FPI (re-branded PNAC) Ropes In Liberal Interventionists After All

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FPI Ropes In Liberal Interventionists After All

While they didn’t sign the FPI letter on Afghanistan, some liberal interventionists are joining their neo-conservative cousins in FPI’s upcoming two-day conference on the “role of human rights and democracy in American foreign policy,” the agenda for which you can find below.

The participation of Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings’ Saban Center is not particularly surprising given their long collaboration with the neo-cons on Iraq, especially with respect to their strong support of the Surge in early 2007. The involvement of Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor (even as moderator) is also not totally unexpected, given the increasingly neo-con drift of the paper’s editorials over the past decade. And I guess Ken Wollack feels obliged to be there because they’re discussing “democracy” and he still has to work with Carl Gershman, the veteran director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a former chief aide to Jeane Kirkpatrick.

But why do such liberals so easily lend the credibility their presence brings to a neo-con-sponsored event without conditioning their participation on the addition of serious critics of the kinds of interventionist policies that will be promoted there? Liberals, after all, are supposed to believe that free and open debate among and between a diversity of views helps society make better decisions. But altogether absent from this event are realists, liberal internationalists who believe that the U.S. is way too over-armed and over-extended, libertarians, or veteran human rights activists and policy advocates who are skeptical of the notion that the U.S. is a morally exceptional nation — all of whom not only have strong and very relevant views about democracy and human rights and their place in foreign policy, but collectively also probably represent the views of a majority of U.S. citizens, according to any number of polls taken over the last couple of decades. The liberals’ failure to insist on broader participation and a wider debate on these issues as a condition of their participation simply contributes to the further rehabilitation of the neo-cons and their worldview.

In any event, here’s the program as announced by FPI today: ... http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=290