eter Beinart's guidance to the Democratic Party is replete with misstatements about MoveOn and mistaken advice for Democrats charting a course to electoral victory ("A Fighting Faith," December 13). On the misstatements: Our membership is nearly double his estimate, and we never in fact opposed targeted military action against Al Qaeda and its Taliban backers in Afghanistan. 

More troubling is Beinart's strategic advice to wind the clock back to the dawn of the cold war and adopt a simplistic us-versus-them mentality that would put a life-or-death struggle with "totalitarian Islam" at the center of the Democratic worldview. And he accuses us of having a "negative" view of the new era? 

The future of liberalism depends not on identifying and vilifying an enemy and manipulating the American public, but on espousing a positive vision for the future around which a movement, a party, and an American consensus can be built. Our experience with MoveOn's 2,900,000 members, who set our agenda, gives us confidence that this vision will emerge from the combined voices of real people who have more faith in the power of democracy and rationality than the right-wing policy elite in Washington, D.C. 

We can only surmise that Beinart's decision to lash out at progressive forces within the party--going so far as to imply they must be "purged"--must be due in part to the difficulty he and this magazine would have defending how the very strategy he promotes led us into a disastrous quagmire in Iraq. We will set aside the question of whether the best place to debate the future of the Democratic Party is in a magazine in which two-thirds interest was recently purchased by Roger Hertog (chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute) and Michael Steinhardt--two men who are either not part of the Democratic Party or are far to the right of any center the party has ever known. 

Beinart is simply wrong to state that MoveOn opposed the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We did urge that retaliation be targeted at military bases and at those who attacked us, believing that excessive military force, if not limited to terrorist camps, could lead to unnecessary civilian death and suffering and further fan the flames of terrorism. 

We are keenly aware of the need for vigilance against terrorism after September 11. To accuse us of indifference to this is pure fabrication. We do not, as Beinart implies, minimize the threats we face, nor are we hostile to U.S. power or its use to counter real dangers. Security must be a guiding principle for Democrats and all Americans. We want our children safe, our homes and offices secure, and terrorism defeated. 

We agree that American military force must be available as an option for responding to very real threats to our security that exist now and surely will in the future. Military force is not the only answer, however. This is a philosophy that drove our view on Iraq, where our signature campaign pulled together a broad coalition of individuals and organizations to support inspections not war. 

Our focus on real threats and our understanding of history led us to vigorously oppose the misguided, preemptive war launched by the Bush administration in Iraq. President Bush--with The New Republic's firm support--attacked an enemy with no connection to the real threat (Al Qaeda) and who posed no immediate threat to our safety and security. The Iraq war has in fact only made us less secure, creating more terrorists seeking to harm us--precisely the disastrous dynamic predicted before the war by CIA intelligence analysts and State Department diplomats and acknowledged recently in reports from the Pentagon itself. 

Beinart ignores these facts on the ground and instead recommends a wholesale embrace of the neoconservative ideology that we face a worldwide clash of civilizations and that those who recognize it are "hard" and those who don't are "soft." This is nonsense. We would like to see analyses by tnr of the truly "hard" choices our nation faces in addressing terrorism, which have been totally overshadowed by the Iraq debacle: How we will approach Russia and the former Soviet Republics to deal with nuclear proliferation? How will we deal with supposedly friendly nations like Saudi Arabia, which foments extremism in religious schools? How will we require U.S. companies to address the security of their own infrastructure? And how will we get serious about inspecting goods flowing through our ports? 

Getting tough on terrorism means getting tough on some of the Bush administration's core constituencies and old friends. And the Bush administration and the neocons are "soft" because they don't have the political will to take them on. Democrats can and should take a tough stand and build a fact-based "hard" security policy for our nation.

PETER BEINART RESPONDS:

Wes Boyd and Joan Blades write that I am "simply wrong to state that MoveOn opposed the war in Afghanistan." But the petition MoveOn circulated after September 11 speaks for itself. It demands that the United States "support justice, not escalating violence," calls for "ending the cycle of violence," and says that "[i]f we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban dictatorship ... we become like the terrorists we oppose."

By any reasonable standard, that is opposition to war in Afghanistan. War, by definition, does not end "the cycle of violence." And any military action that avoided "bombing Kabul" would have left the deeply interwoven Taliban-Al Qaeda regime in power. Had the United States done as MoveOn counseled, we might have avoided killing Afghan civilians. But prolonged Taliban-Al Qaeda rule would surely have killed many more while threatening American lives as well. It is this insistence on absolute American purity, and the refusal to make real world moral tradeoffs, that produces the practical hostility to U.S. power that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. termed in The Vital Center "doughface" progressivism.

Boyd and Blades also deny that MoveOn has "minimize[d] the threats we face." But how else can one interpret MoveOn's July 18, 2002, bulletin, which claims absurdly that the (admittedly flawed) Patriot Act "nullified large portions of the Bill of Rights" and then says, "The big question is, '[I]s it worth it? Is the threat to the United States' existence great enough to justify the evisceration of our most treasured principles?'" This is civil-libertarian alarmism at its worst--vastly exaggerating the threat from John Ashcroft in order to downplay the threat from Al Qaeda.

The New Republic has written repeatedly about the topics that Boyd and Blades urge us to investigate: We have excoriated the Bush administration for its refusal to make securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union a priority, for coddling the tyrants in Riyadh, and for its unwillingness to adequately fund homeland security. On Iraq, while we have long advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, we have also condemned the Bush administration's dishonesty, arrogance, and incompetence in carrying it out (see "Lesson Plan," page eight). Earlier this year, we even published a special issue about Iraq titled "were we wrong?"--the kind of searching self-examination MoveOn might want to undertake regarding its stance on Afghanistan.

Finally, "neoconservative ideology" is precisely what my article does not advocate. I want Democrats to make defeating totalitarian Islam their defining passion because I believe that it is liberalism, guided by its best traditions--not "neoconservative ideology"--that can make Muslims free and Americans safe. It is that brand of liberalism that I hope MoveOn will one day embrace.