The Political War Fouad Ajami Wants To Fight Posted by David Shorr

In today's Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami brings the classic political strategy of defining your opponent to the battlefield of the foreign policy debate. Roughly half of the piece is retread images of liberal elites -- convenient for Prof. Ajami's political aims -- that are asserted without any of the basis in fact that we might expect from an eminent scholar. The other half maps a political battlefield on which we progressives will be happy to fight, where Prof. Ajami has the demonstrably weaker argument.

The piece opens with backhanded praise for Joe Biden as the kind of old-fashioned who is unlike the rest of the current crop of liberals: "Patriotism does not embarrass this man in the way it does so many in the liberal elite." Say what you want about us DA bloggers (our readers have said plenty), but we're nothing if not a representative sample of the liberal foreign policy elite, and the writers here have shown no discomfort with patriotism. It may serve your political purposes to say so, Mr. Ajami, but you're talking about a figment, not real people.

Nor are we "disaffected with American power." Nor do we believe "we can make our way in the world without the encumbrance of 'hard' power." We'd prefer to speak for ourselves, thank you very much, and we're here not to debate over whether America should have power (it should), but what America should do with that power. And we believe the American people are ready and eager for that debate and fed up with the rehash of the 1960s culture war that Ajami wants to (re)fight. Which brings me, to the battlefield on which we would be happy to engage Prof. Ajami.

As I say, a lot of Ajami's argument only shows how out of touch he is with American popular sentiment and with what it will take to pursue the United States' interests in the world after the failed neoconservative ideological experiment. According to Prof. Ajami, one of candidate McCain's chief qualifications is that he "shares the widespread attitude of broad swaths of the country that are not consumed with worries about America's standing in foreign lands." I'm not sure which broad swaths he's talking about, but apparently not the three-quarters of Americans (see slide 9) who consider the diminished respect for America, in so many words, a major problem -- a sentiment currently at the exact same level as a year ago.

Prof. Ajami is not incorrect that willingness to negotiate with Iran is a hallmark of the progressive foreign policy approach -- though the idea that we keep the military option completely off the table is, again, more convenient for his argument than it is true. Yes, we want to negotiate, because refusing to negotiate is absolutely more likely to lead to the exact outcome we are trying to avoid. All during the time we refuse to discuss possible ways out of the current standoff, the Iranians will keep getting closer to having a nuclear weapon. Oh, by the way, who is the latest key figure to give in to this reality? President Bush, who the NY Times has noted, now outflanks McCain to the left.

UPDATE: One more point I meant to make. Either we believe in civilian control of the military or we don't. I think we do; we certainly preach it as a core tenet of democracy when dealing with other militaries around the world. And if we believe this, then we cannot have a military service test to qualify to be president, period.

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