greatest threat liberal societies face today, and it is equally obvious that too many in the Democratic base prefer and idealistic pacifism and unrealistic isolationism as their foreign policy—very much counter to many interventionist Democratic foreign policy makers, as Beinart notes.

But to equate Islamic totalitarianism today with Communism in the late 1940s and 1950s is to grossly exaggerate its power, and thus, its threat. 50 or 60 years ago, Communism was in the ascendant. A dozen nation states—and then more—were in the camp. They had huge disciplined armies, navies, airplanes, paratroopers, nuclear weapons, and on and on and on… then space programmes and satellites…

The Islamofascists today don’t even come close to that kind of power: they have a few thousand nutters with small arms. Of course, they are very dangerous, and even lightly armed—with boxcutters for fucksake—they can do horrific damage. And, of course, they are trying to get their hands on WMD, and they have to be prevented from doing so. But these desperate, suicidal lunatics are not nearly the threat international Communist movement was five or six decades ago.

They are the greatest threat liberal societies face today, but they are not on the same level as other great totalitarian threats liberal societies have faced in the past.

Equating the past threat with the current one risks an over-reaction on our part. And over-reaction could lead to all sort of serious mistakes that then only deepen the problem and even strengthen the enemy. Invading a country without an aftercare plan, for example, and thus pushing millions of people who may loosely sympathise with the fanatics to consider actively joining them.

Still, even if his diagnosis goes over the top, Beinart’s prescription for better aftercare plans is good advice for the Democratic Party to outflank the Republicans:

For all the Bush administration’s talk about promoting freedom in the Muslim world, its efforts have been crippled by the Republican Party’s deep-seated opposition to foreign aid and nation-building, illustrated most disastrously in Iraq. The resources that the United States has committed to democratization and development in the Middle East are trivial...

And as Beinart points out, high-ranking Democrats known for their take on international affairs favour “a far more ambitious US effort” in this regard. More international engagement, then, not less. And that will indeed be a hard sell to the party base, despite that:

...the struggle against totalitarianism... provides a powerful rationale for a more just society at home...