Anti-Climacus

THE DECENT LEFT: Add Richard Just to the list of people who get it. Does this qualify as a Democrat taking a stand on an issue, David?

"These arguments are almost all well-trodden territory at this advanced stage in the debate. But it is this last point -- the sudden puniness of the liberal worldview as embodied by its prescription for Iraq -- that saddens me most, and that liberals have grappled with least. Think of the major policy advances of the last century. The New Deal, the Great Society, the civil-rights movement -- all were fueled by a moralistic ambition and a faith in the power of humans to repair their world through action and ideas. There have never been any great liberal strains in American life that were fueled by a desire to just let things be. Think of the domestic causes championed by liberals at this magazine and elsewhere: public financing of campaigns, measures to conserve the environment, universal health care -- they are all ambitious in the great progressive tradition. No one at this magazine would ever say that corporate funding of campaigns is probably a detriment to American politics, but perhaps the best solution is to leave the system as is -- by meddling, we only risk making it worse. What's more, the American left has a rich tradition of ambition in the international arena. It was a liberal president who proposed the League of Nations and thus created an entire school of foreign-policy thought. It was a liberal president who stared down conservative isolationists and began preparing America -- years before Pearl Harbor -- to help rescue the Jews of Europe from genocide and the world from the greatest evil it had ever seen. It was a liberal president who invoked the lesson of that war to argue for intervention in countless conflicts during the 1990s. And it is liberals who have, over and over again, called attention to human-rights abuses, injustices, killings and torture throughout the world for decades upon decades -- and urged their government to do something, anything about them.

But here we are, on the brink of an attempt to remove one of recent history's most odious men from the world scene, and liberals have surveyed the situation and asked, "How can we find any rationale not to get involved?" They have noted that Saddam Hussein may be evil but that there are plenty of other evil people in the world. Or that conservatives are in it for the oil. Or that there are risks involved. Or that containment could prevent the dictator from ever using nuclear weapons.

All those arguments may well be true.

But not one of those arguments will lead to the liberation of a frighteningly Orwellian society based on fear and torture. Not one of them will protect the citizens of the Middle East's democratic nations against future attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Not one of them could lead to a beachhead -- however small -- of democracy in the Arab world. Not one of them will help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. Not one of them will allow America to take initial steps toward addressing the "root causes" of terror. Not one of them is worthy of the deeply moral traditions of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And not one of them will lead to progress in the Middle East -- yet these objections are apparently all most "progressives" have to offer."