Liberal Hawk
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The term liberal hawk refers to an individual generally described as politically liberal who supports a hawkish foreign policy, as opposed to a foreign policy of not using force to intervene with conflicts around the world. Past U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have been described as liberal hawks for their roles in bringing about America's status as the world's premier military power. Modernly the term is most frequently used to describe liberals and leftists who supported or still support the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which was authorized by the United States Congress and ordered by a conservative president, George W. Bush. The war has stirred heated controversy among all political sides of the debate. In the U.S. growing doubts about the decision to invade Iraq is nearly parallel with the lackluster support for President Bush and the administration's handling of the war. The consensus among the left reaches very little disagreement about the latter.
People who have been described as liberal hawks include:
- Ronald D. Asmus, scholar at the German Marshall Fund of the United States
- Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic
- Paul Berman, contributing editor to Dissent and The New Republic
- Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
- Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times
- Christopher Hitchens, contributing editor to Slate and Vanity Fair
- Bob Kerrey, former U.S. Senator from Nebraska and president of New School University
- Joe Lieberman, U.S. Senator from Connecticut
- Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute
- Michael McFaul, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
- Matthew Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress
- George Packer, contributing writer to The New Yorker
- Martin Peretz, owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic
- Kenneth Pollack, former Clinton administration advisor and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution
- Jeremy Rosner, former Clinton administration advisor and partner at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research
- Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate
- Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International
- Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, although his role in supporting the American military involvement around the world is the matter of debate. Some critics believe the United Kingdom played a major role by convincing the US government to scale down their scope of operations which leads to toppling of Iraq's ex-president Saddam Hussein. Others believe his involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq was mostly to protect Britain's traditional interests and links in the region.
One document often cited as promoting a liberal hawkish point of view is Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy, published by the Progressive Policy Institute in October 2003.
In January 2004, Berman, Friedman, Hitchens, Packer, Pollack, Weisberg and Zakaria participated, along with Fred Kaplan, in a five-day online forum entitled Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War, in which they discussed whether they had been correct in advocating military action against Saddam Hussein's regime. Kaplan by that point had renounced his prior support, but the general consensus among the participants was that, despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war had still been justified on humanitarian grounds.
In his book The Good Fight, published in 2006, Beinart renounced his prior support for the Iraq War, saying, "I was too quick to give up on containment, too quick to think time was on Saddam's side."
