Many liberals are scratching their heads wondering how it could be that Republican candidate John McCain has been doing better than either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama in recent polls. Their answer is to blame the Democratic candidates for their attacks on each other. While such attacks have certainly not helped the Democratic Party ’s chances of winning the 2008 elections, liberals remain puzzled why the crashing economy hasn’t produced a wild charge away from the Republican Party? Chanting the old Clinton-team mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” the Democrats and the media are at a loss to understand the sudden resurgence of the Republicans. 

They would do better to focus on the one issue that McCain has promised to make central: the War on Terror (Iraq today, Iran tomorrow?). The huge opposition to the war should have produced, liberals believed, a huge majority for any Democrat opposing the war. Some lefties and anti-democrats like HBO comedian Bill Maher respond, “the people are stupid.” 

We don’t think so. For many Americans, the fear of an even bigger bloodbath in Iraq, should the United States withdraw, and the ethical concern about making an even deeper mess by a hasty withdrawal genuinely concern many Americans who honestly can’t imagine a way out of the mess that Bush has bequeathed to the world. Others are rightly concerned that the charge of liberals “stabbing the American war effort in the back” might be the prelude to the rise of a fascist movement even more dangerous than the extremely hurtful realities of the Bush/Cheney years.

We at Tikkun have long advocated for the U.S. to announce immediately that it is seeking an international force—not including U.S. troops or “advisors”—that could take over Iraq security from departing U.S. forces and could supervise a free and fair set of plebiscite elections to determine whether the people of Iraq want one or three different countries, and how to govern such in ways that would be fair to the minority populations in their midst. If the United States were simultaneously committed to providing funding (but not the contractors and other profiteers) for the rebuilding of Iraq, required all U.S. related corporations to give at least 50 percent of Iraq-based profits to this reconstruction effort, and immediately ceded to this international force all the military bases we’ve constructed in Iraq plus our huge Green Zone facilities in Baghdad, we would be making clear to the world that we are really getting out but that we really care about repairing some of the damage our invasion and occupation has caused.

If the liberal and progressive forces were to accompany that with a new vision of how to be involved in the world, rather than retreat from it, they could further reassure many Americans who fear that the world will be left to the terrorists if the U.S. government is taken over by the peace forces. We’ve proposed that the U.S. (together with any other G8 countries willing to join) should launch a Global Marshall Plan to which we commit 1-2 percent of our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty years to once and for all end domestic and global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, inadequate health care, and to repair the environment. The plan we’ve developed (check it out at www.tikkun.org under “Current Thinking” on the home page) provides for careful safeguards to prevent such monies being siphoned off by economic and political elites in the recipient countries, and requires a spirit of humility, based on the recognition that the West ’s superior economic strength has been based in part on hundreds of years of policies that have contributed to the underdevelopment of third world countries.

The lesson from Bush and Cheney having lost Iraq should be driven home: Homeland security, liberals and progressives should argue, cannot be achieved through domination (not the “hard” kind advocated by militarists in both parties, nor even the “soft” kind of domination through economic and diplomatic means that Democrats sometimes champion). Both kinds of domination start from the assumption that it is our needs that ought to come before the needs of everyone else. Instead, a more appropriate foreign policy for the 21st century must be based on the understanding that our well being depends on the well being of everyone else on the planet and the well being of the planet itself. In that light, homeland security can best be achieved through generosity, caring for others, and humility that acknowledges that our superior economic strength has not brought us superior wisdom or a superior ability to achieve a society based on love and kindness toward each other.

If Democrats are able to adopt this Strategy of Generosity and challenge the Strategy of Domination, they have an answer to McCain and the Republicans. If not, they will try to fight what might well be a losing battle: to try to convince the American public that either Clinton or Obama can be tougher and a better militarist than McCain. Unless they succeed in changing the fundamental paradigm on which foreign policy is based, we may well be in for another four years of Republican rule made in the image of George W. Bush.