(2004-03-17) Biden Democratic Foreign Policy

George Packer on Joe Biden and the need of the Democratic Party to develop a Foreign Policy. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th (World Trade Center) era... Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism (Dealing With Terrorism) is actually a war for liberalism - a struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of Liberal Democracy... I asked ThomasCarothers, an expert on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name one project that might help change the political culture of the Arab world. He mentioned a nonprofit group, the Center For International Private Enterprise, that is working to spread the idea among Arab business associations that transparency (Transparent Society) and the Rule Of Law will attract foreign investment... The United States achieved this in Serbia during the late nineties - funding pro-democracy student groups that helped in the overthrow of the Milosevic dictatorship. It's possible for something of the kind to occur in Muslim countries. Government agencies and nonprofit groups could fund new organizations like the Iranian dissident Ladan Boroumand's democracy foundation, whose Web site will post a library of liberal ideas for young people in Iran to read behind the privacy of their computer screens.