Looking for a good fight

YESTERDAY'S REFERENDUM on the Iraqi constitution should have been a special triumph for those few liberal thinkers who supported the Iraq War. After all, so-called ''liberal hawks," more than their conservative nest mates, have in recent years been the loudest voices for a foreign policy based on human rights and democratic transformation abroad. The last American war, in Kosovo, was a liberal war, led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Serbian surrender, with the subsequent toppling of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, has gone down in history as a victory of military might deployed in the service of liberal humanitarianism. Might not an Iraqi constitution-or at least a constitutional referendum-count as well?

But today the liberal hawks find themselves in a bind. The circumstances in which the country prepared for yesterday's voting-the assassinations, the suicide bombings, the tattered infrastructure-were not exactly what they had in mind. To make matters worse, once it became apparent that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration took up the liberal arguments as a sort of retroactive casus belli. Thus the liberal hawks find their arguments embraced by an administration they never trusted and whose conduct of the war and occupation they have harshly criticized.

No wonder, then, that a few among them are try-

ing to resuce their ideas from the accusation that, as John Mearsheimer, a leading foreign policy scholar at the University of Chicago and avowed skeptic of interventionism both conservative and liberal, puts it, ''there's not really a lot of difference between the liberal imperialists"-his term for the liberal hawks-"and the neoconservatives in the Bush administration."

Two of those liberal hawks, the writers Paul Berman and George Packer, have just published books concerned, in part, with answering Mearsheimer's charge. Peter Beinart, the editor of the mostly liberal and staunchly interventionist magazine The New Republic, is working on his own book, due out in June, based on a long and much-debated article he wrote for the magazine last December. Each thinker, in his way, is trying to salvage something for liberal interventionism out of its ignominious association with Iraq.

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''I can imagine someday wanting to say, yes, let's withdraw from Iraq," Berman is telling me. We are sitting in the sunny garden of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, across the street from his apartment. ''What I can't imagine is anybody calling that a left-wing idea. That's a conservative idea; it's the idea that says, 'I'm all right, Jack, but I won't help you.' I can imagine that that might be right to do someday, but just don't tell me that's left-wing."

Left-wing, for Berman, is not an insult. A cultural critic who has written regularly over the years for Dissent, The Nation, The Village Voice, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other left-of-center publications, he has shed the anarcho-syndicalist enthusiasms of his 1960s youth-a leader of the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, his 1996 book ''A Tale of Two Utopias" traced the political journey of his fellow radicals in the ''generation of 1968." But there remains plenty of wing between Berman and the political center. Today he calls himself a social democrat.

He was also a prominent supporter of the idea of going to war to depose Saddam Hussein. With his book ''Terror and Liberalism," written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and published during the invasion of Iraq, he traced an ideological lineage from European totalitarianism to both al Qaeda and Iraq's Ba'ath Party and emerged as a leading voice among the liberal hawks.

Berman's new book, ''Power and the Idealists," is ''a narrative, not a polemic," he tells me. Published last month by the small, left-leaning Soft Skull Press, the book is an almost wistful group portrait of a few former radicals of the European left-including Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders and the former head of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, and Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister and leader of the country's Green Party-who traced an unlikely trajectory from street fighting rabble-rousers in 1968 to supporters of military action in the Balkans and, in the case of Kouchner and the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann, even the invasion of Iraq.

In most tellings, liberal interventionism was born out of the Balkans. As Packer wrote in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the Iraq invasion, the Bosnian War ''changed the way many American liberals, particularly liberal intellectuals, saw their country." Inspired and liberated by the end of Cold War, ''These writers and academics wanted to use American military power to serve goals like human rights and democracy-especially when it was clear that nobody else would do it."

But faced with the imminent invasion of Iraq, what Packer called ''the Bosnia consensus"-always a minority position on the left-weakened. Some prominent liberal thinkers who had supported the Balkan interventions-such as the philosopher Michael Walzer, author of the enormously influential book ''Just and Unjust Wars"-ended up opposing the war to overthrow Saddam. Most of the ones who supported it-including Berman, Packer, the historian Michael Ignatieff, then at Harvard's Kennedy School, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens, and the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New Republic-did so with at least some trepidation.

Packer's own doubts, he writes in his new book, ''The Assassins' Gate," an account of the Iraq War and its origins culled largely from reporting he did for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, were nearly paralyzing. The problem as he saw it was that the argument over the war had quickly settled into a duel between two historical analogies-World War II and Vietnam-neither of which he thought appropriate. ''The invocation of Munich and appeasement by one side, or Tonkin Gulf and deception by the other, seemed like ways to shut off debate rather than engage it," he writes. As he told me recently, ''simply bringing up Munich doesn't answer the question" of whether intervention is merited. ''Each generation has an obligation to figure this out for itself."

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Both Berman's and Beinart's books are, in part, attempts to answer the challenge Packer outlines by offering alternate lineages for the liberal hawks, sturdier roots extending back beyond the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Berman, for example, though he readily concedes that the evolution he traces of a few left-wing European intellectuals and politicians has hardly attained world historical significance, argues that the recent history of the European left nevertheless has lessons for American liberals.

''The leftism of the '60s had a political analysis that was anti-imperialist and about how terrible American power was around the world," he told me. ''It had another strand which was antifascist and antitotalitarian. The Europeans, in a much sharper way than the American left, have had to decide which of these strands was more meaningful."

The great difference between the European and American experiences, Berman believes, is Vietnam. Having had higher hopes for the success of Communism in Indochina and elsewhere in the Third World, many on the European left felt an especially bitter disappointment in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Some of them were driven toward a sort of general-purpose antitotalitarianism, a distaste for dictatorships and illiberal ideologies left or right, and a willingness to take action, occasionally even military action, in its service. When Fischer gave Germany's support to NATO's war in Kosovo, when Glucksmann urged war on al Qaeda, when Kouchner advocated for intervention in Iraq, Berman argues, they were not compromising their left-wing values, but exemplifying them.

Peter Beinart's current work looks back even further than Berman's, to an older, and distinctly American, liberalism. The historical touchstone of Beinart's call to arms (the article that his book grows out of was called ''A Fighting Faith," and his book's provisional title is ''The Good Fight") is the emergence, in the late 1940s, of what came to be known as the Cold War liberal. Starting in 1947, and led by figures such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, along with liberal organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP and most of the country's major unions, began to adopt a fiercely anticommunist line, distancing themselves from anyone, like the former vice president Henry Wallace, seen as soft on communism. ''The health of the democratic left requires the unconditional rejection of totalitarianism," Schlesinger wrote in his 1949 book ''The Vital Center."

The parallels to today, Beinart believes, are obvious. Like Berman, he argues that the United States faces a new totalitarian threat in al Qaeda, and that liberalism, unlike the American right, has not come to terms with it. ''There is little liberal passion," he wrote in his New Republic essay, ''to win the struggle against al Qaeda."

This is doubly a shame, Beinart believes. In adopting the Cold War liberals as his ideological forebears, he's not merely pointing out the road back to the White House for the Democrats, but arguing that a muscular liberal foreign policy is better for the country and for the world than a muscular conservative one. A governing philosophy dedicated to small government and low taxes, he warns, is bound to hamper the sort of expansive, aggressive foreign policy he advocates.

Both Beinart and Berman, in their quest for what the historian Van Wyck Brooks called ''a usable past," open themselves up to all manner of disputes over the particulars of their history and over the true meaning of ideas like totalitarianism, liberalism, imperialism, and, in Berman's case, the ''spirit of '68." ''Unlike communism in 1947," the liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall wrote on his widely read blog, ''militant Islam simply does not pose an existential threat to our civilization." Marshall has noted that even some hawkish liberals feel Beinart and Berman's analogy between militant Islam and Soviet totalitarianism does more harm than good, because it risks repeating the excesses of Cold War liberalism with much less justification. Beinart's Vital Center liberals, after all, were handmaidens both to McCarthyism and architects of the Vietnam War.

And neither Beinart nor Berman are entirely comfortable with how Iraq fits into their genealogy of liberal interventionism. The central character in Berman's tale, Joschka Fischer, may have traveled a great distance since 1968, but he opposed the Iraq War. And Beinart, when asked, admits he's still not sure whether a muscular, interventionist liberalism would call for supporting the invasion to topple Saddam.

''That's the remaining hurdle in this task," he says. The task he's referring to is finishing his book, but he might well be talking about rescuing an ideology from the wreckage of Iraq.

Drake Bennet is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.