The Washington Post

No George McGovern

By Robert Kagan

Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A25

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently did his

best to justify the war in Iraq, and he expounded a

bit on the role of American power in the world. Here

are some excerpts of what he said: "The war against

Saddam Hussein was right. . . . He is a vicious

dictator and a documented deceiver. He . . . invaded

his neighbors, used chemical arms and failed to

account for all the chemical and biological weapons he

had before the Gulf War. And he . . . tried to build a

nuclear bomb. . . . I think we're going to find

weapons of mass destruction. I'm convinced that these

weapons were there and that they could have found

their way into the hands of terrorists and found their

way to the United States, and that's what we had to

stop. . . . A nation always preserves the right to

take preemptive action in defense of our security and

our freedom. . . . We have a chance to show the world

that we were in fact in Iraq for the right reasons,

that we were there for the purpose of liberating the

Iraqi people, that this was not about the expansion of

American power, that this was not about oil. . . . I

think the commander in chief has to be tough. I

appreciate the fact that we have a strong military in

this country. . . . I think the world has proven, and

we have proven, that there is a rationale for our

containing the most powerful military on the face of

the planet. To win the war on terror, we must be

prepared to use the iron fist of our superb military."

Okay, I lied. Rumsfeld didn't say any of that. The

above quotation is a composite of statements made over

recent months by John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joseph

Lieberman, John Edwards and Howard Dean. (The lines

about Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear

weapons are Dean's, as are the "strong military" and

"iron fist" lines.)

It has been said that the United States is polarized

these days. Maybe so. But on foreign policy questions,

where the country is presumably most polarized, the

poles are a little hard to define. The fact remains

that a majority of the Democratic Party's most

plausible candidates supported the war in Iraq and

have not, with the exception of Wes Clark, tried to

claim otherwise. Howard Dean is the preeminent antiwar

candidate, but aside from his dissent on Iraq, does he

really offer a fundamentally different vision of

American foreign policy? Will the 2004 election, in

other words, be a national referendum on the

fundamental principles of American foreign policy in

the post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11, 2001, world? At this

moment, it seems unlikely, even if the matchup is Bush

vs. Dean.

Dean has been portrayed, especially by Republicans, as

the new George McGovern. But judging by Dean's public

statements at least, there is a big difference between

the nature of his antiwar critique and the

anti-Vietnam critique offered by McGovern and his

followers three decades ago.

At the heart of the anti-Vietnam critique was a

wholesale rejection of anti-communist containment, the

reigning American foreign policy paradigm in those

years. Vietnam was not just "the wrong war at the

wrong time." It was, McGovernites believed, the

logical culmination of two decades of misguided and

immoral Cold War strategy. The problem was not just

Richard Nixon but the whole foreign policy

"establishment," Democrats and Republicans alike, from

Dean Acheson through McGeorge Bundy, all of whom who

had taken America down the wrong path. And the answer

was not just withdrawal from Vietnam but a complete

reorientation of American foreign and defense policy.

America was on the wrong side of history; its power

and influence in the world were a source not of good

but of evil. In the McGovernite view, any war was the

wrong war. Americans needed to "come home" both to

save themselves and all who suffered from their

nation's oppressive global influence.

In this respect, at least, Howard Dean is no George

McGovern. He opposed the Iraq war, he says, because it

was "the wrong war at the wrong time," not because it

was emblematic of a fundamentally misguided American

foreign policy. Dean has not, in fact, challenged the

reigning foreign policy paradigms of the post-9/11

era: the war on terrorism and the nexus between

terrorism and rogue states with weapons of mass

destruction. "I support the president's war on

terrorism," he told Tim Russert this summer. He

supported the war in Afghanistan. He even supported

Israel's strike against a terrorist camp in Syria

because Israel, like the United States, has the

"right" to defend itself. (European Deanophiles take

note.) Dean does not call for a reduction in American

military power but talks about using the "iron fist"

of our "superb military." He talks tough about North

Korea and at times appears to be criticizing the Bush

administration for not addressing that "imminent"

threat more seriously. And he especially enjoys

lacerating Bush for not taking the fight more

effectively to al Qaeda, a bit like John F. Kennedy

criticizing Eisenhower in 1960 for not being tough

enough on communism.

Of course, all this tough talk could be hot air. Maybe

Dean is doing a great job controlling and hiding his

inner peacenik. If so, that in itself tells you

something about the current state of the foreign

policy debate. Even Mr. Speak-My-Mind thinks he has to

talk tough. George McGovern didn't.

Another possibility is that Dean's opposition to the

Iraq war has been over-interpreted by his supporters

on the Democratic left. They think he rejects the

overall course of American foreign policy, just as

they do. But maybe he doesn't. They think he's one of

them, but his views may not be all that different from

those of today's Democratic centrist establishment.

When Dean criticizes Bush's foreign policy

"unilateralism," he sounds like a policy expert at the

Council on Foreign Relations, not a radical. "There

are two groups of people who support me because of the

war," Dean told Mara Liasson a few months ago. "One

are the people who always oppose every war, and in the

end I think I probably won't get all of those people."

The other group, Dean figures, simply "appreciates the

fact" that he "stood up early" and spoke his mind and

opposed Bush while other Democrats were cowed. Dean

may not be offering a stark alternative to Bush's

foreign policy, therefore, so much as he is simply

offering Democrats a compelling and combative

alternative to Bush himself. The Iraq war provided the

occasion to prove his mettle.

If so, that has two implications, one small and one

big. The small one concerns the general election: The

Bushies are planning to run against a dovish McGovern,

but there's a remote possibility they could find

themselves running against a hawkish Kennedy. The

bigger implication, which the rest of the world should

note well, is that the general course of American

foreign policy is fairly stable and won't be soon

toppled -- not even by Howard Dean.

The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie

Endowment, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Don't forget Carter attacking Bush 1 from the right during their 1976 debates on the grounds that he was not tough enough on the Soviets - I think some readers of this board are old enough to remember that. Or Democrats attacking Bush 1 in the early 90's for doing enough to aid pro-capitalist forces in the USSR.

I mean't, of course, Carter attacking Ford.

Don't matter. Dean will get the nomination, then get buried by President George W. Bush.