Not ready yet.

The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart HarperCollins, 304 pp., $25.95)

IN an age of hyper-partisan book marketing a title can be just a way to attract buyers. So at first I didn't take the subtitle of Peter Beinart's new book at face value: "Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." I figured it was a way to make a book mostly devoted to chastising the Left for not taking the War on Terror seriously enough more palatable for liberal readers. I was wrong; Beinart really means it.

But it is an argument that ultimately he doesn't manage to support, which is why this book--impressive in so many ways--ultimately fails. I want to dwell on the reasons I think it fails, but before I do I should note all that I like about it.

First, I admire Beinart, who recently stepped aside as editor of The New Republic, as a writer and a person. He is brilliant and fair-minded. The Good Fight is marvelously written and briskly paced, and often subtle and profound. Unlike most deep-think foreign-policy books, it is a pleasure to read.

Beinart is right about much. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off. Beinart excoriates the "doughface" liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism.

Beinart wants to revive the bygone anti-totalitarian liberalism that, in contrast to Bush's policy today, channeled U.S. action through multilateral institutions; realized the importance of economic development overseas to the anti-totalitarian cause; and acknowledged the fallibility of the U.S., and therefore allowed other countries to restrain our behavior and pursued domestic reforms within the U.S.

When it comes down to it, however, all of this need only mean tweaks to a mainstream-conservative foreign policy, which is why it would be wonderful if the Democrats adopted Beinart's approach and why they probably won't. But Beinart tries to inflate his proposed adjustments into a full-blown doctrine and it is here where he falls down.

Consider Iraq. Beinart supported the war initially but bailed out when our intelligence on WMD turned out to be flawed and the war wasn't as easy as he had hoped. In The Good Fight, he tries to make one of his problems with the Bush administration's handling of Iraq--its dismissiveness of the U.N.--into a matter of first importance. But it's just not. Yes, the U.N. has expertise in nation-building. Our troubles in Iraq are nonetheless attributable foremost to the opposition of jihadists and Sunni rejectionists to the new order, and to the primitive state of Iraqi society. Our enemies in Iraq didn't give a damn about the level of U.N. support we had.

East Timor is a nearly ideal intervention from Beinart's perspective. It was admirably multilateral, as we supported an Australian detachment there and the U.N. was heavily involved. But around the time of the publication date of Beinart's book East Timor began to fall apart, the victim of the forces that have so hurt us in Iraq: violent factionalism and weak governmental institutions. Alas, the U.N. can't miraculously make those go away.

We can try to spin new foreign-policy doctrines around events in Iraq all we like, but a lot of the difficulty there has been a matter of circumstances and historical contingency. For example: If we had had a version of Afghanistan's Karzai in Iraq, a leader with local legitimacy who was an ally and could have been put in power immediately, at least some of our problems would have been averted.

A lot of foreign policy comes down to a matter of touch. The foremost reason not to have invaded Iraq in retrospect would have been that it wasn't as practical as we thought. But it is hard to set down clear doctrinal markers for what's going to work. If Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation right off the bat and lost several border states from the Union, thus damaging the war effort, he would have been considered a fool for doing it instead of a giant.

Similarly, there was nothing wrong in principle with the Iraq war. If there had been, Beinart surely would have noticed beforehand. It's just that it hasn't yet worked as intended. That is not to minimize Bush's mistake if the war ultimately proves a failure. He then will have been shown to lack the intuition and prudence any successful wartime leader needs to complement his boldness and resolve, qualities Bush has in buckets.

Even as he regrets supporting the Iraq war, Beinart backs the major pillars of the Bush foreign policy. He supports vigorous American leadership and efforts to change the politics of the Middle East. His dissent from Bush is put in harsh terms, but ultimately doesn't amount to much.

Beinart advocates paying attention to economic development as well as democracy, "freedom as both greater liberty and greater equality of opportunity." This means dramatically reducing the female-illiteracy rate in the Middle East, fostering fundamental economic reform, and helping "develop an independent judiciary, a free press, multiple political parties, and, eventually, free elections, so Muslims can express their grievances without turning to violence."

How does Beinart propose to do all this? He advocates a new Marshall Plan for the Middle East. This is a form of fetishizing the past: The Marshall Plan worked 60 years ago, so let's try another one now. He calls for funding any proposed reform in the Arab world, no strings attached: "The only conditions would be that Arab countries themselves develop a plan that enjoys clear political support, conforms to broad democratic and market principles, and is completely transparent." Oh, is that all?

If Arab governments were willing to come up with such plans we wouldn't have a Middle Eastern problem in the first place. We are already pouring massive aid into the broader Middle East. Egypt gets $2 billion a year. Pakistan recently has gotten as much as $1 billion a year. The Marshall Plan was an inspiring success, but is exceptional in the history of foreign aid, which has a way of always finding its way down the rathole.

Beinart has several other themes. He calls for a more nuanced view of America's goodness. Here he is absurd, writing that "liberals reject the Right's claim that American actions, simply by virtue of being American, are beyond moral judgment." That is an indefensible sentence. How many conservatives argued that sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib was acceptable because Americans did it?

Also, the notion of a conservative belief in the moral infallibility of America--an obsession of Beinart's--is misplaced coming only a few years after conservatives were denouncing America's corruption during the Clinton impeachment controversy. It also is strange coming from the former editor of a magazine dripping with contempt for Christian conservatives who have moral objections to American culture.

Beinart's emphasis on moral nuance is part of the reason he advocates a greater reliance on multilateral institutions and the U.N.: They might know better than we, given our moral failings. This is fine--when it's possible. Let's look back to Iraq. What do you do if the U.N. is, as it often is, being terminally recalcitrant? If NATO is deadlocked by an ally, France, acting in bad faith? If the regional multilateral organization is the diseased Arab League? Beinart's answer three years ago was, "Invade anyway!"

His answer now is, "Don't do it," but that can't be the right call in every instance. The New Republic wrote a scathing editorial a few weeks ago attacking as moral idiots anyone who wants to work through the U.N. or the African Union to end the genocide in Darfur. Which goes to show that multilateralism is indeed sometimes nothing more than an obstacle to effective action, exactly as the Bushies thought it was prior to Iraq. We are back to the matter of touch.

Also, unless it is carefully hedged, the argument that Bush is insufficiently multilateral can be a straw man. You can certainly argue that he was too dismissive of allies going into Iraq, but Beinart was with him on that. On North Korea, Bush has stood resolutely by the (failed) multilateral six-party talks. On the most important crisis facing his administration besides Iraq, Iranian nukes, he has steadfastly deferred to the EU-3.

Beinart's last grand agenda item is democratic renewal at home. But there is no civil-rights struggle today, of the kind that created the occasion for anti-totalitarian liberalism's greatest domestic triumph. Jim Crow was a blot on the United States, and undermined our moral authority abroad. The post-9/11 airline bailout, which Beinart rails against, didn't provide moral propaganda for our enemies. Nor will, say, reviving American unionism strike a blow against jihadists.

Once you're committed to an aggressive anti-totalitarianism and to transforming the politics of the Middle East--the core of the Bush policy--more economic-aid programs and a greater awareness of our own fallibility and the rest of it are mere garnishes. If they can help effect the broader vision, all the better. But they aren't the main event, to which Beinart is struggling to bring his fellow liberals. This is why, for now, conservatives--and only conservatives--can win the War on Terror.