Rogue States & Failed States

Something like an enunciation of Democratic foreign policy concerning terrorism is floating around the left half of the blogosphere. The central tenet is a concentration on terrorist groups and a recognition that their relationship to states is not generally given to cooperation. I made this point in mid September in a comment to a reader in the context of a response to the reader's assertion that the number of terrorists is finite:

Whereas the Nazi ideology, potency, and potential lethality was inextricably linked to the German state calling for a war of states to defeat it, the war on terrorism is different in significant ways that require differentiated responses. The terrorists are now and have been geographically decentralized since the end of major combat in Afghanistan and not analogously connected to a state since then either. It was wise and necessary to take out the Taliban for the same reason as it was to do likewise to the Dritten Reich. We no longer have the luxury of such large targets. Nazi ideology died (in any important sense) with the German state. Islamic fundamentalism did not die with the Taliban because it does not require (although they would certainly like to have) the machinery of a state. It required just five people who wanted to kill Americans to climb into an aircraft.

The Republican response to terrorism is to attack states. In short, Democrats go straight to the source of terrorism while Republicans go to what they consider the long-term underlying factors.[ As a sidenote, I think we need to think more about these long-term factors in the light of the fact that most al-Qaeda are well-educated and even Westernized. See the spiked-online article Meet the Al Qaeda Archetype I quoted from in early September for this.]

A consequence of this difference in perspective is that Republicans are liable to advocate policies that Democrats believe to be the exact opposite of the country's best interest. Josh Marshall out of the Atlantic:

A key assumption shared by almost all Democratic foreign-policy hands is that by themselves the violent overthrow of a government and the initiation of radical change from above almost never foster democracy, an expanded civil society, or greater openness. "If you have too much change too quickly," Winer says, "you have violence and repression. We don't want to see violence and repression in [the Middle East]. We want to see a greater zone for civilization--a greater zone fur personal and private-sector activity and for governmental activity that is not an enactment of violence."

The Republican approach appeals to me over the long term and it's one of the main reasons I supported the invasion. In the long term a democratic Iraq truly will make us safer and help to counter the terrorist threat in the greater Middle East. I now think that the best chance for a democratic or at least non-threatening Iraq lies with a Kerry administration. It's not a fight the Democrats would have started, but because of their greater concern for failed states, it is not a fight they will leave undone.