Someone Who Gets It

Paul Berman, author of the brilliant book Terror and Liberalism has an excellent piece in The New York Times on why Iraq is so crucial to the war on terrorism. Berman understands the reasoning for the war in Iraq more clearly than most, and his piece is absolutely brilliant A sample:

The war in Iraq may end up going well or catastrophically, but either way, this war has always been central to the broader war on terror. That is because terror has never been a matter of a few hundred crazies who could be rounded up by the police and special forces. Terror grows out of something larger — an enormous wave of political extremism.

Berman sets up the article with this observation, and it is perhaps one of the most crucial elements of the argument. Getting rid of al-Qaeda is not enough – it is a symptomatic treatment that leaves the real malady behind. The source of terrorism isn’t one group – it’s the cultural failure of the Muslim world to adapt to modernity. It is the violent backlash against this failure that is driving terrorism worldwide, and treating terrorism like a law enforcement problem does nothing to prevent this tide of terrorism.

Iraq is part of a much larger picture that has nothing to do with oil, Halliburton, or domestic American politics. It has everything to do with the absolute necessity of ending the cesspool of terrorism in the Middle East. The people of the Middle East are kept poor, misinformed, undereducated, and violent by rulers who deliberately use racism and xenophobia as a way of blunting dissent. In those places that have been largely free of such influences for a long time (as in the Kurdish north of Iraq), the people have assembled a much more sensible form of government and society than those areas still under the bootheel of tyranny.

That is why Iraq is so important. Iraq is a place where democracy can thrive if given the right conditions and sufficient time. The Iraqi people are well-educated by Middle Eastern standards. They’re relatively secular. They have seen firsthand that the US isn’t some Great Satan, but someone willing to keep them safe and help them gain independence, prosperity, and security. Iraq is a catalyst for change in the Middle East – and change is exactly what is needed. Yet this reaction won’t happen overnight. It could be years before the fruits of Iraqi liberation grow across the Middle East. Yet that in no way diminishes or invalidates the importance of what is being done now.

Berman notes that even though he believes the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq were "depressingly bungled" (a charge I strong disagree with) that the invasion of Iraq still was the right choice to have made. He also faults Bush (and rightly so) for not pressing the humanitarian case about the WMD case.

On this, I think Berman is dead on. Bush was basing his WMD information on data which appeared solid, but was clearly incomplete. On the other hand, we knew that Saddam Hussein was killing his own people. The Bush Administration never convincingly stated the humanitarian case for war until late February – far too late to eclipse WMDs as the predominant causus belli. It would have also prevented WMDs from becoming a way of disingeniously arguing that the war was simply a war of plunder or colonialism rather than liberation and democratization.

Berman argues that moderate Democrats need to make the case where Bush has not. In many ways I think that’s a laudable goal. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit naive. Berman assumes that there are enough moderate pro-war Democrats to change the face of the Democratic Party. Instead, what we’ve seen time and time again is that the anti-war extremists are firmly in control of the party at the grass-roots level and beyond.

It’s sad that there aren’t more like Berman, liberals who understand that the war in Iraq was a liberal war in the truest sense of the word. Unfortunately the facile partisanship of Bush hatred has ovewhelmed the Democrats, and the chances of Berman’s advice being heeded is slim.