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One thing that has struck me about the Iraq debate in the last week is the way conservatives have gone on the attack against anti-war liberals and leftists by arguing that the peace movement is protecting a dictator that anyone concerned with human rights (i.e. liberals) should abhor. David Brooks was most forceful on this point on last Friday’s NewsHour:

You’ve got 100,000 people marching in the streets and they are, in effect, marching to preserve a fascist regime. I know that’s not what they want. They want to prevent war, which is a legitimate thing to do. But they are never asked why are you preserving a fascist regime, why don’t you want the tide of democracy, which is to spread through Latin America and Central America, to spread to the Arab part of the world …I just want somebody to say to those people and I wanted to go down there and say here’s a regime that has professional rape teams in their military where they rape women and send the videotapes to the fathers. Here’s a regime that imprisons mothers and babies in the next cell and forces them to watch their babies starve to death. You know, what is the defense?

At the risk of abetting a fascist regime and its torture, I would retort that there are several good cases for the left’s defense: 1) As atrocious as these things are, I’m not sure they’re worse than genocide in Rwanda or people chopping off limbs with machetes in Sierra Leone, yet we didn’t lift a finger in those instances when despots could have been toppled with less cost; 2) The left doesn’t trust the administration to bring about democracy. Maybe this isn’t fair, as Afghanistan does seem on the road to more democratic rule, but the episode with the Venezualan coup shows that economics and ideology often do trump democracy; 3) Similarly, the left bristles a bit when the same conservatives who balked against NATO involvement in Yugoslavia now say the left doesn’t care about evil dictators, or when conservatives scream about chemical warfare against Iran when that took place during the Reagan administration with the U.S.’s willingness to look the other way; 4) the left is suspicious of media and punditry demonization of one person as a convenient way to turn sight away from naked U.S. self-interest: just think of Noriega (and is anyone concerned these days with Panama after its “liberation”?); 5) in general, the left doesn’t trust the current administration to act on principal rather than crude economic and geo-political self-interest.

The left is right to insist on multi-lateralism but in my view they’re insisting on the wrong kind of multi-lateralism. Yes, the UN inspections are a good brake on the rush to war, but maybe what’s needed - and what we should be demanding - is a clearer formulation from the U.S. and Europe of the goals of international governance. Is the problem with Iraq biological/chemical/nuclear weapons, a general bellicosity, torture of its citizens, or dictatorial government? The right (and even center’s) answer is “all of the above”, but that’s not good enough. As Brian Whitaker notes in the Guardian, this is an engineered crisis. “So we may get the evidence in due course, but not necessarily before the war starts. The Iraqi affair has gone on for 12 years but now time is running out. Why is it running out? Because Mr Wolfowitz says it is.”
Taking each issue separately it’s hard to find consistency with our approach. (see Michael Kinsley’s disussion of this in Slate)

Granted, foreign policy is about realpolitik posing as principle, but here the principals are so muddied by the inconsistencies that it’s not clear how we’re going to accomplish any of the broader goals we want - peace, democracy, and an attenuation of terrorism. It’s insulting to hear Republicans talk about the U.N.’s lack of backbone after they have consistently withheld U.N. dues and ignored any attempt for international governance of the last decade and a half. On every front - chemical warfare, nuclear proliferation, human rights - we need to be working with Europe and East Asia (not to exclude the rest of the world, but the industrialized nations will be providing the economic and military muscle for any international governance) to formulate unified and enforceable responses to these problems. Democrats should be willing to make a deal with the Republicans - we can support this war only if you use it as an occasion to forge anti-weapon and pro-human-rights treaties. Otherwise, your purported humanism is a sham.