WSJ review of "The Good Fight"

The Wall Street Journal

May 26, 2006

BOOKS

A Direction for Democrats
By FRED SIEGEL
May 26, 2006; Page W5

(snip)

"The Good Fight" is built on a series of analogies. Mr. Beinart sees today's MoveOn.org left as the woolly-minded heirs of the Henry Wallace-supporting, philo-Soviet left of the 1940s. If this left was too willing to find fault with America, Mr. Beinart argues, then the traditionalist conservatives of the period were too quick to assume America's inherent virtue and to push for its corollary, unilateral action.

The liberals he justly admires, such as the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, criticized the Wallacites as people whose insistence on purity of means disguised an unwillingness to deal with the messy requirements of combating the evils of communism. But Niebuhr also insisted, unlike conservatives, on the inherent impurity of even America's motives, arguing that American hubris could be a danger to itself and the world. The ideal was President Truman's policy of containing -- not confronting -- the Soviet Union. Impatient and overwrought conservatives attacked the policy, but it served us well in the long run.

Unfortunately, says Mr. Beinart, the liberal backlash against the Vietnam War generated an unwillingness to deal with the realities of communism. And that failing, he insists, has made it impossible for liberals ever since to formulate a foreign policy capable of winning popular approval. As for the right side of political spectrum, Mr. Beinart believes that the Bush administration has fallen into the very hubris and zealotry that Niebuhr criticized in the conservatives of his era. Thus Iraq, like Vietnam, has alienated liberals from supporting a strong American foreign policy. What America needs, Mr. Beinart concludes, is a new 1940s moment in which liberals tough enough to take on the jihadists re-create a version of containment that will, with patience, allow us to defeat our foes.

(snip)

Mr. Beinart tries to push Islamism into the social and economic categories of the 1940s. Nation-building and Marshall Plan-like aid to alleviate poverty, he claims, are what is needed in the Middle East and in other places where radical Islam festers dangerously. But this supposed solution is inadequate to the task. Today's jihadism is the expression of an imperialist imperative that is part of Islam itself, reaching back more than a millennium. It is not a manifestation of poor living conditions.

The reality is that there are no good choices when a major world religion appropriates whole countries or peoples on behalf of a radical, "holy" agenda. The subtitle of Mr. Beinart's book reads: "Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." But that is the sort of narrowly partisan sentiment that Mr. Beinart rightly criticizes in President Bush. As in the 1940s, it will take a bipartisan foreign policy to set America on the long path to victory.

Mr. Siegel is the author of "The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life" (Encounter).
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