My liberal political science professor brother Jeff was one of the panel members at the Howard Dean/Richard Perle debate in Portland. While googling for reactions to the debate, he came upon the thread at democraticunderground.com, which was basically a cheering squad for the nut who screamed and threw his shoe at Perle. Jeff had this to say about it:
What was interesting to me about the democraticunderground.com threads was that a lot of it was coming from people who were at the event (paid $20 to get in) and, even so, were gung ho about the action of this very obviously deranged guy that you would think they would be at pains to disassociate themselves from.
No kidding. After the debate, Jeff and I had our own exchange of views, about the debate and about my post previous to this one. Jeff’s comments are in italics. Mine are in regular text:
I enjoyed the debate. I thought your questions were excellent, much better than the commie in the bow tie. I think you’re right that those who expect Dean to be a disaster as DNC chairman are going to be disappointed. I also think you’re right that Richard Perle was pretending to be a much nicer, bipartisan guy than he really is, but you can hardly blame him, surrounded as he was by so much hatred and contempt. They both did quite well. Perle is obviously smarter than Dean and had the advantage of being on the right side of the issues, but Dean did a good job. God forbid he should ever become President, but then God forbid that Perle should either, not that he wants the job.
The most interesting thing to me was that Perle thinks we should have pulled out as soon as we got rid of Saddam. I think he’s wrong, but it’s quite surprising and interesting that he thinks that.
As I understand it, Perle wanted to invade with a force of only about 45,000 troops, which he thought was enough to topple Saddam (probably right about that), then immediately airlift in Ahmed Chalabi and install him as the head of a new interim gov’t. Then we would leave within a matter of months and turn Iraq over to Chalabi and whatever forces he could pull together to deal with the subsequent situation. He assumed Chalabi would get broad support for having participated in the destruction of Saddam and be able to create stability. This seems altogether delusional to me. But it gives Perle a convenient position today. We were right to invade, but the Bush administration screwed up by not following my sage advice. Therefore, all the stuff that has gone wrong in Iraq has nothing to do with the policy I advocated. It is a result of Bush having screwed up.
I thought Perle was strongest when he was challenging Dean to get the Dems to take national security seriously instead of just trying to solve their PR problem. I am always suspicious of politicians who have very strongly established positions or records on something that is widely disrespected, and they conclude that they have a communications problem. No, over time people get a pretty good sense of what you are about. The public has a pretty good understanding that the Dems haven’t taken national security issues seriously for 30 years and so only strong Democrats or people who don’t care about foreign policy still vote Democratic. I liked what Dean had to say about foreign policy, but I think the Dems need to show that they are really serious about an alternative strategy. The only candidate that I thought could be taken seriously in this sense was Wesley Clark. Joe Biden maybe is another.
I thought Perle’s answer to my second question to him about “soft power” was just outrageous, though, and I was happy to see Dean nail him about it. Joseph Nye has never even remotely suggested that “soft power” ought to displace “hard power” so that we could avoid all the tough decisions. His point is that “soft power” is a very important part of our overall power and has to be cultivated and reinforced at the same time that we maintain and deepen “hard” forms of power. Every serious foreign policy practitioner recognizes that this dimension of power is real and important. My question to Perle was just how important do you think “soft power” is and what impact has the war on Iraq had on it? There’s a perfectly reasonable neo-con answer to that that would assign less importance to “soft” power than Nye does and insist that the short term hit to our prestige from Bush’s policies to date will be more than offset by goodwill down the road when our hardline policies prove successful. Instead he completely ignored the question I asked, completely distorted Nye’s position, and tried to ridicule those who believe that “soft” power can be a substitute for real strength when we face terrorists. Dean was absolutely right to say no Democratic leader has ever suggested any such thing and that what he is advocating is that we need to be concerned about BOTH.
What was especially irritating about it is that Perle knows very well what Nye’s point about soft power is and was intentionally distorting it so he could attack a straw man. Interestingly, the first time Nye came forward in a strong way with his concept was in a book that was directed against those in the late 1980’s who claimed America was in decline. Nye said, sure, others will develop military power and our purely military superiority may erode some. Sure, our economic hegemony is bound to deteriorate some as other economies develop strongly. But we aren’t in decline because we have such a large amount of “soft” power that no other country can come even close to approximating. If we manage that “soft” power well in conjunction with our “hard” resources of economic and military strength, our hegemony can last through the whole 21st century. Nye is anything but some sort of anti-American softie, and Perle knows that perfectly well but chose to go for the easy debater point. Dean’s response was just devastating if you know what Nye actually stands for and paid attention to my original question.
You’re right about Perle booting the question on soft power, and I think his plan for what we should have done in Iraq is wacko. The chances of Iraq becoming a stable, unified democracy have always been slim, although they’re looking a little better these days, but if Perle’s plan had been followed, they would have been practically nonexistent. Of course he doesn’t care about that, and disingenuously pretends that he does.
I saw your latest post. This is the self-delusion of all reactionaries. Religious fundamentalists all say they aren’t reactionary; their churches have just left the old true religion. Reactionaries are people who return to dead ideas after their inapplicability to changed circumstances has become obvious to people of a progressive bent.
This sounds like a very good description of the current Democratic Party to me. You think it describes Bush Republicans?
To say that, on affirmative action for example, you are just returning to the good old liberal days before the civil rights acts and Richard Nixon (whose administration was the first to issue regulations instituting affirmative action) is another way of saying you have renounced your previous judgment about these things.
Not at all. I’m saying that affirmative action may have been a good idea at the time, but that it has outlived its usefulness due to its “inapplicability to changed circumstances.”
You once upon a time left JFK on many of these issues, too. Now you have become a backslider. All of which is not to say that the Democrats and liberals and progressives may not have gotten some things wrong and JFK may have been on sounder ground in 1960 than Teddy is on some issues in 2005. But it gets tiresome to hear conservatives say that they are really just liberals from 1960, and anyone who has moved forward from 1960 must be some sort of radical extremist. Perle was playing that game in the debate, and it’s just silly. Just face it. You have become a conservative, and you need to develop a defense of that. That you happen to agree with JFK on something is a pretty thin reed of a defense of anything.
You think the Democrats have moved forward from the days of JFK? I think they’ve gone off the rails. You’re right that I have become a conservative relative to my previous incarnation, but not, I think, relative to the pre-Vietnam Democrats. In any kind of sane framework, I’m a moderate liberal, and moderate liberals have been marginalized in the Democratic Party, and are being forced to vote for Republicans.