Bill Kristol's Crusade For Seriousness

In Bill Kristol's latest column in the Weekly Standard, we're treated to yet another sermon on the lack of "moral seriousness" among Bush's foreign policy critics (on both the Left and Right). Kristol writes:

From Copenhagen to Samara, the radical
Islamists are on the offensive. From Tehran
to Damascus, the dictators are trying to regain
the upper hand in the Middle East. From
Moscow to Beijing, the enemies of liberal
democracy are working to weaken the United
States. Across the world, the forces of terror
and tyranny are fighting back. Are we up to
the challenge?

It's not clear that we are. Many liberals, here
and in Europe, long ago lost the nerve to wage
war--or even to defend themselves--against
illiberalism. Parts of the conservative
movement now seem to be losing their nerve
as well. In response to an apparent clash of
civilizations, they would retrench, hunker
down, and let large parts of the world go to
hell in a hand basket, hoping that the hand
basket won't blow up in our faces.

Remember: The United States of America
and its allies--regimes that seek to embody, or
at least to move towards, the principles of
decent, civilized, liberal democracy--did not
seek this war. But we are at war, and we could
lose it. Victory is not inevitable.

These three paragraphs perfectly exemplify everything that is wrong with the sort of armchair neoconservativism Bill Kristol has helped to popularize. As always, Kristol lumps together a number of very different and very complex foreign policy issues and insists that the current debate over how best to approach these issues is nothing more than a clash between those who are serious and responsible and those who are not. For Kristol, this simplistic dichotomy explains all policy disagreements: there are those who understand the nature of the threat and the need to fight it, and those who either don't see the threat or naively hope that if we do nothing the problem will go away. Indeed, Kristol is so sure that this simple dichotomy is at the root of all foreign policy disagreement, that he devotes virtually every column he writes to the task of convincing people that Islamic extremism is something we need to take seriously. Just this morning Kristol explained on Fox News Sunday that the reason things are going poorly in Iraq is because "we have not had a serious three-year effort to fight a war in Iraq."

It's as if he thinks that if he can just convince people to be "serious," all disagreement over foreign policy will magically resolve itself; we'll all intuitively know--like he does--what needs to be done.

The problem, of course, is that Kristol's dichotomy is a false one. Sure, there are plenty of unserious people in America (on both the Left and Right), people who are either blissfully ignorant or hopelessly naive when it comes to issues of foreign policy. But none of these people have even the remotest chance of ever setting our nation's foreign policy. Among the relatively small group of politicians, government officials, and intellectuals who have any chance of ever actually influencing our foreign policy, there is universal agreement that Islamic extremism poses a serious threat to our national security, and that we must do whatever is in our power to minimize this threat. In other words, all the people whose opinions actually matter can safely be classified as "serious" under Kristol's dichotomy.

What Kristol can't seem to comprehend is that serious people can disagree over what strategies are most likely to reduce the threat that radical Islam poses to our country. To take the most obvious example, critics of the war in Iraq point out that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq--a country that, prior to the war, had no significant connection to the terrorist group that attacked us on 9/11--has destabilized the region, created a breeding ground and new base of operations for jihadist terrorists, alienated our allies, bogged down our military in a seemingly endless guerilla war, cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and greatly limited our ability to respond to any other global threats, such as Iran or North Korea. Now there's an argument to be made that the long-term benefits of having invaded Iraq will someday outweigh all the problems it has created (though if Iraq descends into full-on civil war, that argument can probably be put to rest forever), but the point is that there is plenty of reason for even the most serious-minded among us to question the wisdom of having invaded Iraq in the first place. But Kristol just can't bring himself to admit this. He has some deep-seated need to believe that those who disagree with him just don't understand the nature of the threat.

Among the people whose opinions actually influence (or will ever influence) our foreign policy, disagreement is almost always strategic in nature, not philosophical. These people disagree over how best to achieve key objectives, not what those objectives are. Opinions about the wisdom of invading Iraq ultimately boil down to whether or not one thinks that doing so helped or hurt the overall war against terrorism. The same is true regarding the debate over the use of torture or the continuing existence of our prisons at Guantanamo Bay.

But Kristol refuses to engage in any of these complex and difficult policy debates. He'd rather stand on the sidelines discussing imaginary philosophical disagreements and endlessly preaching about the need for "seriousness." And this incessant moralizing would be easier to take if Kristol had not be so consistently and colossally wrong about virtually everything he's said over the last three years. Bill, if by some chance you happen to read this, there are a lot of serious people who are struggling at the moment with very difficult foreign policy questions; feel free to join the discussion any time.