Podcast with Peter Beinart
Today we are speaking to Peter Beinart, who is the author of a new book, The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.
Mr. Beinart is editor at large of The New Republic, a regular writer for Time and a television commentator. He talks with us about his new book, why Democrats are "too nice" to each other, and why only liberals can win the War on Terror. Glenn and I discuss our reaction afterwards and my only conclusion: When a liberal talks about defending America, it's called a "Good Fight" and when a conservative does, it's called imperialism. Read the book and judge for yourself. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here or subscribe on iTunes, which we would appreciate. (It moves us up on the charts.) You can see our podcast archive of other shows here, and there's a dialup version right here.
Please leave any comments or suggestions below.
posted by Helen at 5:03 PM
18 Comments:
Nice to see something bipartisan.
This may be picking nits, but, Anonymous, how is the author of a book subtitled Why Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on Terror, etc., a bipartisan guest? Are People of the Right also convinced that they can't win it? I haven't heard the podcast yet; maybe the point of the interview is that classical liberalism is the strongest opponent of the evil of which terrorism is one manifestation. If so, I withdraw my nit.
Or perhaps anon 511 is just glad to hear a liberal on their podcasts; although I think they have done so before.
While listening to Mr. Beinart I was reminded of that scene from Saving Private Ryan when the young corporal, having just been brought-on to interpret for the squad, tries to ingratiate himself with the guys. He talks about a book he intends to write about the comradery of soldiers in war. The men simply walk past him, until he comes to Mellish who glares at him and barks: 'get away from me you fancy f*ck'. Mellish later dies because of the corporals inaction.
One thing I noticed about Mr. Beinart's comments on the War on Terror is that he thinks we should basically just sit and defend our country and "detain" or "contain" the enemy forces much like we did Stalin and Mao.
What he did not say (nor did you nor your hubby state) is that while the USA was detaining/containing Stalin and Mao, they were systematically slaughtering their own people by death squads, gulags, or starvation. Also, there were communists in the US State Department while Americans just sat around and watched.
How is "sitting by and watching" a Liberal attribute? I thought Libs wanted to end social injustice?? I suppose this only applies to our country alone. We don't want to get involved in another country's "civil war" now, do we?
That attitude and sort of ignorance of how the enemy works is exactly why it is dangerous to have Liberals in control of this country. They refuse to understand our enemy. They still believe Sept. 11th was somehow our fault.
"Just sit around and wait for the attack....and then do something about it. Afterall, we don't want to offend other countries." Seems to be their attitude.
No thanks.
I haven't read the book, but from Beinart's statement of his thesis, and answers to the follow-up questions, it sounds like he's primarily interested in providing the Democrats with a workable campaign narrative for 2008. Which is fine, but should not be confused for a security policy platform.
His arguments strike me as an attempt to repackage the staples of a Liberal domestic agenda as Security Policy.
Also the idea that the US must earn the right to defend itself will be offensive to most, in his words, 'down scale' people.
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I suspect that this is the Rand study that he'd alluded to - http://www.rand.org/news/press.05/02.18.html .
And at this point the CoD's (Community of Democracies) primary ambition seems to be to establish itself as a caucus at the UN.
I've been following Beinart's thread since his New Republic article (with followup and a good point by Christopher Hitchens via Tigerhawk). This podcast shows to me that Mr. Beinart is intermittently good, disappointing to me in places but overall making sense to me and not full of it.
Some of my quibbles or other points:
--countering Joe McCarthy is anticommunism? Maybe, but the charge needs to be pretty precise to understand what was going on there (COINTELPRO versus witch hunting, both real at the time).
--Beinart says "The US doesn't participate at all" in UN peacekeeping. As a military guy I certainly don't see it that way. First submarine officer I met with a Purple Heart got hit by a mine as part of an international team in Bangladesh; we've got significant American blue hat presence in many places, and ohbytheway there's a UN command running a lot of what's happening in Korea. Beinart is almost getting to a good point but oversimplifies and comes across as uninformed. (One short explanation: guys on UN duty get employment and a daily stipend from the UN that is not trivial to a soldier making $300 a year. This is a powerful incentive to have the Lebanon-Israel border guys speaking Hindi, and why our folks in 1990's Somalia were fighting alongside coalitions of fighters from poorer countries. It's also a powerful incentive to keep troops forever once the situation is stable.)
--It sure is nice to have your podcast be the type that allows people to talk a little. Beinart, like Austin Bay, seemed trained to jam as many ideas and concepts in as short a time as possible. I wonder if they'll slow down their speech when they get used to your format.
--I would greatly enjoy seeing Beinart and Ralph Peters discuss how the United States acts in war. I say this because Peters makes the point that in war, we can do very ugly things, and come back and be good people afterward. This matches Victor Davis Hanson's observation that the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, with the atrocities performed by both sides, did not result in a permanent change of level of morality a few decades later. It's a difficult concept to swallow and invites slippery slope arguments, though. This would be an entertaining discussion, I think.
I was interested in his comments on deterrence: how we were able to deter very bad regimes like the USSR and China, even when they were led by (certainly at points during their reigns) psychopaths like Stalin and Mao. I would have liked a question regarding differences between deterrence then and now.
What about psychology? I think that without the threat of total extermination the psychology changes. With the Soviet Union, we knew that we could be totally destroyed and that we could totally destroy them in turn. There were no nasty just war questions of proportionality that would pop up in a war with, say, Iran. If Iran destroys a city, do we destroy one and only one in return? Or do we commit genocide, and wipe out the Persian people in retaliation? Whatever the answer, there is doubt, doubt that was lacking with Soviet Russia.
Then there is the question of determining who attacked us. If a nuke would have exploded in 1960, we'd have known to a certainty where it came from. Now, we'd have to deal with thorny little questions of evidence. What is our standard of proof? Preponderance of the evidence? Beyond a reasonable doubt?
Anyway, I think there are a number of differences between then and now that may make deterrence more difficult.
At 6:50 in the podcast, Beinart says "I don't think that Democrats and liberals want us to win in Iraq, lose in Iraq...". Just a misstatement by someone rapidly talking, or Freudian slip? Heh. :)
Honestly, he doesn't really think that more words will convince people the left really supports the US, does he? After the years of attacks on Bush? After Michael Moore? After ex-Vice President Al Gore denounced Bush's administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists" just the other day? At the Hay Festival of the Guardian, that anti-American rag? In Great Britain, a foreign country yet? Beinart must really think we're stupid. (And it scares me yet again to think that that nut Gore was so close to becoming president.)
Beinart talks so fast that he's just plain annoying. I saw him interviewing someone from National Review on C-SPAN and I just couldn't stand him. I had to change channels.
In the podcast I heard so much utter BS up to the point above that I was too disgusted to listen to the rest. Just another steaming serving of the same leftist BS we've heard for years.
Once again I have to applaud Glenn and Helen for showing some courage in their choice of an interview subject: they interviewed a reasonably articulate guy who they don't agree with at all. But it wasn't as courageous as they could have been, because Beinart sounds touchy-feely and argues everything in terms that Glenn and Helen are completely prepared to refute. In the end, he's a pushover. I got too irritated and didn't listen to the whole interview.
I think that Beinart is correct that only a liberal can win the war on
terrorism, but not for Beinart's reason. The real reason is that, as Stephen
Colbert said, reality has a liberal bias. In particular, everyone who sees the
writing on the wall in Iraq has cast his lot with the liberals, regardless of
his Republican, conservative, or military credentials. Colin Powell, Anthony
Zinni, Pat Robertson, etc. are all liberals on the issue of Iraq. Having
concluded that the war in Iraq is illogical and unwinnable, they imply (despite themselves) that Bush's foreign policy is somewhere between incompetent and
impeachable. The implication is sufficiently anti-Bush that it can only be
called liberal.
On that note, Helen asked an interesting question in the interview: What can Democrats or liberals do to dispel the impression that they want the United States to lose the war in Iraq? I don't agree with Beinart's answer. There is nothing that liberals can do to dispel that impression among people in denial.
The situation reminds me of a medical story. There was a basketball player, Tony Penny, who was warned by his doctor, Milton Sands, that he had cardiomyopathy and should quit professional athletics. Penny said, basically, that Sands wanted him to lose. He even sued Sands for $1 million for disrupting his career. The suit fizzled. Not long afterward, Penny died of a heart attack in the middle of a professional game in England. Sands summed it up very nicely: "I like being right, but I sure don't like to be right this way."
That is exactly what 99% of the American critics of the war in Iraq -- now about 60% of the voters -- would say about themselves. We all like being right, but we don't like to be proven right by watching America lose a war. If I had wanted that, I would have voted for George W. Bush.
Afghanistan is a totally different story. The war in Afghanistan is logical and winnable -- I totally supported Bush's terrorism policy when it was just Afghanistan. But Afghanistan is not an easy operation. The war in Iraq is now going so badly that the United States might lose Afghanistan too.
A much better interviewee on the subject of Iraq would be General William Odom. Odom is tough as nails, unlike Peter Beinart. It would be nice to see Glenn and Helen give him a try.
I keep waiting for the Kuperberg podcast. I'm sure it will be as enlightening as his comments here, and as popular.
Very interesting, but Beinart was very unconvincing when you asked him about democrats who seem to want us to lose. Saying there is "anger at George Bush" is no answer. That anger is part of why they want us to lose.
However, in fairness to Professor Reynolds and Mr. Ingemi, I’m sure you could also find this in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi Baathists, the Ottomans during World War I, etc. There are only so many ways to be dangerous authoritarian psychopaths. It’s really not right to expect Reynolds and Ingemi to come up with anything new.
Although Dr. Helen might open up quite a few more avenues of inquiry in this regard.
Let's all watch and see where this all goes...
Glenn continues with the topic of containment today, referring to the interview with Beinart. He notes, correctly, that the White House is finally trying the more level-headed approach with Iran. He asks two useful questions:
The question is, will it work?
It might not. The point is not that containment is all that great, it's that it is often the least bad option. Again, an analogy with heart disease. If a patient has heart disease, you don't always want to jump into his or her chest with knives and fix everything. Sometimes that's necessary, but sometimes it can worsen the problems that it's intended to solve. Sometimes the wise path is to chip away at the problem without a bodily invasion.
And if so, would it work as well if it weren't for the presence of U.S. troops on both sides of Iran?
Containing Iran would have worked a lot better without the invasion of Iraq. The US Army is getting spent in Iraq. The Iraqi government is now pro-Iranian. The Shiite militias, who amount to a shadow government, are even more pro-Iranian. Iran has been emboldened. This is a main reason that the invasion of Iraq is illogical, even retrograde, as part of the conflict with political Islam. It was a pro-Islam invasion, even though the Commander in Chief insists that it wasn't.
The invasion of Afghanistan also doesn't help contain Iran, but for a variety of reasons, it doesn't much work against containment either.
It ALWAYS amazes me that Kuperberg----with NO experience in the Armed Forces at any level---pontificates on the subject of warfare, strategy, and tactics. He has no relevant background, other than (I hope) reading material of his own choosing and prejudice in between teaching classes and doing math research. More to the point, I do not sense that Kuperberg believes he can ever be wrong. This is ironic, since most leftists (like Kuperberg) excoriate Bush for not be willing to admit it when "he is wrong." Pure projection.
I don't know if Kuperberg is right that we are "losing" any wars. Neither does he. I do know that if people keep paying attention to bad things and NEVER highlighting successes, it would sure look like losing. Why is it that discussing any success in Iraq is deemed "political" or worse still, "patriotic"----but screaming headlines of anything bad in Iraq is "journalism" or "speaking truth to power"?
I shouldn't criticize Kuperberg, I suppose. Katie Couric is nothing but a shallow parakeet, and yet she has been exalted to Chief Newscaster. Kuperberg is much better informed (and less opinionated) than Our Katie.
Flame if you like, folks, but none of us are there with boots on the ground, few of us have military experience, and practically none of us have training in strategy, tactics, or the history of warfare.
This war is not being fought in Iraq, or Afghanistan. It is being fought in newsrooms.
Sorry for the downer.
Keep up the good work » » »
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