Andrew comments on Shadi Hamid’s remarks:

One the worst legacies of the Vietnam boomer syndrome has been turning complex foreign policy decisions – which should ultimately be pragmatic actions in defense of national self-interest – into idiotic left-right, patriot-traitor, soldier-hippie dichotomies.

It is understandable to associate this with Vietnam, but it is a habit of mind developed over many decades before Vietnam. It was perhaps more prominent during Vietnam in ways that had not occurred in many decades, but it is hardly unique to the last forty years. Before U.S. entry into WWII, and for decades afterward, opponents of entry into the war were derided in similarly abusive ways, and during WWI opponents were not simply denounced but were also sometimes jailed on account of their supposed radicalism. Were we to identify pro-war factions with political affiliations in the early 20th century, the left or center-left was typically more interested in intervening in foreign wars. Proponents of confrontational foreign policy and adherents of what Bacevich calls the “ideology of natioinal security” came from across the spectrum after WWII, facilitated by the anticommunist focus of policy, and the right or center-right adopted equally aggressive or even more aggressive policy views. Misinterpreting reality and inflating threats, which Bacevich identifies as two recurring themes in policymaking in the post-WWII era, became and remain the marks of what passed for serious, responsible foreign policy thinking.

What Kennan called the legalistic-moralistic strain in our foreign policy thinking, which may have existed before Wilson but has become much more pronounced ever since Wilson’s administration, forces the debate into these unsatisfying and distorting categories. As Lukacs said in his biographical study of Kennan:

Beliefs in world law, the outlawing of war, Leagues of Nations, United Nations, World Government, etc., are all outcomes of that–as is their consequence of “total war” against “Evil.”

In the end, the conviction that policy is a dedicated fight against Evil is not only used to justify all manner of wrongs, but ultimately it is used to justify ignoring and scrapping domestic and international law as and when the “fight against Evil” requires it. Left-right oppositions make little sense, and they are certainly insufficient to explain the divisions over the Iraq war. The legalistic-moralistic view leads to imputing vice to critics of policy and identifying support for the state’s policy with virtue. It also tends to lead to identifying opponents of a given intervention or the entire direction of policy as virtual fifth columnists. This is related to nationalist identification with the state, but even more important is the identification of the state’s policy with some higher good. This is what Claes Ryn described in America the Virtuous in the following way:

Power sought and exercised for the good of humanity is thought to be by definition virtuous and to need no restrictions. Today the result is the proliferation of militant, sometimes highly provocative but also moralistic political conduct and speech, as witness the uncompromising attitudes of so many leading American politicians and political intellectuals in discussing how to handle opposition to American aims in the world. What is creating arrogance and saber rattling is not adherence to old Western moral and cultural traditions but an unwillingness to heed them.

This adoption, or rather perversion, of the language of morality by supporters of aggressive policies abroad lends them an initial advantage in framing the debate and setting the terms. I cannot count the number of times that advocates for invading Iraq derided opponents for supposedly being unable to distinguish between good and evil or even for not recognizing the validity of such categories. On the contrary, I think opponents of the war were paying more attention to the line between the two, but what we objected to even more was the ready identification of a bad policy as an expression of Goodness and the idea that opposition to it was somehow morally corrupt.