It's not that morality plays no role for neoliberals: it's an input, a variable, a side issue--it can take on any number of forms... except that of an actual moral imperative.
And Mark added:
The whole point was neoliberals use a different decision making process than progressives. That is true regardless if they end up agreeing with your final conclusion or not.
However, as I argued in an earlier diary focused on economic policy, "The sensible center outraged by the 'sensible center'", there's a further difference between neoliberals who have a firm grasp on certain significant historical facts--such as Brad DeLong and Matt Miller in that case--and those that do not--such as President Obama--those who are ultimately creatures of whatever political process they find themselves embedded within. For Obama, all facts are eventually fungible, as a too-small stimulus becomes "just right", a cowardly, mean-spirited, obstructionist senator (Democratic or Republicans) becomes a great statesman (or woman) aand whatever war needs fighting next automatically becomes a "smart war" even though all the evidence of history tells us that it is as dumb as eternity is long.
The neoliberal way is one that "goes meta" by treating everything as a process to be analyzed considering all the variables (including moral considerations), tweaking them here and there, and then coming up with a supposedly "optimum" solution. At least that's the aspiration. This contrasts sharply with leftist traditions that "go meta" by adopting religious, philosophical or scientific frameworks that are inherently skeptical of and stand apart from the everyday discourse used to discuss a given subject.
I had meant to write a diary about all that today or tomorrow. But then came this segment on The Racel Maddow Show yesteday, and I think it's sufficient to simply state the above as a framework for viewing this segment, and in particular, the section that I've quoted below. It demonstrates in tragic specificity how this double difference between left/progressive analysis and Obama's entirely relativist form of neoliberalism:
MADDOW: A week before Congress passed the joint resolution authorizing war against Iraq in 2003, an Illinois state senator stood up before an anti-war rally in Chicago. He described Saddam Hussein as a bad guy who the world and the Iraqi people would be better off without. But then, State Senator Obama said this, quote, "I also know that Saddam poses no direct threat, no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength and that in concert with the international community, he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dust bin of history." "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require an occupation a U.S. occupation of undetermined length at undetermined costs with undetermined consequences." "I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst better than the best impulses of Arab world and strengthen the recruitment of al-Qaeda." "I`m not opposed to all wars," he said, "I`m opposed to dumb wars."
The number of U.S. troops in Iraq since that young state senator became president of the United States has dropped by 90,000 and will apparently drop to zero by this time next year. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, however, since that young state senator became president has tripled. Joining us now is Andrew Bacevich. He is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He retired at the rank of colonel after 23 years in the United States Army. And he`s author of the new book, " Washington Rules: America`s Path to Permanent War." Professor Bacevich, thanks very much for being here.
ANDREW BACEVICH, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me on the program.
MADDOW: Do you think there`s really no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the biggest most important issues in national security?
BACEVICH: The differences are far smaller than one would conclude from all of the rhetoric and the hype. I`ve long believed that if you`re looking for the big truths about American politics, about the way Washington works, you don`t look at the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. You look for the continuities. And I think when it comes to the national security policy, going all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War, the continuities are quite evident and very strong and continue down to the present day with the president who promised he was going to change the way Washington works.
MADDOW: And that, to you, boils down to Washington rules, this credo that America has to determine sort of the means by which the rest of the world is allowed to run and that we need to enforce that by global military dominance. That means having troops everywhere all over the world, being able to project force all over everywhere in the world and being repeatedly almost in a recidivist way, being interventionist all the time?
BACEVICH: Exactly right. I mean, I was really struck by that quotation from State Senator Obama who, at that point, is not a creature of Washington and who, in that quotation, reflected, I think, a real skepticism about the way we do our national security policy. That skepticism today with President Obama has long since vanished. I mean, you have to be struck by the fact that President Obama has followed a path in Afghanistan that is probably identical to the path that Sen. McCain would have followed had we elected Sen. McCain president. There is no real change when it comes to national security policy. And as someone who voted for the president and admires the president, I have to say that that absence of change is not only disappointing. I think it may even qualify as tragic.
That's what happens when your highest principles are just variables in an equation--or rather, when your highest principle is to adjust the variables in all your equations to fit the political environment of the moment.
This past week I covered the bold testimony of Ret. Cpl. Rick Reyes before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the comparison between Reyes's anti-war testimony and a young John Kerry alerting the nation to the horrors of the Vietnam War 38 years ago. I certainly wasn't the only one to connect the dots between Vietnam and the current quagmire in Afghanistan, as you can see from this video with excerpts of Andrew Bacevich's testimony.
Bacevich, a retired Colonel who served in Vietnam and is now professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, has become one of the most vocal critics of the "Long War," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates dubbed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paraphrasing General Bruce Palmer's account of the Vietnam War, Bacevich said that our country is once again "mired in a protracted war of an indeterminate nature, with no foreseeable end to the US commitment."
The Long War, as Bacevich exclaimed, has become the second most expensive war in US history (second only to WWII). Now that we our facing trillions in debt, Bacevich urged Congress to question the reasons for escalation in Afghanistan. "We just urgently need to ask ourselves whether or not the purposes of the long war are achievable, necessary, and affordable," Bacevich claimed, "and Afghanistan is a subset of that longer set of questions." Congress needs to address questions of cost before they vote on President Obama's $83 billion war funding bill in the coming weeks. And the most direct way to follow Bacevich's lead and confront Congress is by calling your Representatives as soon as possible, urging them not to vote until we have more oversight hearings like these, and more questions answered.
What happened today in Washington was, as Senator Russ Feingold called it, "historic." Thirty-eight years nearly to the day when a young John Kerry shocked the nation with his fiery anti-Vietnam war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rick Reyes, a former US Marine Corporal, delivered an equally puissant testimony in which he expressed his disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan. How appropriate Kerry should be sitting directly across from Reyes as Committee Chairman, listening attentively as Congress heard one of the first major voices of dissent on this war.
The son of Mexican immigrants who joined the Marines to escape a violent gang life in Los Angeles, Reyes served as an infantry rifleman in Afghanistan and Iraq. He upheld his duty to serve our country honorably, and immediately after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan "with the conviction of fighting for justice and the American way." All of that changed when Reyes realized US military forces faced the impossible task of fighting militant Taliban members who blended in with the local Afghan population, routinely resulting in the injuries or deaths of innocent civilians.
There's no question Andrew Bacevich has been one of the staunchest critics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In part one of Rethink Afghanistan, from which this clip is excerpted, Bacevich called the 17,000 additional troops President Obama has committed "a drop in the bucket." And in a recent conversation with me, Bacevich said Obama put the cart before the horse by escalating the war before finishing his policy review. So I was surprised when Bacevich, a Boston University International Relations professor and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, told me we wouldn't see congressional oversight hearings anytime soon.
Bacevich's pragmatic assessment stemmed from the fact that Afghanistan is deemed part of the global war on terror that Defense Secretary Gates has called "the Long War." And Bacevich is certainly correct in the sense that we haven't seen much of an institutionalized effort to challenge the policymakers, monitor the military agencies involved, or inform the public. That said, I remain entirely optimistic about bringing about congressional oversight hearings (and I'll explain why in the extended post).
Over the weekend, President Obama confirmed what many Get Afghanistan Right bloggers, myself included, have been saying for months: resolving the war in Afghanistan will require negotiating with elements of the Taliban. 17,000 more troops will be "a drop in the bucket," as Andrew Bacevich has said, if the US doesn't engage in regional diplomacy.
Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban "should be explored," an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.
Granted, the Obama administration has acknowledged that it is far more complicated to reach out to moderate Taliban factions than it was to negotiate with nationalist Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq. Yet the fact that the Obama administration is pursuing this diplomatic strategy at all is a step in the right direction to Rethink Afghanistan. As The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss notes in his must-read piece on the Taliban, we should have been talking with them all along.
Last night saw one of the most amazing programs in the history of Bill Moyers Journal. Really, one of most amazing programs Moyers has done, period, in all his years on television. His guest for the hour was Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired colonel with 23 years in the Army, and author of several books, including The Limits Of Power: The End Of American Exceptionalism, just released this week. Here's a distillation of their conversation:
As I suggested in my diary earlier today, "We're So Lame" , the Democrats would be much better off scrapping their "national security" lineup full of disgraced Iraq War hawks, and replacing the whole lot with Bacevich. More reasons why on the flip--and a suggestion about how we might change the direction of our country.
STATE BLOGS
