THE CIRCULAR firing squad is the signature practice of the Democratic Party. Think of 1968, or 1972, or everything that happened during the Clinton presidency except impeachment, or the Howard Dean campaign. Democrats are never truly happy unless they're at each others' throats.
It has been a while since the Democratic Party had a good, old-fashioned internal bloodbath. The Bush years have had a unifying effect. But as Bush begins to recede from the scene, the prospect of controlling Congress looms and the presidential primaries appear over the horizon, the cherished habits are bound to resume.
In fact, the infighting has started. The new Democratic civil war, which is already burbling up in liberal magazines, blogs and opinion columns, centers on whether the Bush administration screwed up Iraq or whether the project was doomed to failure regardless.
This may sound like a trivial subject for a vicious ideological bloodbath. (Leave it to Democrats to tear each other to shreds over a counter-factual historical argument.) But it's actually a crucial question. At stake is nothing less than who gets to direct the party's foreign policy.
The liberal wing of the party has long been aware that although Democratic voters are generally dovish, the party's foreign policy elite is fairly hawkish. Liberals, understandably, want to depose that hawkish elite and replace it with a dovish one. Flynt Leverett, a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry, complained that "Democrats have fallen into a 'soft neoconservatism' that has dulled the party's voice on foreign policy." John Tirman, in his book, "100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World," writes, "When I see a liberal hawk, I smell a rat."
The Iraq debacle (which most liberal hawks supported) has given the doves new ammunition. In some ways it resembles the fallout from the Vietnam War, when liberals such as George McGovern -- who were skeptical of the Cold War -- unseated the Kennedy-era hawks who had led the country into a quagmire in Southeast Asia. One difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the former was conducted mostly by Democratic administrations, while the latter has been conducted by a Republican one. Liberal hawks (like me) believe that this mostly absolves us; it wasn't us who conducted this debacle.
