Brooks - crap =

Howard Dean is the only guy who goes to the Beverly Hills area for a gravitas implant. He went to the St. Regis Hotel, a mile from Rodeo Drive, to deliver a major foreign policy speech, and suddenly Dr. Angry turned into the Rev. Dull and Worthy.

The guy who has been inveighing against the Iraq war as the second coming of Vietnam spent his time talking about intelligence agency coordination as if he had been suckled at the Council on Foreign Relations. The guy who just a few days ago stood next to Al Gore as the former vice president called Iraq the worst mistake in American history has suddenly turned sober.

Sure, he did get off a classic Deanism. He conceded that the capture of Saddam had made American soldiers safer, but, unwilling to venture near graciousness, he continued, "But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer."

Still, the speech was respectable and serious. Coming on the same day as President Bush's hastily called news conference, it affords us the opportunity to compare the two men's approaches to the war on terror.

And indeed, there is one big difference. George Bush fundamentally sees the war on terror as a moral and ideological confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny. Howard Dean fundamentally sees the war on terror as a law and order issue. At the end of his press conference, Bush uttered a most un-Deanlike sentiment:

"I believe, firmly believe — and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it — that freedom is the almighty God's gift to every person — every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."

Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice, and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries who fear liberty for women.

Furthermore, Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in this struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror.

Judging by his speech yesterday, Dean does not believe the U.S. has an exceptional role to play in world history. Dean did not argue that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the world.

Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and biological materials away from terror groups.

Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral.

At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible.

In the world Dean describes, people, other than a few bizarre terrorists, would be working together if not for Bush. In the Dean worldview, all problems are matters of technique and negotiation.

Dean tried yesterday to show how sober and serious he could be. In fact, he has never appeared so much the dreamer, so clueless about the intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us and with which real presidents have to grapple.  

OTHER THOUGHTS ON BROOKS: See Pandagon and Roger Ailes

posted by Quiddity at 12/16/2003 11:08:00 PM