November 10, 2007
The Politics of National Security II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:40 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for linking to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech “The Politics of National Security.” I’m not really sure where to begin responding to it, except to say it is a good example of why I find Lieberman a very sad public figure. There have always been aspects of Lieberman’s politics that I’ve found problematic, but I used to be a fan of his. I considered him a decent man and, even when I disagreed with him, an unusually honest politician. But as the centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes, the Connecticut senator’s latest speech “seemed designed to validate everything [Lieberman’s] Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him.” I do not think I can critique Lieberman’s address more effectively than Kilgore already has, so forgive me for quoting liberally. The heart of Kilgore’s argument is that Lieberman’s speech “provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were ‘good’ from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be ‘bad.’ Democrats were ‘bad’ from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were ‘good’”—and so on. Kilgore continues: “These judgments appear to be based on an interpretation of the ‘muscular’ Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” To Kilgore’s observations I’ll only add that Lieberman’s speech totally misses the present political reality in the United States. In Lieberman’s view, the source of antiwar opinion in this country is the “politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base.” According to a brand-new poll, 68 percent of Americans oppose our continuing commitment in Iraq. That is a new high. If Joe Lieberman still supports the war that’s his right, but someone should disabuse him of the notion that he’s the voice of a beleaguered and sensible quiet majority.
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