Let Your Enemies Crumble

By Peter Beinart

For those of us who mistakely supported the war in Iraq, it is tempting to say we were betrayed by the facts. After all, we backed a war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons he didn't have.

But, in truth, it was not merely our information that proved faulty; it was also our state of mind. In the run-up to war, the Bush Administration repeated one message again and again: Time was running out. "We have every reason to assume the worst," declared President Bush. "Time is not on our side," insisted Dick Cheney.

James Burnham, the most important conservative foreign-policy thinker of the early cold war, called this "the catastrophic point of view." And a half-century before George W. Bush took office, Burnham urged the Truman Administration to embrace it. In the years following World War II, the U.S. already had a nuclear bomb, and the Soviets were getting closer. So Burnham proposed preventive (what Bush would have called "pre-emptive") war--to protect America before it was too late.

Burnham wasn't the only one. The idea that America must act proactively against its enemies, or else grow inexorably weaker, was a staple of the cold war right. "Like the boxer who refuses to throw a punch," warned Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, "the defense-bound nation will be cut down sooner or later." In the 1960s, with China rushing toward the Bomb, preventive war was proposed again.

And once again, American leaders refused. They hewed to containment, a policy premised on a very different mind-set. "The advocates of preventive war with Russia assume that Russia will grow stronger and we will get weaker," argued theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose writing influenced the Truman Administration. "Their calculations are not only strategically mistaken but morally wrong." "NSC-68," which outlined the Truman Administration's cold war strategy, predicted it was Moscow that would eventually falter, because the "idea of freedom" is "peculiarly and intolerably subversive of slavery."

Critics attacked containment as passive. But its architects did not propose that America sit back and await victory. They said America could be patient if it strengthened its democratic allies so their desperation did not push them into the arms of the communists. From that came the Marshall Plan. They said America could be patient if it nurtured alliances based on consent, because such alliances would outlast the Soviet bloc, which was held together by brute force. Thus, NATO. And they said America could be patient abroad if it democratically solved problems at home, something the Soviet Union could not do. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, John F. Kennedy said America's cold war struggle depended on American kids learning science. "Every ... measure ... to improve self-confidence, discipline, moral and community spirit," wrote George Kennan, Truman's head of policy planning, "is a diplomatic victory over Moscow."

It was that deeper argument for containment that war supporters like me neglected in the debate over Iraq. When U.N. inspectors re-entered the country in late 2002, they did not find Saddam growing inexorably stronger; they found a corrupt, isolated regime with an infrastructure degrading to the Stone Age. Had America not gone to war, containing Saddam would have been a diplomatic challenge for years to come. But if containment was taking its toll on the U.S., it was taking an even greater toll on Saddam.

Now America faces Iran, another tyranny apparently seeking nuclear weapons. And again, some hear the clock ticking, with time supposedly on the mullahs' side. No one knows how long the Iranian clerics--widely loathed by their own people-- can hold onto power. And no one in Washington knows how close they actually are to the Bomb. But our ability to endure a standoff requires fostering a stable democracy on Iran's borders so Afghanistan and Iraq become bulwarks against theocracy rather than conduits for it. It requires leading our Western allies by persuasion, not command, once again. And it requires confronting great challenges at home: above all, our dependence on foreign oil. There is no guarantee containment will succeed; there never was. But patience, combined with self- improvement, can be a sign of strength. Panic never is.

Peter Beinart is the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again