Intervention needed with voters

Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan:

Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas.

As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. Throughout its history, America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change. Despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world's dominant military power, spends half a trillion dollars a year on defense and faces no peer strong enough to deter it if it chooses to act. Between 1989 and 2001, Americans intervened with significant military force on eight occasions -- once every 18 months. This interventionism has been bipartisan -- four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the situations in which an American president may have to use force have only grown, whether it is to respond to terrorist threats, to curb weapons proliferation, to prevent genocide or other human rights violations, or to respond to more traditional forms of aggression.

To sustain broad, bipartisan support for interventions requires that we rebuild a domestic consensus on a fundamental but elusive issue: the question of legitimacy. That consensus has been one of the casualties of the Iraq war. Many of President Bush's critics, at home and abroad, argued that the war lacked legitimacy because it did not receive the sanction of the U.N. Security Council. Many of Bush's supporters respond that it is not the opinions of other nations or institutions that provide legitimacy but the substance of the action itself. Toppling Saddam Hussein was a just act and therefore was inherently legitimate.

To forge a renewed political consensus on the use of force, we first need to recognize that international legitimacy does matter. It matters to Americans, who want to believe they are acting justly and are troubled if others accuse them of selfish, immoral or otherwise illegitimate behavior. It matters to our democratic friends and allies, whose support may attest to the justness of the cause and whose participation may often be necessary to turn a military victory into a lasting political success.

...

One of the reasons success in Iraq is so important is that it will mean we will need to intervene less often. If we can prove that we can win this kind of war, our enemies will be less likely to try them. That has already happened with conventional wars where we are virtually unchallenged and where our current adversaries be they in Iran or Venezuela recognize they cannot hope to win so they posture that they will fight insurgents when they go to war with us.

The legitimacy argument is also bogus. It is not really an argument but an excuse for the status quo. The Actions in Iraq and Afghanistan had for more international legitimacy than the actions by the Clinton administration in the former Yugoslavia. Those did not even have congressional approval much less UN approval.

The problem is that there is a large group within the Democrat party that opposes the use of force under any circumstance and they are hoping for defeat in Iraq so they can use that as an argument against all future interventions with force. It needs to be demonstrated that they are conclusively wrong and the best way to do that is to win in Iraq. If we allow them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq we will have more nor less wars and our national interest will be in greater peril.