Who Really Blames America First?

Liberal critics of the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign and domestic policies are often referred to dismissively by Republicans (and some putative Democrats) as the "blame America first crowd." The allegation is that liberals hate America and insist on blaming all of our problems on our own policies. Here's Ramesh Ponnuru writing in the National Review shortly after 9/11 in a column entitled--you guessed it--"Blaming America First":

America is guilty. America is always guilty. Even when it's attacked. So it appears, at least, to a certain type of commentator. When the Towers fell, when the Pentagon was pierced, when thousands of our countrymen were slaughtered — the America Last pundits were there to explain how we had brought these calamities on ourselves. We were attacked, they explained, because we had angered the world.

Toward the end of the column, Ponnuru observed that "[a] policy designed to keep from offending people who might be inclined to attack us is a policy of preemptive capitulation to terrorists." He ended the column with this conclusion:

Here, then, is the true strategy being recommended to America: Curl up and die.

Classy, right? This talking point has always been particularly hypocritical given that the only people of any significance to reflexively blame America following 9/11 were rightwing nutjobs like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who, if you remember, went on television just two days after 9/11 and blamed the tragedy on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians." ("I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' ")

But that point, while always worth noting, has been made by many others before me.

Over the course of the past year, however, a more striking hypocrisy has become apparent to me. From almost the moment the dust from 9/11 settled, we have been engaged in a battle in this country between those who want desperately to preserve what America stands for and what makes it great--i.e., our rights and freedoms and the rule of law--and those who believe our obsessive respect for such principles has made us weak and vulnerable. In a very real sense, the people who blamed America first were people like Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo. These men looked around on 9/12 and saw a country they didn't like. They blamed what had happened on "quaint" laws, treaties, and constitutional understandings that purported to prohibit the government from detaining people without charges, wiretapping people without oversight, and torturing suspects in our custody (among other things). They saw the need to fundamentally change what America was, to put aside centuries-old understandings and principles in the name of increased security.

Senator John Cornyn probably summed up this blame America first mentality best when he observed that "[n]one of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead." Senator Pat Roberts, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, has also made this point: "I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead." Of course, the millions of Americans who have died over the years fighting to protect those very rights and liberties might beg to differ. As would our founding fathers, who no doubt spin in their graves every time someone repeats this cowardly talking point.

In reality, the people who have shown the most respect and reverence for traditionally American principles and values over the last five years have been the liberals and libertarians who have fought back against repeated efforts by the Bush administration to rollback checks on governmental power and subvert the rule of law. Despite conservative allegations to the contrary, liberals don't hate America. In fact, most are deeply worried that the America they know and love is being altered for the worse by those who fail to appreciate what makes our country truly great.

Nor, for that matter, did any mainstream liberals blame America for 9/11. They did, however, recognize that, depending on how we chose to respond, America could very well make the situation worse. This is a distinction that conservatives can't seem to get their heads around, and it's a shame, because it's becoming increasingly clear that the policies we've pursued have in fact made the situation worse.

Ponnuru alleged in his column that the "true strategy" of the left is to "curl up and die." If that's the case, then how come it's those of us on the left who are the least willing to sacrifice our cherished principles and freedoms, even in the face of seemingly endless Republican fear-mongering? And how is it the people who live in the places most likely to be targeted by terrorists overwhelming oppose the Cheney/Addington/Yoo approach to fighting terrorism?

It's becoming increasingly clear that for some (Cheney, Addington, and Yoo come to mind), 9/11 served as an excuse to reassert old grievances and to abandon long-held values and principles to which they never really subscribed. For the rest of us, 9/11 and the Bush administration's response to it have served as a chilling reminder that many of the values and principles we'd long taken for granted and believed were protected by a solid consensus in this country are, sadly, vulnerable to attack.