Liberal Hawks

Niall Ferguson’s piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times notes the fundamental paradox of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy: they generally love foreign interventions, wars, and the use of American power to do good and spread democracy . . . but not in Iraq. In other words, if the country in question has no resources, no civilizational fellow travellers, and no conceivable impact on America’s national interests, liberals support the intervention; our motives in that case are presumably pure. Consider the liberal ardor for interventions in the Balkans, Kosovo, Rwanda, and now Darfur. At the same time, a war (and now a proposed withdrawal) that would undoubtedly have great human rights consequences for the Iraqis are treated in a completely cavalier fashion. Ferguson writes:

Obama’s call for rapid withdrawal from Iraq would make some sense if he were an isolationist. But he’s not. His memoir-cum-manifesto, “The Audacity of Hope,” insists that, out of both self-interest and altruism, the U.S. has no alternative but to “help make the world more secure.” Looking back on the Rwandan genocide, he reflects that “an international show of force … might have stopped the slaughter.”

Obama also has accused the Bush administration of doing too little to stop the murderous policies of the Sudanese government toward the people of Darfur. In an article in December 2005, he went so far as to urge the deployment of “a U.N.- or NATO-led force.”

Wait a second. Here are two civil wars, each likely to spiral out of control. But in one (Sudan), Obama recommends intervention, while in the other (Iraq), he recommends military withdrawal. Am I missing something?

Ferguson is missing something: the fundamental defining principle of liberalism is the replacement of natural sentiments like love of country, family, and concern for one’s own political community with idealistic and utopian regard for mankind as a whole. As Burke wrote, “This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.” So, if the advance of liberalism requires great expense and loss of life this is not a problem–indeed, it is a kind of asceticism–but great expense in service of one’s countrymen’s security is a scandal. (Recall, setting aside the merits of Iraq as a national security threat, that one of the biggest liberal criticisms of the war was that it was “all about oil, ” in other words it was a scandal that it might have someting to do with one of the world’s most important resources.) After all, why should we live securely when some others will die, but for our humanitarian intervention?

This same background liberalism, shared by both American poltical parties, is why Iraq has turned out so badly. From the start, the war was called a war of liberation and the post-war planning was dominated by rosy scenarios of our troops being welcomed as liberators by nascent democrats. It was inconceivable to Bush and his right-liberal advisors that we should be willing to go to war for revenge and exemplary violence and that the outcome of that war would advance our security primarily by undermining another’s.