I think it's fair to say that Democrats as a party oppose President Bush's foreign policy -- so much so that they are willing to make purely opportunistic attacks on it that are wildly dissonant with the gist of their own critique of that foreign policy. They apparently think the public doesn't pay sufficient attention to note the dissonance.
Insufficient attention is not a fault that can be attributed to Peter Beinart, who calls the approach in his Washington Post column this morning. A liberal Democrat who yearns for his party to adopt a respectable foreign policy, Beinart finds the Democrats' condemnation this week of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki too much to stomach. He finds that the condemnation fits with a Democratic line of attack on Bush administration foreign policy that he calls "jingoism with a human face."
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Peter Beinart:
Pander and Run
After years of struggling to define their own approach to post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, Democrats seem finally to have hit on one. It's called pandering. In those rare cases when George W. Bush shows genuine sensitivity to America's allies and propounds a broader, more enlightened view of the national interest, Democrats will make him pay. It's jingoism with a liberal face.
The latest example came this week when Democratic senators and House members demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki either retract his criticisms of Israel or forfeit his chance to address Congress. Great idea. Maliki -- who runs a government propped up by U.S. troops -- is desperate to show Iraqis that he is not Washington's puppet. And the United States desperately needs him to succeed because, unless he gains political credibility at home, his government will have no hope of surviving on its own.
Maliki took a small step in that direction this week when he articulated a view of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict quite different from that of the Bush administration. ...
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Contributed by Bill Faith on July 28, 2006 at 11:21 AM in , , |