Here, as promised, is my piece in The Forward on the conference in Washington put on last Saturday by the Social Democrats, USA. 
These are the folks who might say, paraphrasing the famous line of the immortal Irving Howe, “Blair is the name of our dream.” (That’s a bit of an inside joke, which may require some explaining unless you’re over sixty, have the last name Walzer, or just read a lot of really old back issues of Dissent. But I can certainly relate to the sentiment.) As I said yesterday: “These are, simply as I can put it, the neo-cons who never quite became neo-cons.”
The central point of the event was the creation of a political movement that combined a progressive agenda at home with a tough, democratizing internationalism overseas. Or as their statement put it at one point …
Support for the labor movement at home and for energetic American assistance to democracy abroad are today two points of practical focus for Social Democrats, USA. If this combination somehow seems unnatural, we would argue that it is the lens of our political culture that is clouded: the two actually fit naturally together.
I’m not sure what to say about the piece or the conference other than what is contained in the article. But I did thoroughly enjoy it — or, perhaps better to say, it provoked my thinking in ways that have continued on since it ended.
One thing that struck me was the utter certainty of some of the panelists that to have disagreed with the Iraq war was something on the order of having blinked at Munich, taken a post in the Vichy government, or generally acted as an amoral wimp at a hundred other points over the last hundred years.
I’m thinking particularly here of Jeffrey Herf who said, among other things, that the German government’s opposition to the Iraq war was a sign of “Germany’s lack of complete understanding of armed anti-fascism.”
He combined that with what I could not help but see as a tendentious, strained reading of Germany’s role in international politics under the Schroeder government. He ended by arguing, as I understood him at least, that Germany had to come to grips with this misjudgment, this historical error, before it could get back on history’s, and presumably our, good side. It was rather like what Paul Wolfowitz told the Turks a few weeks ago: say you’re sorry.
Regular readers of this site will know I have very mixed feelings about Iraq and still find the arguments for having dealt with it militarily quite compelling. But this sort of Iraq war ideological triumphalism irks me on any number of levels. Most of all, I think this is so simply because it was such a very close call. To place Iraq into the category of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia is a crude perversion or even cheapening of the past. That hubris strikes me as even more misbegotten given what’s happened since the war ended. I don’t think the fact that we have yet to find any WMD necessarily weakens the argument for the long-term threat the Iraqi regime posed. (I’ll try to explain why in a later post.) But the increasingly likely possibility that the Iraqis had little or no offensive WMD capacity does serious damage to those who tried to present the situation as one of imminent danger. In any case, this struck me as one of the weakest parts of the event.
As I’ve said earlier, and would like to discuss at more length later, the French are one thing. But I think what happened in Germany in the lead-up to the war was a much more complicated and ambiguous development. 
Certainly, the country’s domestic politics, and Schroeder’s need for a defining issue in a very close election, played an important role. But the decision-making — as nearly as I’ve been able to make it out — was a far cry from the cartoonish, euro-weenie stereotyping that one sees in so much of the press coverage in the United States.
We in the United States sometimes think of the German Greens as some sort of wild New Leftish fringe party that the German Social Democrats use to put together a majority for their governing coalition. But this is far off the mark. For those who believe in progressive government at home and democratic internationalism abroad the German Greens are one of the most compelling and dynamic forces in Western political life today. I recently went to a dinner/discussion put on for a visit by Katrin Göring-Eckardt, leader of the Green caucus in the German Bundestag. Though she opposed the war, it was a more nuanced opposition than one might have expected. And there was a lot in her thinking that struck me as in line with the sort of democratizing internationalism that many of us have in mind to help create. (Göring-Eckardt is from the former East Germany, a fact, I thought, which must play an important role in her views of these issues.)
