I just came across a new attack on my American Prospect Online piece from August 2002 on Democrats’ need for a new internationalist doctrine. I think it still holds up pretty well:

In recent weeks, it has become increasingly clear that there is a void at the heart of the Democratic Party.

At the outset of our first great debate over post-September 11 foreign policy — what to do about Saddam Hussein and Iraq — the Democrats are sitting it out, worried about taking on a popular wartime president and preferring to focus on domestic issues. In the latest issue of The Prospect, Harold Meyerson calls this an abdication of leadership on the most important issue facing this country. And as a result, the task of criticizing the President’s plans for Iraq has been left to internationalist Republicans and nervous European and Middle Eastern leaders.

But politics isn’t the only or the most fundamental reason for the Democrats’ silence. As Peter Beinart pointed out recently in The New Republic, the Dems can’t articulate a serious critique of President Bush’s plans to invade Iraq because they don’t have an overarching theory of how America should deal with the new threats to our security…

It’s time for Democrats to think big. Really big. What we need is a muscular new internationalist doctrine that addresses post-September 11 threats in Iraq and around the world — something along the lines laid out by Michael Hirsh in the September-October issue of Foreign Affairs.

Under such a doctrine, territorial sovereignty would become somewhat less sacrosanct: If a rogue state violates international law or norms by harboring terrorists or seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, the international community — led by the US — would have a range of options culminating in the possibility of military action. These options would be pursued forcefully, but Bush-style preemption would be ruled out because it undermines the system and could lead to globally destabilizing aggressions (for example, an Indian attack against Pakistan).

But writing on the Guardian Online, Brendan O’Neill criticizes me and other TAP writers for supporting an interventionist approach to foreign policy:

The notion that Bush’s interventionist policies did not go far enough was a recurring theme in American Prospect’s coverage of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. In August 2002, contributor Brendan Nyhan responded to a suggestion in New Republic magazine that America should adopt a policy of “pre-emption plus”, where war in Iraq would be followed by a “political intervention – ie nation-building”, by arguing that “even this vision is too narrow”.

“It’s time for Democrats to think big. Really big,” said Nyhan. “What we need is a muscular new internationalist doctrine that address post-September 11 threats in Iraq and around the world … Under such a doctrine, territorial sovereignty would become somewhat less sacrosanct: if a rogue state violates international law or norms by harbouring terrorists or seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, the international community – led by the US – would have a range of options culminating in the possibility of military action.”

We might call this “pre-emption plus plus”, where America would effectively head up a global police force which would threaten or actually pursue military action against any country found to be a “rogue state” – that favoured phrase of all American interventionists. Nyhan was critical of the idea that America should go ahead and bomb Iraq unilaterally; instead, he said, it “should build a new consensus for action grounded in the international system”. So, not so much an anti-war position as a pro-better-wars-than-the-ones-Bush-is-proposing position.

…It is worth recalling that some liberal commentators were even more gung-ho than the Bush administration back then. Very often they demanded a more systematic form of interventionism that would spread the liberal worldview and gallantly “liberate” the oppressed and toiling masses of the Third World.

Often, their main criticism of Bush and Co was that their war in Iraq was in pursuit of narrow “national interests” – such as security for America – rather than pursuing global values of justice and liberty. This shows that there is nothing more dangerous than a liberal imperialist. Where Bush’s war moves are at least, in some part, anchored by the national interest, liberal interventionism can be more sweeping, more unforgiving, more all-encompassing.

Looking back at 2002 and 2003, we can see that some liberal commentators not only gave the green light to war in Iraq but also proposed a new framework for western liberal imperialism which would have been even worse, if you can imagine it, than what the Bushies have pursued.

If you’re interested, I actually wrote ten freelance articles for TAP Online back in 2001-2002. [Disclosure: I criticized the Prospect after resigning from my guest blogger position in 2006.]