Showing Restraint Abroad, Cato Cato's Letter No. 3

8/8/2019 Showing Restraint Abroad, Cato Cato's Letter No. 3

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A Quarterly Messageon Liberty

Summer 2010Volume 8 Number 3

wrote a book right after Barack Obama gotelected called The Last Best Hope. I was get-ting tired of hearing liberal bloggers, liberaleditors, liberal talk-show hosts, and liberal

elites coming on my show and talking about howthe Republicans lost in 2008 because they were“too conservative.” Republicans didn’t lose in2008 because they were too conservative. Repub-licans lost in 2008 because they were too radical.They were too radical when it came to spending,

they were too radical when it came to foreign pol-icy, and they were too radical in their rhetoric.The most difficult of those to explain to conser-

vatives—who have really seen the definition of a conservative foreign policy distorted over the past

JOE SCARBOROUGH

I

Showing Restraint AbroadShowing Restraint Abroad

Former Congressman Joe Scarboroughis an author and cable news and talkradio personality. He is currently thehost of Morning Joe on MSNBC. He spoke at a Cato Institute confer-ence, “Escalate or Withdraw? Conser-

vatives and the War in Afghanistan,” in March.



2 • Cato’s Letter SUMMER 2010

decade—is the need for Republicansto show restraint abroad. We also

need leaders who are capable of ar-guing for restraint both to conserva-tives and to the American people. Arecent NBC—Wall Street Journal pollindicates Barack Obama is upsidedown in his approval rating when itcomes to the economy, when itcomes to health care, when it comes

to just about every single issue. But,when it comes to his handling of Afghanistan, he’s plus 18 percentagepoints. In his handling of Iraq, he’splus 15 percentage points. When itcomes to whether we should invadeIran, plus 14. Americans believe thatif we think Iran is moving towards

having nuclear weapons, we shouldinvade the third Muslim country ina decade.

I would suggest one of the rea-sons why these numbers are asskewed as they are is that, in 2010,there isn’t much difference between

the Republican and Democratic views of foreign policy. This “anti-war” president has doubled thenumber of troops in Afghanistan tonearly 100,000 and, most critically,he’s continued the transformation of the Afghanistan effort from a coun-terterrorism mission to a nation-building mission. There’s no end

game. There’s no exit strategy.There’s no definition of success. We

have no idea what the ultimate priceis going to be. And there’s no answerto a very prescient question Joe Bidenasked: “If Pakistan is the most dan-gerous country on the planet and thekey to resolving the crisis in this area,why are we spending 50 times theamount of money in Afghanistan

that we are in Pakistan?” This policy doesn’t make sense.

It did, to me, in 2001. It simply doesn’t any more in 2010. And if Leon Panetta is to be believed—thatal Qaeda has been reduced to a quivering mass of a terrorist move-ment—great. Let’s declare victory

and bring our troops home.But, beyond Afghanistan, I think

it’s important as we move forwardto figure out what theconservativemovement does, and where we havegone wrong this past decade. Istarted my chapter on foreign poli-

cy with a 2000 quote from

George W. Bush: “We must be judicious in our use of the mili-tary. We will fight only when itis in the vital interests of theUnited States, when our mis-sion is clear and when the exitstrategy is obvious.” We conservatives need to ask why it is thatthe same cautious Republicans

who resisted Bill Clinton’s calls formilitary use in Bosnia, Kosovo,Haiti, Sudan, and Iraq adoptGeorge W. Bush’s preemption strat-egy without question. Why did sofew conservatives criticize Mr.Bush’s Wilsonian pronouncementthat the United States of America would lead a global democratic rev-

The most difficult of those to explain toconservatives is the needfor Republicans to showrestraint abroad. “

“



SUMMER 2010 Cato’s Letter • 3

olution that would “end tyran-ny on the globe?” What exactly

were we conservatives thinkingduring Mr. Bush’s second in-augural address, when hepromised that U.S. troopswould single-handedly exportdemocracy and bring freedomand peace to all corners of theglobe? And why did the same

Republicans who quoted ColinPowell’s doctrine to justify a re-strained approach to foreign policy in the 1990s attack Colin Powell in2002 when he urged, before goinginto Iraq, that we adopt the sameapproach?

When we Republicans con-

trolled the Armed Services Com-mittee in the 1990s, we constantly lectured the Clinton Administra-tion on the need for showing moreprudence and restraint in foreignpolicy. We saw Bill Clinton’s use of military force as undisciplined andreckless, and as one Foreign Affairs

article stated at the time, “The Clin-ton cabinet seemed to view foreignpolicy as an extension of socialwork.” We conservatives used ourmajority in Congress to attack thatapproach as unfocused, undisci-plined, and Wilsonian.

For most conservatives the ColdWar was a necessary evil. U.S. globalinvolvement was the only optionavailable to contain the communistthreat. But after the Soviet Unionfell, Republicans I served with inCongress believed that the UnitedStates should engage in less mili-tary adventurism and narrow ourfocus abroad. We were so cautiouswhen we would lecture the Clinton

Administration that Madeline Al-bright, then Secretary of State, an-grily accused GOP leaders of stand-ing in the way of humanitarianmissions that she wanted our mili-tary to run. And she was right. Wedid stand in the way of it, and wewere proud of it. No conservative I

worked with on the Armed ServicesCommittee in Congress was com-fortable with Bill Clinton’s eager-ness to dispatch troops to Haiti,Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Wewere especially troubled by theBalkan crisis, believing that history taught us that you should never

involve U.S. troops in a three-sidedcivil war. Conservatives repeatedly pressed Clinton administrationofficials who testified before our Armed Services Committee to statethe overriding national security in-terests that justified risking U.S.casualties. They never could. Ithink the closest we got was AlGore saying that if we didn’t sendtroops to the Balkans then ourcredibility within NATO would bedamaged.

Obviously, prudent Republicanconcerns faded once the Democrat-ic commander-in-chief left townand the Republican commander-in-chief arrived. We are not the

Prudent Republicanconcerns faded once theDemocratic commander-in-chief left town and theRepublican commander-in-chief arrived.“ “



world’s 9-1-1, as we said in the1990s, and we regularly admon-

ished Clinton aides who ignoredour repeated warnings of an over-stretched military. We would lec-ture Clinton officials on what weconsidered to be the Magna Carta of conservative foreign policy: theWeinberger Doctrine. After the sui-cide bombing of the U.S. Marine

barracks at Beirutairport in 1983,Secretary of De-fense Caspar Wein-berger got togetherwith people in theDefense Depart-ment and argued

that we really need-ed to narrow thefocus of when wesend U.S. troopsabroad so that wedon’t repeat themistakes of Viet-nam and Beirut.

He had a young army man, ColinPowell, working with him. They came up with a doctrine statingthat U.S. troops should only be de-ployed when (1) it is vital to U.S. na-tional interests; (2) our troop com-mitment is full and overwhelming;(3) the objectives for our troops areclearly defined; (4) our leaders arewilling to constantly reassess trooplevels; (5) Americans support thewar before the engagement; and (6)U.S. combat troops are sent in only as a last resort.

You can apply those criteria looking back to some wars wehave gotten involved with and toGeorge W. Bush’s foreign-policy

pronouncements. But, more im-portantly for this conversation, we

need to apply it to where we go inthe future for Afghanistan. I wouldlike Republicans and Democratsalike to tell me, at this point in2010, “What is vital to U.S. nationalinterests in Afghanistan?” Andafter answering that question, Iwould like them to tell me, “What

are the objectivesfor our troops?”Our “clearly de-fined” objectives? And, most trou-bling, we’ve been in Afghanistan fornine years. We still

have not had a leader, Republicanor Democrat, tellus what the endgame is. ColinPowell says the key to the Weinbergerdoctrine is that

you never send troops in until youknow what the trigger is to bringthem home.

In the first Gulf War George H.W. Bush said our mission was toliberate Kuwait, and then bring ourtroops home. George H. W. Bushfaced a torrent of criticism for de-clining to carry on to Baghdad. Buthe stuck to his guns. Our trigger forexit was liberating Kuwait. Once wedid that, he brought the troopshome. He showed discipline andthus avoided a lot of the mistakeshis son made.

And you know what? Republi-cans have paid for what George W.Bush did when it came to spending





at home and foreign policy abroad. So I think it is very im-

portant that we look at howGeorge W. Bush and the Re-publicans in Congress man-aged to lose their way, and howthat should guide us as wemove forward. Just as ColinPowell learned from America’stragic experience in Vietnam,

we’ve got to learn from themistakes of the past eightyears. It seems to me that the cen-tral lesson to draw from the pasteight years is that dogma and rigidideology are the natural enemies of conservative foreign policy. We livein a world that is brutish and nasty,

that cannot be fit into a neat, tidy ideological box. There are no easy-to-apply rules for internationalconflict. Most importantly, thosewho are still arguing, in 2010, thatwe can somehow export democracy across the globe, or rebuild coun-tries on the other side of the globe

in our image, are the people wehave to call out today, tomorrow,and every day as the dangerous rad-icals that they are. History hasproven them and their worldviewto be dangerous and radical.

As someone who fought theClinton administration for failingto show sufficient restraint in for-eign policy, the great irony to me isthat we conservatives are now being viewed as predisposed to mili-tarism. That impression has to bechanged. Conservative leaders onceagain need to be wary of ideologues. And, fiscally, we need to under-stand that this country has bornea disproportionate share of the

world’s security responsibilities fortoo long. We need to begin to showsome restraint and back away fromsome of our long-standing military commitments. As conservativesliked to say to flustered Clinton ad-

ministration officials during the1990s, America can’t be the world’s9-1-1. We can’t go it alone anymore,and we’ve been going it alone fortoo long. We need to realize that theUnited States military is over-stretched, we are facing cripplingdebt, our economy is in crisis, our

people are war-weary, and Ameri-ca’s days as the world’s watchmanare over.

In The Conservative Mind, RussellKirk wrote, “Men not being angels,a terrestrial paradise cannot be con-trived by metaphysical enthusiasts. Yet an earthly hell can be arrangedreadily enough by ideologues of one stamp or another.” You lookback over the past 10 years—overthe past century—and I think it issafe to say that the world has suf-fered through enough of thoseearthly hells. American conserva-tives should make it their missionnever again to be party to an ideo-logical war.

“It seems to me that thecentral lesson to drawfrom the past eight yearsis that dogma and rigidideology are the naturalenemies of conservativeforeign policy. “




Draped in the color of Iran’s GreenMovement and standing beside hiswife, Akbar Ganji accepted the 2010

Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty before a crowd of nearly one thousand. Ganji’sacceptance, and the remarks that followed,capped an evening of celebration and speech-es—a biennial event Cato has presented for thelast eight years.

An Iranian writer and journalist, Ganji spentsix years in a Tehran prison for advocating a sec-ular democracy and exposing government in- volvement in the assassination of individualswho opposed Iran’s theocratic regime.

This year’s pool of nominees was deep, but Akbar Ganji stood out. He is best known for a

1999 series of articles investigating the ChainMurders of Iran, which left five dissident intel-lectuals dead. Later published in the book The Dungeon of Ghosts, his articles tied the killings tosenior clerics and other officials in the Iraniangovernment, including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In his acceptance speech, delivered throughan interpreter, Ganji said that “emancipationmovements in the United States,” from the American Revolution to the civil rights move-ment, have inspired struggles for freedom

around the world. But he warned that the Unit-ed States had sometimes supported authoritar-ian regimes in other countries and that in theMiddle East “the tyranny of secular and corruptgovernments, supported by Western countries,”had pushed their people toward the only visiblealternative: religious extremism and funda-mentalism.

In his own country, Iran, the shah was over-thrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979.Today, he said, after 31 years of “extremistIslamic fundamentalism,” Iran is “the only country in the region that if fair, free, and com-petitive elections were to be held, democraticforces that believe in the separation of religionfrom the state would be victorious.”

But this tentative hope in the face of funda-mentalism is threatened, Ganji said, by callsfrom Western nations for further economicsanctions. These will “make the Iranian state-run economy even more contingent on thestate and as a result make the current condi-tions even more corrupt and repressive.”

Akbar Ganji expressed his intent to use theaward, which he called a “moral and ethical en-dorsement of Iran’s Green Movement,” to“facilitate our struggle for advancing democra-cy and human rights in Iran.”

Recipient of the MiltonFriedman Prizefor AdvancingLiberty:

AKBAR

G ANJIThe Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, named in honor of perhaps the greatest champion of liberty in the 20th century, is presented every other year to an individual who hasmade a significant contribution to advance human freedom. The winner for 2010 is Akbar Ganji, the fifth recipient of the prize, joining Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy stu-dent movement in Venezuela; Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia; Hernando de Soto, Peruvian property rights crusader; and Peter Bauer, the late British development economist.




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