The debate over Peter Beinart's Democratic war-cry (amplified here) continues to grow. For a sampling of opinion, head over to Technorati. Or for an attack, look here. For a nuanced critique, look here. Or visit The New Republic's letters roundup, here.
Josh Marshall's are among the most cogent objections -- much moreso than Kevin Drum's.
I continue to side with Beinart. Having said that, let's pick apart the sides and see what's really going on here.
Beinart's main points are these -- the Democrats need to be serious about foreign policy; that means being serious about security; the terrorist threat is critical; therefore a hard response to terrorism is central to the party's survival. The party's response in the early days of the Cold War provides the model.
Against Beinart, there are several arguments, ranging from the mild -- "the terrorist threat is real but unlike the Cold War threat, different policies are needed" -- to the moderate -- "the terrorist threat is real to some people in some major cities, but isn't a threat to our survival" -- to the extreme -- "the terrorist threat isn't serious at all, it's a ruse the Bush Administration is using to drive its agenda and control us all."
Guess what? It's another Metaphor Fight.
Not that there aren't real points of policy to debate here -- there certainly are. But at the moment, the heart of the debate is -- what's the war on terrorism like? What thing from the past is it? What metaphor should we use? Is it the Cold War? World War II? Wag the Dog?
"None of the above" is the right answer -- but hardly anyone seems able to go there.
Building policy out of metaphors is dangerous -- inevitable, yes, because that's the way we think, but nevertheless strong medicine that carries with it the risk of overdose. You know you're overdosed when you let the metaphor lock you into an old model, and let it carry you past the details that are specific and new in each situation.
There's no shortage of examples. Such as -- we wound up in Vietnam because we thought that Communist expansion was like Nazi expansion, and said, "No more Munichs!" And then we said, "No more Vietnams!" And that kept us going for a while, until September 11 put us in mind of Munich again. Therefore Afghanistan, probably a good use of the Munich analogy, and Iraq, very possibly a bad one. See Vietnam, above.
And now Beinart calls for a hardline Democratic response to a threat, and cites the Cold War. So Cold War imagery is in play. Containment, anyone?
To Beinart's credit, he didn't push his metaphor to the limit -- he simply said that there's a threat, and that Democrats need to respond to the threat, and that the Cold War experience is instructive. So far, so good.
His critics -- Drum in particular, Marshall to a degree -- have taken the Cold War analogy and run with it, or let it run them. The counterargument -- Al Qaeda, unlike the Soviet Union, isn't a nuclear-armed state actor. Therefore it doesn't pose an existential threat. Therefore it's not really such a big threat after all.
At which point we come off the rails. You start with the Soviet Union as the model threat, and then conclude that it's the only threat. Or at least, the most severe. Now, let's slow down and think about this. Al Qaeda doesn't necessarily have Soviet-style territorial ambitions, yes? It'll be reasonable and stick with its goal, which is the diminishment of U.S. influence in the Mideast and the restoration of the Caliphate. But to get its Caliphate, it launches, say, a wave of suicide bombings that bring our economic life to a halt. Or it unleashes a biologic that takes out a significant portion of the population. We still exist as a nation, yes? Of course. So the threat wasn't existential, then? Not so fast. There are different flavors of existential threat -- there's the instant, Soviet-style kind, and there's the slow-moving variety that leaves the nation standing, but transformed to such an extent that it might as well not exist. Freedoms curtailed, the economy broken -- and you can manage that without recourse to a land army and ICBMs. Think I'm being alarmist? Take time out to read about the Black Death -- which, by the way, left Europe's institutions standing, at least in the short term -- and tell me that Europe wasn't transformed, or that it wasn't facing an existential threat.
Marshall, to his credit, is dead-on in his critique of misapplied analogies. Except that he comes out at this: "...unlike Communism in 1947, militant Islam simply does not pose an existential threat to our civilization. It just doesn't." It just doesn't? Why so sure? Once you take off the metaphoric blinders -- the ones that force you to see threat in the form of missile attack -- it's a different picture.
The point is this -- Islamism is a threat, not because it's like Soviet Russia, but precisely because it isn't. It's a threat because it takes an entirely different approach -- one that pits its strengths against our weaknesses, not against our strengths. It's a threat because we don't have a frame of reference for it. We're busy arguing about whether it is or isn't like the Soviet Union. We'd be better advised to think about what kind of threat it actually is, and whether existential threats can come in packages that don't look like missiles or tanks.
Here's a suggestion -- let's use our metaphors to a degree. Let's talk about the Cold War model and the Vietnam model and the Munich model. And then let's put them aside and take a hard look at what we've actually got on our hands.
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