Who Can Really Say?

Paul Berman wants to have it both ways in today's NY Times. He wrote an Op-Ed piece essentially a) making the case for the War in Iraq (that's War 2 in the Terror Wars if you're keeping count) and then b) trying to make the case that the reason we don't have more allies in the War is President Bush.

First, part a):

The Sept. 11 attacks came from a relatively small organization. But Al Qaeda was a kind of foam thrown up by the larger extremist wave. The police and special forces were never going to be able to stamp out the Qaeda cells so long as millions of people around the world accepted the paranoid and apocalyptic views and revered suicide terror. The only long-term hope for tamping down the terrorist impulse was to turn America's traditional policies upside down, and come out for once in favor of the liberal democrats of the Muslim world. This would mean promoting a counter-wave of liberal and rational ideas to combat the allure of paranoia and apocalypse.

So far, so good. Then, part b):

Now we need allies ? people who will actually do things, and not just offer benedictions from afar. Unfortunately ? how many misfortunes can fall upon our heads at once? ? finding allies may not be easy. Entire populations around the world feel a personal dislike for America's president, which makes it difficult for even the friendliest of political leaders in some countries to take pro-American positions.

Point b) is his first mistake, and he rolls rapidly downhill from there. His argument assumes without any established basis that the reason we don't have more allies is because those potential allies are put off by President Bush. This is high order hogwash. Countries make foreign policy decisions based upon their interests and their commonly held sense of self. France, Germany, and Belgium (I won't even dignify adding Russia and China to the list) didn't oppose the War because they don't like Bush. They opposed it because it wasn't in their interests, as they perceived them, and because they don't imagine themselves as having anything to offer to offer the rest of the world, short of their own self-inflated sense of importance.

Berman goes on to exhort John Kerry to bridge the gap caused by Bush's bad manners. The problem, as Glenn Reynolds points out, is that the Democratic Party doesn't want to hear what Berman's got to say, most of which was roundly rejected by the party (and, of course, Kerry) during the primary season:

Kerry's problem is that a lot of the Democratic base -- and in particularly a lot of the noisy Democratic base -- sees things differently. He's gotten into the race by stressing his differences with Bush on the war, but he's going to have a hard time being elected if he can't stress his differences with the anti-American elements within his party.

Berman's problem is that, like Kerry, he wants to blame the lack of additional international effort in Iraq on Bush -- except that the real problem is that the French, Germans, and Belgians would have voted overwhelmingly for Howard Dean.