Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, which I have touted repeatedly in these august pages, reviews Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Beinart, an erstwhile New Republic editor, argues for the resuscitation of muscular Cold War liberalism as the only kind of fighting faith that can effectively combat the new totalitarian menace of Islamic jihadism. Bacevich severely criticizes Beinart’s reading of history, and in particular his attempt to co-opt Reinhold Neibuhr as a patron saint of a new “national greatness” liberalism. Neibuhr, Bacevich points out, was deeply aware of the complexities of history and the perverse consequences that attended even the best-intentioned actions on the world stage. In Bacevich’s view, “[w]ere [Neibuhr] in our midst today, he would likely align himself with those dissidents on the left and the right who reject the conceits of the American Century and who view as profoundly dangerous the claims of both neoliberals and neoconservatives to understand history’s purpose and destination.”

Another conceit of both liberal hawks like Beinart and neoconservatives that I think needs to be critically examined is that Islamic terrorism does in fact represent a new totalitarianism which poses an existential threat to the USA, and the West more generally, on a par with Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism. This article, for instance, points out that many of the high profile al-Qaeda figures have turned out to be bumblers and losers and that we may have in fact blown the menace of al-Qaeda out of proportion. If anything, the author argues, our response to 9/11, especially the war in Iraq may have actually strenghtened what was essentially a fringe movement who managed to pull off one spectacularly horrifying attack. Another facet of this possible exaggeration of the threat we face are the perfervid fantasies about Islamic radicals actually taking over America and imposing sharia law on the populace. How exactly this is supposed to come about is never made terribly clear. (The number of firearms in America alone would seem to provide a pretty serious obstacle to such an outcome.)

For some reason, there are intellectuals who seem to want there to be some kind of grand existential conflict. In a recent interview, for instance, Christopher Hitchens, (former?) leftist and current Iraq war apologist out and out admitted that 9/11 was “exhilirating” for him because it pits everything he loves versus everything he hates and the conflict is so “interesting.” And even before 9/11, and kicking into high gear afterwards, there have been pundits on the right and left who longed for a project of “National Greatness,” an epoch-spanning mission that would allow us to display our virtue in bringing the blessings our Our Way of Life to the world (Recall Bill Clinton’s comment that he was actually kind of sorry the Cold War was over because there was no world crisis that really gave him a chance to shine. He had to settle for bombing backwaters like Sudan and Serbia. In other words: peace and prosperity is so boring!)

I’ve experessed myself on the whole “national greatness” idea before – here and here – and pretty much stand by everything I wrote then. I think what galls me the most about these projects of greatness that get cooked up by what passes for our public intellecutals is that they aren’t the ones who will shoulder the burden of their schemes. Christopher Hitchens may find it all exhilirating and interesting, but what about the Marine in Iraq who sees his buddy get blown up by an IED, or the young Pakistani who’s tortured at Gitmo and then later let go because he has no ties to terrorism, or the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for the war in Iraq? Is the idea that the architects of our greatness will bask in the reflected glory of America while the costs are imposed on other people who don’t have much of a say?

Granted that, as Camassia recently pointed out, the line between legitimate self-defense and imperial expansion can appear fuzzy, it would help, I think, if we didn’t cloud things with vague abstractions like national greatness and dreams of a divinely sanctioned mission to save the world and instead tried to understand what would be a reasonable and prudent way of managing the threat of terrorism. In the terms of both classical Christian and classical liberal political theory, the political authorities are called to secure the conditions of earthly well-being so that society can function and the church can go about spreading her message. When this important, but limited, function is replaced by dreams of “greatness” the state can easily become a kind of ersatz savior instead of “God’s servant for your good.”