MB Civic

By Robert Kuttner  |  June 17, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ARE THE liberals dividing the Democratic Party once more and weakening Democrats’ credibility on defense? Or are they stepping into a leadership vacuum?

The Democrats’ schisms over Iraq were on display at this week’s Take Back America convention in Washington. Senator Hillary Clinton, whose speech to the gathering was mostly applauded, got scattered boos when she declared that it was not “smart strategy” to “set a date certain for troop withdrawal.”

The hawkish Senator Clinton, one senior Democratic strategist observed, is prematurely positioning herself for the 2008 general election. First she has to win her own party’s primaries. At the rate she’s going, she is fast alienating the party’s overwhelmingly antiwar base.

Senator John Kerry quickly differentiated his position from hers. Speaking shortly after Clinton, Kerry won cheers when he pledged to introduce a Senate resolution calling for withdrawal of most troops by the end of 2006 (though several in the audience could be heard muttering words to the effect of, “Where was he when we needed him?”).

Most voters want to end American involvement in Iraq. As in the Vietnam War, the voters are ahead of most politicians. And political debate about defense is finally recovering from the administration’s manipulation of 9/11 trauma.

In Connecticut, Senator Joe Lieberman, a leading Democratic war-hawk, is on the verge of being chased out of his party by antiwar primary challenger Ned Lamont, a political novice. With the primary Aug. 8, polls show Lieberman only barely leading Lamont. The veteran incumbent is seriously talking about quitting the Democratic Party and running as an independent.

When Senate Republicans forced a quick vote Thursday on a withdrawal resolution before Kerry could work with other Democrats on consensus language, only six senators voted for the Republicans’ antiwar language. But that vote drastically understates the pro-withdrawal feeling in the country — and not just among Democrats. A week of upbeat Iraq news — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death, the long-deferred filling of key cabinet posts, a Bush photo-op in Baghdad — doesn’t change the fundamentals.

After a US missile attack killed the Al Qaeda chief in Iraq, White House political adviser Karl Rove lost no time in declaring to a Republican meeting in Manchester, N.H., that if Democrats had had their way, Zarqawi would never have been killed.

In fact, if Democrats had been in charge, we never would have invaded Iraq, and Zarqawi and his fellow international terrorists would never have gone there. As Senator Russ Feingold reminded the Take Back America meeting, two months after 9/11, the Bush State Department’s own website displayed a list of 45 countries where Al Qaeda was active. Iraq was not among them.

Feingold and Kerry both pointed out that the best way to strengthen the Iraqi government, and increase the chances for stability, is to remove the chief lightning rod that is stoking sectarian anger — the American occupation. Even if US troops withdrew, leaving some of them on nearby carriers, strikes against remaining terrorist leaders, of the kind that killed Zarqawi, would still be possible.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s caution, fewer Democratic leaders are now intimidated by Republican catcalls of “cut-and-run.” At stake is far more than presidential jockeying. What’s truly at issue is who has the more realistic conception of how to keep Americans secure, in an age of multiple and complex threats.

Speaking at the same convention, former senator Gary Hart, who cochaired a national commission in the late 1990s on homeland defense and counterterrorism, spoke of the many threats to American national security that far outrank Iraq. These include nuclear proliferation, a genuine menace wrongly displaced by the White House obsession with Iraq; negotiated solutions to nuclear saber-rattling by North Korea and Iran; domestic security bungled by an administration that staffs key offices with cronies and strips National Guard units of first responders to provide troops for Iraq; and other regional threats from Islamist militants, as in Somalia where the administration clumsily backed local tribal warlords — who were just routed by pro-Al Qaeda militants.

Democrats serious about national security are redefining what it means to protect America, and what it means to be a “Defense Democrat.” The dwindling Lieberman wing of the party and its enablers of George W. Bush have had a lock on that label for far too long.

A new generation of threats requires fresh thinking about real security and,in the spirit of tough realist liberals like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman,and John Kennedy, credible leadership from Democrats. Belatedly, we just may get it.