Right’s ‘Centrists’ Gang Up on Dean

Listening to Howard Dean’s foreign policy speech at a recent meeting of the Pacific Council on International Policy, I was impressed by its realism. Here was a candidate calling Americans back to the policies of international cooperation and alliance that helped us create the United Nations, put Western Europe on its feet, bring Japan and Germany back to democracy and take the lead in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In short, the policies that enabled us to triumph over the Soviets in the Cold War. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, I was reassured by Dean’s references to Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Clinton and, for that matter, the first President Bush in their reliance on multilateral action to keep the peace.

Dean’s post-speech answers to questions about U.S. relations with China, North Korea and the Israel-Palestine conflict also had the ring of realism. Going further, I had to admire his consistency in opposing the hasty, ill-timed Iraq war. His statement that Saddam Hussein’s capture, while fine work by the U.S. armed forces, has not improved our domestic security one jot was dead-on. Here’s one presidential candidate, I thought, who doesn’t waffle on his principles.

It was thus more than mildly surprising to read media comment on the speech, according to which Dean was an extremist wrong about all things international, especially the security consequences of Hussein’s capture. Who was he, a mere former governor, to ignore U.S. successes in Iraq, not to mention President Bush’s morally worthy plan to bring freedom and democracy in a hurry to Iraq?

While headlines spotlighted the other Democratic candidates’ criticisms of Dean -- was he being disloyal again? -- various right-wing columnists went for the jugular. To Max Boot, it was just “rhetoric” to talk about the cowards in the “international community,” especially when “the situation in Iraq appears to be looking up.” David Brooks said Dean was “clueless about the intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us.”

The ever-vigilant editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, regretful that Dean “would not veer back to the center,” worried that “one of the two major political parties nominate a candidate whom voters won’t be able to trust on [national security], the most important duty any president has.” By the Journal’s lights, a centrist is someone who would uncritically push the president’s war effort wider in support of a grand plan, details to come, to turn the Middle East miasma of fanaticism and brutal dictatorship into a new world of democracy.

These are not frivolous comments. They are certainly not isolated, at least not in a country in which a majority of the citizens still believes that Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and in which all too many think that disagreeing with any portion of Bush’s anti-terror campaign is one step from treason. The center seems to be lurching rightward.

According to medieval theologians, “a leap of faith” was necessary when a good Christian, unable to attain truth through philosophy and logic, relied on sheer belief in God to sustain him. We may live in a modern secular democracy, but the American public’s opinions and voting patterns, true to tradition, are all too often determined by taking on faith the statements of likable fellows we elect to public office. As a people, we are shrewd, patriotic and hustling, but we also tend to be gullible. This, after all, is the country that went to war against Spain because of a false charge, heavily laid on by Washington, that Spaniards had blown up a U.S. warship in Havana; that ate Liberty steaks in place of hamburger and believed that German troops in World War I impaled Belgian babies on their bayonets; and that tolerated the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans without any evidence of disloyalty for the duration of World War II.

This time, we rebounded from the 9/11 attacks with an initially successful assault on the Taliban and Al Qaeda fanatics in Afghanistan, then hastily went to war in Iraq ostensibly to head off more terrorist attacks on the U.S. Our occupation of Iraq has been bumbling, in large part because we didn’t bother to learn much about the country and its cultures. Meanwhile, we allowed the Taliban and the Afghan warlords to retake chunks of Afghanistan.

Unquestionably, the world is better off with Hussein in captivity. And who can quarrel with Bush’s lofty goal of bringing democracy, single-handedly, to a hostile Middle East, even if he isn’t exactly sure how he’s going to do it? But let’s not join the new right-wing centrists in denouncing Dean’s criticisms of the Bush foreign policy as radical cliff-jumping. Let’s try to make the presidential nominating campaign into a more level playing field. Dean’s multilateralism in foreign policy seems far more centrist than Bush’s polarizing “us or them” approach. For a trusting American public to meekly support the administration’s grand design without examining the arguments for and against it is a leap of faith that a working democracy can ill afford.