INTERVIEW WITH PETER BEINART COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

The predominantly Kurdish Yazidi community in northern Iraq is still reeling in the aftermath of last week's wave of suicide bombings. The government says that more than 400 people were killed in the deadliest attack since the 2003 US-led invasion.

But when a body is found the work is done by hand. The torso of a young woman is carefully removed, ready for burial. Many of the corpses yielded by the rubble are obscenely disfigured. As we walk through Qahataniya's ground zero it looks like an act of God but this was a deliberate attack.

CAPTAIN BARRY SEIP, US ARMY: Horrible destruction. Many people lost their wives, their fathers. I saw babies that had terrible injuries. It tore my heart out.

And that story epitomises the dilemma facing not just the US President but those on the Democratic side hoping to take his place next year. Well, Peter Beinart is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations and editor-at-large for the 'New Republic'. Anton Enus spoke to him a short while ago and asked him if there was an honourable way out of the conflict for the United States.

PETER BEINART, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: The withdrawal from Iraq is likely to be ugly. It would take a year just in terms of military logistics to get the United States out of Iraq. But I do think it is honourable to leave if you don't believe you are doing any good by staying. I think that is the situation that most Democrats feel America has reached. So Democrats have to, I think, support a withdrawal from Iraq. It's what they believe, it's what their voters believe. But they have to try to put it in a larger context of US policy in the Middle East which argues that American power will remain in the region and tries to explain how American power in the region can be a force for stability and ultimately for liberty as well.

ANTON ENUS: Turning to the two candidates, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, the contest has been portrayed as experience versus change. What are the implications for reclaiming the liberal mantle in choosing one or the other of those two candidates?

PETER BEINART: Hillary Clinton, it seems to me she has been described as someone who would be between a B-minus and a B-plus president. Which is to say she is very experienced, it's very hard to imagine her making stupid mistakes. But there may be limits on her abilities given her difficulty to communicate with more conservative voters. She is so disliked by half the country that it might be difficult for her to speak to that half of the country, which is what you need to do to make big changes in office. Obama has been described as someone who could be anywhere between a D and an A. Which is to say, there is an enormous upside because of his capacity to communicate, his capacity to speak to all Americans, which is quite remarkable. On the other hand, there is quite a lack of experience there, so the first years in particular could be rocky.

ANTON ENUS: The challenge, though, is to find a different framework for foreign policy. For example, 'liberal' has been a bad word, it has been a demonised word in America for a long time. Liberals have been portrayed as soft on national security, soft on Iraq, soft on border protection. What do the Democrats need to do to turn that around in order to have success in the White House next year?

PETER BEINART: One thing they need to do is to begin to reconcile with the American military. The US military after the Vietnam War became an all-volunteer force. It became very culturally rooted in the South and to some degree the Midwest, and became in some ways culturally anathema to liberals. Even today, on many prestigious Ivy League campuses, the US military is not allowed to recruit because the military violates those campuses' anti-discrimination laws because it does not allow gays and lesbians to serve openly. I think liberals need - and there is an opportunity now, because there is a new kind of break between conservatives and the military given the terrible way the Iraq war has been prosecuted. The Liberals need to make an opening to the American military to argue in fact that their values are not so dissimilar from the values of the American military.

ANTON ENUS: And in terms of foreign policy, placing Iraq within a context, the framework of the Bush foreign policy has been this war on terror, which you use in the title of your book. Do the Democrats need to find a different framework to formulate foreign policy?

PETER BEINART: I think the war on terror is extremely important but I would argue that it is only one part of the larger story of American foreign policy and that is the reality of globalisation today. We live in a smaller world, and as a result of that, the changes in technology and communication, America is more threatened by the pathologies that are bred even in small, poor countries than ever before. Terrorism, yes, but not only that. Public health issues like bird flu, refugees, climate change. America has to be more involved in trying to help other countries govern themselves better so that they don't threaten us, but we also have to take our responsibilities to other countries more seriously. Because in a globalised world, we each impact one another more.

ANTON ENUS: Just briefly, with the prominent neo-cons now leaving the Bush Administration, do you see that Washington politics is ripe for a changing of the guard?

PETER BEINART: Yes, the extreme unpopularity of this president has affected the Republican Party in quite a deep way. The polling is really quite astonishing about how unpopular the Republican Party is today. How much people want a dramatic change on virtually every issue from the Republican Party as it has been manifested by George W. Bush and Karl Rove. So there is enormous opportunity for a sea change in American politics if the Democrats can exploit it.

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