[Dean's World] Dave Price: What Might Dem Foreign Policy Look Like?

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Posted by Dave Price:
What Might Dem Foreign Policy Look Like?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1199734482.shtml


   Aside from the obligatory Bush-bashing and characterization of Iraq's
   liberation as a "disaster" (it is The Nation, after all), some
   interesting insights in [1]this article.

     Holbrooke acknowledges that in the wake of the Iraq disaster, it
     will be harder to carry out the type of humanitarian interventions
     that defined the Clinton Administration. In the case of Darfur, for
     example, none of the candidates have suggested sending US forces.
     "The standard will be higher," Holbrooke said. "The tests of an
     exit strategy will be higher. The risks will be higher." In the
     1990s Holbrooke warned of "Vietnamalia syndrome," the aversion to
     using military power because of failures in Vietnam and Somalia,
     and says we cannot retreat now, either. "A swing from
     neoconservatism to neo-isolationism would not be a good deal."

   I think we can live with a Holbrookian "muscular liberalism."
   Obviously it won't be nearly as muscular as Bush's toppling of two
   illiberal regimes, but the main concern, Iraq, may actually be stable
   enough by this time next year that it won't be a major issue, and
   Afghanistan still has the clear 9/11 ties that make abandoning the
   field to Al Qaeda unthinkable.
   No doubt we'll see a lot of this type of thing...

     Statements like these raise the question of what a post-Bush
     foreign policy should look like. The next President must decide:
     will the "war on terror" continue? What about the Bush doctrine of
     preventive war or the escalating size of the military budget?
     Holbrooke says, "The next President needs to scrap a lot of things
     from the Bush Administration, and torture, Guantánamo and
     pre-emptive war should be on that list." Wesley Clark, too, says
     the concept of a "war on terror" was a "terrible mistake," and he
     calls the Bush doctrine "nonsense, rubbish." On these points Obama
     and Edwards concur.

   ...but these are basically cosmetic. Of course, we didn't torture
   under Bush either, and I'll bet if we capture a few senior-level AQ
   terrorists with knowledge of plots to kill large number of Americans
   they will be waterboarded if it comes down to that, whatever claims
   Dems make in the heat of a primary battle. They can close Gitmo as a
   nod to all the histrionic press coverage, though one wonders where
   they will put all the terrorists. And we'll see lots of obsequious
   bowing to the "international community" and the UN, but that won't
   matter any more than it ever has.
   Probably the main differences in the GWOT will be that the CIA won't
   leak every secret initiative to the NYT to embarass a Dem
   administration, and we won't hear these endless moronic complaints
   about the civil rights of terrorists any more than we heard complaints
   about the mass internment of Japanese-Americans and the summary
   executions of German spies when that seemed necessary. Why, it's
   almost enough to make one look forward to an Obama administration...

References

   1. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080121&s=berman