Foreign policy divides the Democrats.

[Corlyss_D]

THE STARTING GATE
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Foreign policy divides the Democrats.
Issue of 2007-01-15
Posted 2007-01-08

Evan Bayh was uncharacteristically dispirited when I met him in the Russell Senate Office Building on a quiet Wednesday before Christmas. For Bayh, who is fifty-one and was first elected to the Senate from Indiana in 1998, December will be recalled as a low moment in an otherwise high-achieving life. Less than two weeks earlier, he had the bad luck to visit New Hampshire on the same weekend that his junior colleague in the Senate Barack Obama, from Illinois, was also visiting. Bayh spoke to a hundred and fifty supporters in a Manchester restaurant; Obama swept through the state trailed by a hundred and fifty reporters. “We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones for this party,” the governor, John Lynch, told fifteen hundred people who paid twenty-five dollars apiece to see Obama in a Manchester ballroom. “But we cancelled them when we realized Senator Obama would sell more tickets.”

It was not merely this experience, though, which led Bayh to announce, shortly afterward, that he would not seek the 2008 Democratic nomination for President. He did not lack for money—his finance chief, Nancy Jacobson, had already raised more than ten million dollars—or desire. His father, Birch Bayh, was also an Indiana senator, as well as a failed Presidential candidate, and Bayh had harbored White House ambitions for years. So his decision, made just two weeks after he formed a Presidential exploratory committee, surprised many Democrats.

Bayh suggested that he was deterred by the morass in Iraq and, by extension, the challenges posed by Iran. Liberal Democrats, he said, would not respond to his views about the use of American military power. “You just hope that we haven’t soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle,” he said. “That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too.”

Bayh believes that the American experience in Iraq is turning some Democrats away from the Party’s internationalist tradition, and although that split in the Party is not new—it helped to shape the race in 2004—Bayh appears to think that it has become more intense as the next election draws closer. “While we’re rightfully pointing out those errors in Iraq, we’ve got to say very clearly that Afghanistan was the right war to fight,” he said. “There are those kinds of tough steps that occasionally involve the use of force. Lots of Americans wonder whether we Democrats have that in us.” Bayh, to be sure, is a pragmatist: he saw that he had little chance of penetrating his party’s consciousness in time for a 2008 race. “There are too many Goliaths out there,” he said, referring to Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards, and he added, with more sharpness than usual, “I believe I would be a very strong general-election candidate,” suggesting that the dynamics of the Democratic Party left little room for a semi-obscure, non-dazzling senator whose positions, in particular on the Iraq war, have been fairly hawkish.

Twelve months before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, foreign policy, and not abortion, gay rights, tax policy, or voters’ churchgoing habits, is what seems most to separate Democrats from Republicans and, to some extent, from each other. An early test of the Democratic contenders will be how they approach the Iraq war. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama—at this point, the chief competitors—have many views in common. They tend to see China as an economic challenge rather than as a military threat; they are pro-Israel, and support (Bill) Clinton-style engagement to restart the Middle East peace process; they all want more commitment in the fight against AIDS. On Iraq, though, and on the uses of American power, there is less unity.

John Edwards (the 2004 Vice-Presidential nominee, who announced his intention to run just after Christmas) has become the candidate of troop withdrawal. When I asked Edwards last week for a concise description of his Iraq position, he said, “Let’s start leaving.” Hillary Clinton, who has not announced her candidacy but is said to be close to doing so, is a connoisseur of statecraft, the candidate of the Democratic foreign-policy élite. She brings the most experience in foreign policy to the race—much of it gained vicariously, in her husband’s White House. Unlike Edwards, she sees the loss of Iraq as potentially catastrophic for American national-security interests.

Obama, who has strongly hinted at a possible candidacy, is the pleaser; he can be rhetorically hawkish, but seems most comfortable when advocating the softer forms of American power. He told me that a quick pullout from Iraq “could result in a spike in deaths,” but he does not talk about looming catastrophe if Iraq is not stabilized. His tone is relentlessly measured and sometimes banal; in his best-selling book, “The Audacity of Hope,” a chapter on foreign affairs reads like a tentative primer on the history of American foreign policy. Obama speaks at length of a trip to Iraq, but barely mentions the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. Still, he would enter the race for President with one clear advantage: he did not support the Iraq war, even at its inception.

Democrats are doubtful about the usefulness of an increase in troop levels. Obama, who does not use the euphemism “surge,” favored by the Administration, but, rather, “escalation,” said, “I don’t know any military expert who says that a modest increase in troop levels is going to make a big difference. Even if you pursue the logic of increased troop levels, you’re going to need one hundred thousand more, one hundred and fifty thousand more, orders of magnitude that we don’t possess. Twenty thousand troops is not going to make a difference anymore.” Clinton says that she has doubts but will withhold judgment until she sees President Bush’s actual plan.

Clinton, Edwards, and Obama view themselves as internationalists—eager to keep America engaged in the world and willing to employ force if necessary. And yet, if polls are to be trusted, this outlook separates them from their party’s base. A 2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS.* Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake—thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats. As the New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who has argued for a more assertive Democratic foreign policy, notes in an essay that will appear in a forthcoming collection produced by the Brookings and Hoover Institutions, “America’s red-blue divide is no longer chiefly between churched and unchurched. It is between hawk and dove.” He is not alone in arguing that Bush has done something that would have seemed impossible in late 2001: he has turned the fight against terrorism into a partisan issue.

“This is an exceedingly strange moment, but a plastic moment,” said Jeremy Rosner, a former Clinton Administration National Security Council official and now a Democratic pollster. “I tend to think that, once Bush and Iraq are off the screen, someone might be able to rally Democrats to an enlightened internationalism, but the data on that point is mixed right now.”

The Democratic Party’s base may be dovish, but it accounts for less than twenty-five per cent of the American voting public. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine a serious general-election candidate who does not favor some sort of “enlightened internationalism,” with its possible military implications. (Lieberman’s ultimate victory as an Independent seemed to demonstrate that dovish voters, even in a liberal state such as Connecticut, cannot by themselves unseat a hawkish senator.) But the Democratic Party’s chief problem may be finding a way to arrive at a coherent and persuasive post-Bush foreign policy. Michael E. O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, and Kurt M. Campbell, a former National Security Council official under Bill Clinton, argue in a recent book, “Hard Power: The Politics of National Security,” that Bush Administration incompetence, not Democratic foreign-policy wisdom, accounts for the Democrats’ success in last November’s midterm election. “Without answers of their own to the questions they pose to the Bush Administration about how to keep the country safe and secure, Democrats are likely to find current gains in national polls to be fleeting or illusory,” they wrote. They might have added that, whether or not the public hopes for a period of international tranquillity, the next President, Democrat or Republican, will inherit an extraordinarily difficult set of problems.

“It’s not a great bargain for the next President to take over the mess in Iraq,” Obama told me last month. “But there is as much pressure in both the Republican and Democratic camps, because both have genuine concern for the troops and the families and the budget. It won’t be good for congressmen of the President’s party if we’re still spending two billion dollars a week in Iraq in two years.”

Obama, like his rivals, would rather not see the Democrats take the blame for what recent events suggest will be an unhappy dénouement in Iraq. But many foreign-policy experts believe that, even without an increase in troop levels in the coming months, Bush may yet succeed in delaying the day of reckoning until the next President takes office. “Bush is going to do anything he can do in his power not to lose,” Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a onetime State Department official in the Carter Administration, said. “The worst challenge the next President will inherit will be to figure out how to lose in Iraq without the appearance or effects of losing. Then, there are these huge problems at either end of Asia—Iran and North Korea. The next President is heading into the biggest, most dangerous set of problems that we’ve faced since the Cuban missile crisis.”

On September 12, 2001, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the Senate floor in which she sounded much like President Bush, saying that the country should “make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but those who in any way give any aid or comfort whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country.” She added, “You are either with America in our time of need or you are not.”

When we met recently in her office in the Russell building, I mentioned that speech, calling it “pretty pugnacious.”

“Well, I was pretty pugnacious,” she said, laughing. “Post-9/11, that was appropriate language.” She has since been critical of Bush’s leadership of the war on terror, and in particular his handling of Iraq. She agrees with Gelb that the next President will inherit a set of foreign-policy challenges that will make her husband’s 1993 White House transition seem (to borrow a term from the run-up to the Iraq war) like a cakewalk.

Clinton speaks with confidence and directness. On issues of foreign policy and national security, she readily said “I don’t know” when she didn’t, and she referred frequently, without self-consciousness, to her husband’s experience, especially in the Middle East and in the Balkans, perhaps as a way of signalling that nothing prepares a person for four years in the White House like eight years in the White House. She seems to have assimilated data on a comprehensive range of issues. In one conversation, I asked her whether she believed that the best antidote to Islamism might be Islamism itself—in other words, for Muslims to experience periods of Islamist rule to fully grasp its flaws. “Well, I don’t see any evidence of that,” she said. “You know, if you look around the world, Islamists have had to be defeated by internal military forces, in such places as Algeria and the Philippines, or by external military forces, in places like Afghanistan. We want to be able to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible packages. We want to be smart about this. Take the Palestinians, where we had an election. Don’t you think it would have been smart to make sure that the election was run in such a way that everyone knew how to compete? Hamas certainly knew how to compete. They ran a modern election. They knew enough to run only one person in each constituency, unlike Fatah, which we apparently didn’t tell. Hamas had a cell-phone system to get everyone to the polls. It’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s have an election.’ If you’re going to do it and install democracy, democracy means rule of law, it means democracy education, democracy means opening up the media.”

She went on, “That’s what we did during the Cold War. We had a multi-pronged agenda against Communism and the Soviet Union, we worked with candidates and parties in Europe, we worked to persuade people to be part of our alliance, we used every tool at our disposal.” Clinton seemed just moments away from naming individual Hamas precinct captains.

When I asked Clinton to place herself on a foreign-policy continuum in which Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser, represents the realists, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Defense Secretary, represents the armed idealism of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists, she demurred. “I’m me,” she said. “Here’s Clinton. I’m not either one of them. I think both of their approaches are not adequate to the task we are facing. I think Wolfowitz’s strong feelings and deeply held values come out of the Holocaust, come out of an understanding of the need to expand universal values and create a climate in which people would stand up and fight for those human rights. I think it is real with Wolfowitz, but I think in pursuit of policies people see things that are not real.”

She continued, “On the other hand, if you entered the world arena and see it just as a series of Realpolitik transactions, you also miss the larger picture. We can critique the idealists, who have an almost faith-based idealism without adequate understanding or evidence-based decision-making, and we can critique the realists for rejecting the importance of aspiration and values in foreign policy. You know, I find myself, as I often do, in the somewhat lonely middle.”

Obama (like Clinton and Bayh) has studiously calibrated his approach to Iraq. Although he cannot be considered one of Congress’s foreign-policy experts, it is hard to think of another recent graduate of the Illinois Senate who could speak as comfortably as he does about the arcana of the Middle East. Obama is discomfited by those on the left who, in his view, minimize the threat of terrorism. In his recent book, he even scolds those who put the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and the improvement of relations with America’s allies, ahead of national-security concerns. “The objectives favored by liberals have merit,” he writes. “But they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy.” He adds that “the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating.” But when he writes that it’s “useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh,” it’s hard to imagine who would confuse the two.

Obama has not yet articulated an overarching national-security world view; the political danger in doing so is that it could alienate him from a wing of his party at a time when he’s just becoming widely known. In a conversation last month, he focussed on some of the most worrisome issues facing the United States, saying that the possibility of Al Qaeda or another terrorist group obtaining a nuclear weapon was “the No. 1 threat” facing America, and he warned that deterrence theories might not apply to the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang. “Just because they’re state actors doesn’t mean they might not act irrationally,” he said. “We can’t gauge their decision-making process accurately, partly because our intelligence capabilities have been entirely inadequate to the task, and partly due to the nature of the regimes. Whatever you want to say about the Soviets, they were essentially conservative. The North Korean regime and the Iranians are driven more by ideology and fantasy.” On the other hand, he is hesitant to describe a scenario in which he would actually use force against those regimes.

“What I don’t want to see happen is for Iraq to become an excuse for us to ignore misery or human-rights violations or genocide,” Obama said. “We should be engaged in Darfur. We have a self-interest and a stake in preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being slaughtered.” (Obama’s policy prescription for Darfur, though, is more modest than his rhetoric: he wants to build an “international protective force” in Darfur to buttress the African troops already there.) Democratic Party realism, he said, should reflect the country’s moral values. He cited the coup, in 1953, against the Iranian President, Mohammed Mossadegh, aided by the C.I.A., as an example of American values gone awry. “Iran is a classic case of something biting us on the ankle, when we assisted in overthrowing the democratically elected regime that was replaced by the Shah,” he said.

In his less cautious pre-Senate days, Obama expressed his view of the world more bluntly. In a 2002 speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago, he condemned Middle Eastern autocrats, and condemned President Bush (and, it is possible to infer, previous Presidents of both parties) for coddling pro-American dictators in the name of stability. “Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies, so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”

I asked Obama if his sympathy for the victims of civil war and ethnic cleansing takes in the mass of Iraqis who are victims, and not the perpetrators, of the current violence. “We absolutely have an obligation to the Iraqi people,” he said. “That’s why I’ve resisted calls for an immediate withdrawal.”

John Edwards, by contrast, argues that America has fulfilled its commitment to the Iraqi people. “We’ve been there for a few years,” he said. “We’ve devoted enormous resources, human and otherwise. And now we’ve reached the place, I think, where the Iraqis are going to have to take responsibility.” I asked if he believed that America had a moral responsibility to the Iraqis because the Bush Administration chose to topple a dictatorship, only to replace it, albeit inadvertently, with chaos and what looks like civil war.

“My view of Darfur is, we’ve done nothing but yap. We—as a lot of American families can tell you—we’ve done a lot more than talk in Iraq. And I think you just reach a place where you have to say, ‘We’ve done our part, and now it’s time for them to step up to the plate.’ You can’t police places forever.” When I suggested that Iraqis who “step up to the plate,” in the manner that Edwards suggests, are sometimes beheaded, he responded, “But when they’re doing it to each other, and America’s not there and not fomenting the situation, I think the odds are better of the place stabilizing. I mean, ultimately, that’s the judgment.”

Edwards unequivocally recommends the immediate withdrawal of forty thousand troops, a position that may help to explain his popularity: in one poll last month in Iowa, Edwards and Obama were tied for first place, each supported by twenty-two per cent of likely Democratic caucus-goers. Iowa’s outgoing governor, Tom Vilsack, who is also an announced candidate, was backed by twelve per cent of likely caucus-goers, and Hillary Clinton was polling at about ten per cent.

It sometimes seems that Edwards is running in a different election than Obama and Clinton. He is focussed on next year’s primaries, building support among union members and among Democrats infuriated by the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy. Obama and Clinton seem focussed instead on the general election. Edwards disputes this notion. “Well, I call the surge idea ‘the McCain doctrine,’ ” he said, laughing. When I mentioned how Obama and Clinton have approached the Iraq issue, he said, “They may be trying to run for President, too, you mean?” He insisted that his tack on Iraq was “nonpolitical,” and added, “I think the political position is to be cautious. There are consequences to taking positions, but leadership in this situation requires you to make clear what you think should happen in Iraq.”

In his announcement speeches, Edwards called for “getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil” but did not mention counterterrorism as a top priority, which sets him apart from the current Democratic field. Rather, he emphasized universal health care, ending poverty, and combatting global warming.

I met with Edwards in New York, just after he delivered a speech to the Asia Society about a recent trip he had made to China. During the question-and-answer period, he gave perfunctory responses to a series of questions, and seemed most engaged when the conversation turned to domestic policy. “I could go on all day about this,” he said.

When I asked about his relative inexperience in foreign policy, he said, overenthusiastically, “I love this stuff. I think it is the critical thing for the next President of the United States, and whether it is Uganda and Darfur, or the Middle East, or China, or India, or Europe, I just find it fascinating. And I think the President of the United States has to have a very strong, clear vision about how to engage the world.”

Edwards is careful not to rule out the use of military force against Iran, but he would much rather talk about other things—his recent interest in Africa, and his antipoverty ideas, which are at the core of his candidacy. Edwards is genial in conversation, but he became almost testy when I brought up his vote, in 2002, in favor of the Iraq-war resolution. Edwards has repudiated his vote, unlike Clinton, who has not renounced her own support for the war despite demands from her backers that she do so. Edwards worries that his vote will be seen as evidence that he was somehow fooled by the Administration into giving it his support. “I was convinced that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons,” he said. “There was some disparity in the information I had about how far along he was in that process. I didn’t rely on George Bush for that. And I personally think there’s some dishonesty in suggesting that members of the United States Senate relied on George Bush for that information, because I don’t think it’s true. It’s great politics. But it’s not the truth.”

When I asked who was making this suggestion, he said, “I’ve just heard people say, I can’t even tell you who, I’ve just heard people say, ‘Well, you know, George Bush . . . misled us.’ You know, it’s just— I was there, it’s not what happened.” (Edwards would not single out anyone, but he appeared to be referring to, among others, his 2004 running mate, John Kerry, who has often said that he was lied to by the Bush Administration about W.M.D.s. “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true,” Kerry told a rally of liberal Democrats in June of last year.)

“I was on the Intelligence Committee,” Edwards went on, “so I got direct information from the intelligence community. And then I had a series of meetings with former Clinton Administration people. And they were all saying the same thing. Everything I was hearing in the Intelligence Committee was the same thing I was hearing from these guys. And there was nary a dissenting voice. And so, for me, the difficult judgment was not about the factual information, which I was convinced was accurate. It was about whether I was going to give authority to this President I didn’t trust. That was where the friction was for me. I decided to do it, and I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it.”

Hillary Clinton’s decision to give Bush her approval in 2002 was influenced by her recent White House experience. “I have respect for Presidential decision-making and I saw what the Republican Congress had done to Bill on a range of issues, denying him the authority to deal with Bosnia and Kosovo and second-guessing him on every imaginable issue,” she said. “And I don’t think that that’s good for the country, and I had no problem in giving President Bush the authority to do what he stated he would do and what I was assured privately on many occasions would be done.”

Still, Clinton was never an enthusiastic supporter of the war. In a speech to the Senate before casting her vote to support the resolution, she cautioned Bush, saying, “If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia to attack Chechen rebels. India has mentioned the possibility of a preëmptive strike on Pakistan. And what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan? So, Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option.”

When I asked Clinton if she thought that she had been lied to, she said, “I have to tell you, I think that they believed, as I believed, that there was, at the very least, residual weapons of mass destruction, and whether the Iraqis ever intended to let the inspectors go forward was being answered year by year. There was a lot of evidence that this was not their intention.”

Obama wasn’t in the Senate at the time of the invasion of Iraq, and in his 2002 Chicago speech he prophesied some of the difficulties that the Bush Administration is now experiencing. “I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein,” he said then. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors.” He went on, “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

A year before the primaries, the Democrats certainly have solid contenders for the Presidency, each of whom—some more than others—is struggling to design a credible series of foreign-policy beliefs for a party that has foreign-policy inclinations but no reigning philosophy. Obama and Clinton appear thus far to be the Party’s strongest potential candidates, and each brings strengths to the debate. Obama’s foresight on Iraq may be one of his most potent weapons, just as Clinton’s expertise, and essential centrism, will be an asset to her candidacy. For now, though, Edwards has something that the others lack: a position on Iraq that resonates best with his party.

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*Goldberg was the reporter who cautioned listeners at a C-SPAN panel before the election that many people who were voting Democratic wanted to win in Iraq, not flee ignominiously, but there was no voice representing them in the party. One waits in vain for the Democrats, with their severe case of arrested development and their permanently juvenile world view, to become serious adults.