We're starting to see articles that are giving some serious thought to what a new Democratic administration would need to do. First, we have to get one of those. But obviously some of that discussions has to take place before the November 2008 election, less than a year away now.
One of those articles appears in the just-published edition of The American Prospect, Healing Our Self-Inflicted Wounds by John Shattuck 12/17/07 (link is behind subscription for four weeks or so). Shattuck discusses at some length the ways in which the Cheney-Bush war and torture policies have compromised American "soft power" influence and ability to get things done in world affairs.
I was particularly interested, though, in his priority list of challenges for an incoming Democratic President:
The first is countering the threats posed by Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
And he elaborates:
Years after the U.S. military interventions, Iraq and Afghanistan remain major exporters of terrorism and centers of human-rights abuse. Iran is a major terrorist exporter and a human-rights disaster.
To be fair, he doesn't specifically call them priorities, so he's not necessarily claiming that this is first priority. First priority should be to restore a realistic international effort on nuclear nonproliferation, which the Cheney-Bush policies have badly damaged. Shattuck doesn't mention it at all.
I'm also not thrilled to see Shattuck's description of this set of problems. Iran is a major terrorist exporter? Even being generous enough to read the grammar as meaning something other than that Iran is exporting terrorists, it's still a very questionable statement. Iran does support Hizbullah and Hamas in acts of terrorism against Israel. And Iran is allied to the Shi'a government in Baghdad and also to Moktada al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, or JAM. But try as they have, the administratio has yet to come up with any serious evidence that Iran is specifically sponsoring attacks against American troops in Iraq.
Human rights needs to be a major element of American foreign policy, but in a realistic way, not simply as a propaganda excuse for war, as Cheney and Bush have used the issue. Our main interests with Iran are nuclear nonproliferation and getting Iran to support stability in Iraq and prevent a regional war as the Americans withdraw. Those are probably the most constructive things we could do to promote human rights in Iran, because they would take away the rally-round-the-flag effect that US hostility and threats of war against Iran provide the conservative leaders there.
It's not clear from this description that Shattuck recognizes that the biggest danger to US foreign policy that Iraq and Afghanistan represent right now is that we're stuck in protracted wars in both countries, with no peace in sight in either place.
A second major stated objective of U.S. foreign policy is preventing genocide.
Here is Shattuck's expanded discussion of this point:
The lesson of Rwanda was that the cost of failing to stop genocide is not only a massive killing of innocent civilians but also an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe and long-term regional instability. Following the Rwanda genocide, a doctrine of humanitarian intervention was developed under U.S. leadership and invoked, with broad international support and authority under the Genocide Convention, to end the genocide in Bosnia in 1995, and then to prevent a genocide in Kosovo in 1999. Today, that doctrine is in shambles, undermined and discredited by the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq. As a result, the U.S. has been unable to mobilize support to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur and an entire region of Africa has been destabilized.
The humanitarian hawk stance allows Democrats to sound "tough" by advocating or threatening war somewhere. But the Bush Doctrine set back the progress that had been made toward finding broader multilateral solutions to such situation, set it back for years if not decades.
Two considerations have to be kept in mind here. One is that genocide is unquestionably evil and war is the most destructive evil that afflicts the human race. I'm not a pacifist and I support the Christian doctrine of the Just War. But the sooner we flush the romantic, foolish, destructive neocon idea of war as a purging force of liberation down the toilet, the better off we'll be. We see in Iraq that American occupation created the conditions for civil war and brutal sectarian conflicts.
A closely related consideration is that we have to recognize that just because the reason for the intervention is more realistic or humane than Cheney's and Bush's cynical propaganda deceptions about Iraqi WMDs, that won't eliminate the difficulty of running a country through an occupation by foreign troops, particularly if they are foreign troops of a different race and/or religion. Because intervening to stop a civil war would be a type of counterinsurgency operation and those aren't easy. Less drastic measures like using a UN force to set up a safe haven for refugees could be used without taking on a full counterinsurgency effort and foreign occupation. But even a more limited measure like that has its own risks. If one side in a civil war sees that the UN has set up a safe haven for refugees, that may encourage them to widen ethnic cleasing against their enemies.
Addressing the challenges posed by geopolitical rivals such as China, Russia, and Cuba is a third long-standing concern of U.S. foreign policy.
He discusses this one briefly in terms of human rights and how the US has damaged its image in that area. But the main need here is not to be better able to brag about a superior human rights record, but to manage those relationships so that they don't become hostile.
Creating and managing strategic alliances is a fourth major U.S. foreign-policy objective.
No argument there.
Finally, holding accountable those who commit human-rights crimes has been a bedrock objective of U.S. foreign policy since the Nuremberg trials following World War II.
Here he notes that "the Bush administration has relinquished its leadership on these issues." But to regain a leadership position on those questions, a real set of prosecutions for criminal acts are needed. The Democrats shouldn't flinch from such a thing and the Democratic base needs to demand it.
