Peter Beinart, on staff at the New Republic, has been struggling to persuade his fellow Democrats to adopt a more coherent and muscular foreign policy. In this piece in the Washington Post, he calls Congressional Democrats out for their disgraceful behavior when the Iraqi Prime Minister came to address Congress.
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.
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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid demanded that Maliki eat his words or be disinvited from addressing Congress. "Your failure to condemn Hezbollah's aggression and recognize Israel's right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East," wrote Reid and fellow Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Charles E. Schumer on July 24.
How, exactly, publicly humiliating Maliki and making him look like an American and Israeli stooge would enhance his "leadership" was never explained in the missive. But of course Reid's letter wasn't really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that's George W. Bush's problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and thus pandering to Jewish voters.
Surely disengagement from Iraq, let alone a successful disengagement, depends on the success of the Iraqi government. And surely, given the forces churning inside his country, he cannot afford to be seen as a puppet of the U.S., or as pro-Israel. Democrats who have complained frequently that we should not impose our values on Iraqis now want to impose them all the more. This is the worst sort of partisanship. Of course the Democrats don't want the insurgents to win in Iraq. But they don't care about that nearly as much as they care about pandering to voters at home and humiliating Republicans in the next election.
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