The Courage of Our Convictions

Voters rarely listen to policies and programs from parties whose principles and ideals are indistinct, vague, and amorphous. Nor is there any guarantee that the Democratic party's candidates will prevail this fall or in 2008 simply because of public disaffection with the Republican president and Congress:

"Because the Democratic Party split asunder over Vietnam, a war whose central "domino" assumption turned out to be flawed, and have thereafter tended to oppose the use of military force as a first resort, we have been portrayed by Repubicans as "weak on defense." This is an easy charge for those who see life as "nasty, brutish, and short" and who would just as soon punch someone in the nose as take the trouble to discover whether that person might have a legitimate grievance against us that might be satisfied without the sacrifice of American lives. But security has become more intricate, and simply punching someone in the nose or unilaterally invading his country may not achieve it.

"No better illustration of this idea exists than Iraq. By unnecessarily invading Iraq, based on false assumptions, rather than relying on containment, the principle that won the Cold War, we will be living with the consequences for a long time to come. We should not go to war because we want to, but only because we have to. There was no imperative to invade Iraq.

"Forget the convenient default justification of removing an evil dictator. We have never been in the evil-dictator-removal business. By our unprovoked invasion we have: created an international training camp for jihadists; released ancient Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish animosities; established the conditions for a restrictive theocracy where before a secular Arab society existed; increased instability in the most volatile region of the world; and, perhaps most of all, surfaced a Great White Whale to accomodate George W. Bush's latent Captain Ahab."

Excerpted from "The Courage of Our Convictions," Henry Holt/Times Books, September 2006