Iraq and Liberal Interventionism in American Foreign Policy– PART 1

by

Larry DeWitt

Intimations of Greatness-

In mid-November the President of the United States stood in historic 17th century Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace in London and spoke to the British aristocracy–and through the media to the British people and to the world–about the war in Iraq. The Banqueting House has been the setting for state banquets and for similar speeches for nearly four hundred years. On that afternoon in November 2003 the speaker of the moment reminded a listener of no one so much as Winston Churchill, who roamed the rooms of Whitehall for sixty years himself. This was a surprising invocation since the speaker was George W. Bush, he of the fractured syntax and, up to now, a mind like a mullet and a soulfulness little deeper than a smirking college frat boy. And yet it was indeed George W. Bush, and the words he spoke, and the depth of conviction with which he spoke them, could only be fairly described as Churchillian. There were, I would even say, intimations of greatness in that speech.

This was certainly a shock to me. For the very first time since his shameful conduct in Florida in the 2000 election, I finally had an occasion to actually be proud that George W. Bush was my President. In the Iraq situation I had always secretly admired Tony Blair for the depth and thoughtfulness of his comments on the war. In Tony Blair, I saw a mature mind at work. In George Bush, I usually saw a B-student who seemed obtuse at his most lucid. But something has changed. Something has changed George Bush. He has now become an American President, and one, perhaps, on the threshold of becoming a great President.

There are two grand narratives of history, classically called the Great Man theory (or Great Woman) and the Great Events theory. The Great Man theory supposes that people achieve greatness because of their own inherent character which, when faced with the opportunity of challenging circumstances, provides the climate for their own greatness to be displayed. The Great Events theory says that people achieve greatness because quite ordinary people find themselves in quite extraordinary circumstances and rise to their challenge. It is impossible to choose between them, although I am starting to think that George W. Bush is adding a little more weight to the Great Events side of the scale.

In any event, something very momentous was given voice on that day in November. George W. Bush, in words that could have very easily been spoken by Churchill, announced that the fundamental goal in Iraq–the sole metric for our success–was whether or not we successfully brought freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. In this speech, Bush made the final transition from what I will shortly describe as a Conservative Interventionist to that of a Liberal Interventionist. Before I explain just what that means, and its significance, we would do well to consider in some detail just what the President said.

Putting the British and American effort in Iraq on the foundation of his moral vision the President said:

“The deepest beliefs of our nations set the direction of our foreign policy. We value our own civil rights, so we stand for the human rights of others. We affirm the God-given dignity of every person, so we are moved to action by poverty and oppression and famine and disease. The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings. Together our nations are standing and sacrificing for this high goal in a distant land at this very hour.”

Recalling some of the history of Whitehall, Bush reminded the world:

“The last President to stay at Buckingham Palace was an idealist, without question. At a dinner hosted by King George V, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson made a pledge; with typical American understatement, he vowed that right and justice would become the predominant and controlling force in the world. . . .

At Wilson's high point of idealism, however, Europe was one short generation from Munich and Auschwitz and the Blitz. Looking back, we see the reasons why. The League of Nations, lacking both credibility and will, collapsed at the first challenge of the dictators. Free nations failed to recognize, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain sight. And so dictators went about their business, feeding resentments and anti-Semitism, bringing death to innocent people in this city and across the world, and filling the last century with violence and genocide.”

Bush then went to some length to express the principles that he urges should guide our foreign policy:

“The peace and security of free nations now rests on three pillars: First, international organizations must be equal to the challenges facing our world, from lifting up failing states to opposing proliferation. . . .

America and Great Britain have done, and will do, all in their power to prevent the United Nations from solemnly choosing its own irrelevance and inviting the fate of the League of Nations. It's not enough to meet the dangers of the world with resolutions; we must meet those dangers with resolve. . . .

Our first choice, and our constant practice, is to work with other responsible governments. We understand, as well, that the success of multilateralism is not measured by adherence to forms alone, the tidiness of the process, but by the results we achieve to keep our nations secure.”

“The second pillar of peace and security in our world is the willingness of free nations, when the last resort arrives, to restrain aggression and evil by force. There are principled objections to the use of force in every generation, and I credit the good motives behind these views.

Those in authority, however, are not judged only by good motivations. The people have given us the duty to defend them. And that duty sometimes requires the violent restraint of violent men. In some cases, the measured use of force is all that protects us from a chaotic world ruled by force.

Most in the peaceful West have no living memory of that kind of world. Yet in some countries, the memories are recent: The victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, those who survived the rapists and the death squads, have few qualms when NATO applied force to help end those crimes. The women of Afghanistan, imprisoned in their homes and beaten in the streets and executed in public spectacles, did not reproach us for routing the Taliban. The inhabitants of Iraq's Baathist hell, with its lavish palaces and its torture chambers, with its massive statues and its mass graves, do not miss their fugitive dictator. . . .

It's been said that those who live near a police station find it hard to believe in the triumph of violence, in the same way free peoples might be tempted to take for granted the orderly societies we have come to know. Europe's peaceful unity is one of the great achievements of the last half-century. And because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget how Europe's unity was achieved -- by allied armies of liberation and NATO armies of defense. And let us never forget, beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.”

“The third pillar of security is our commitment to the global expansion of democracy, and the hope and progress it brings, as the alternative to instability and to hatred and terror. We cannot rely exclusively on military power to assure our long-term security. Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance.

In democratic and successful societies, men and women do not swear allegiance to malcontents and murderers; they turn their hearts and labor to building better lives. And democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbors; they honor the aspirations and dignity of their own people. In our conflict with terror and tyranny, we have an unmatched advantage, a power that cannot be resisted, and that is the appeal of freedom to all mankind.”

And finally, the President told his British hosts, and he told the watching and waiting world, wherein their own failings of the past lay, and where they must labor to build a better world:

“Our part, as free nations, is to ally ourselves with reform, wherever it occurs. . . .

It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it.

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”

George W. Bush has found his voice and has hit his stride. The office, it seems, has finally begun to make the man. If he can sustain this level of engagement with the great issues of his time, he will become a great American President. But whether he does or not, we need to take the message of his Whitehall speech and make it the basis for our foreign policy on into the future.

The Four Forms of Foreign Policy-

When the Bush Administration signaled its intentions to invade Iraq most liberals rose up in full-throated opposition. They perceived all sorts of ugly agendas behind the decision–both overt and hidden. But they missed something very large, because of the poverty of their conceptual scheme. You see, there is not just one type of interventionism, but two. And there is not just one form of isolationism, but two as well. In both intervention and isolation, there is a conservative and a liberal strain. We need to understand all four viewpoints to really understand what is happening in Iraq and why.

Conservative Isolationists believe that America is, or ought to be, a Fortress America. They want us to somehow pull up the drawbridges across the Atlantic and the Pacific and stay out of “foreign entanglements.” This kind of Conservative Isolationism held great sway in America in the interwar years and it was the dominant foreign policy idea throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It also led, in my view, to the U.S. missing many opportunities to respond more effectively to the gathering storm clouds in Europe and Asia and to lessen, if not entirely prevent, World War II. Conservative Isolationism is the impulse, even today, behind the unwillingness of many Americans to act “as the policeman to the world.”

Liberal Isolationism springs from an entirely contrary set of values and attitudes. Liberal Isolationism is a liberal reaction to the excesses of our own government, especially during the Cold War and the War in Vietnam. Liberals felt betrayed by American foreign policy during the post-War period, which offered rationalizations for intervening in the affairs of other nations that were often transparently self-serving and imperialistic. Thus liberals tend to see interventions like Vietnam as the paradigm for what America does when it becomes involved by force in the affairs of other nations. It is this distrust, and the assumption of corruption in American foreign policy, which is at the base of the liberal opposition to our policy in Iraq. Extravagant suggestions like “we’re doing it for the oil,” or “we want to put bases in Iraq,” or “we just want to throw our weight around because we are the biggest bully on the planet,” are all over-the-top expressions of the Liberal Isolationist sentiment. Fundamentally, the Liberal Isolationists are isolationists because they believe that the only form of interventionism is Conservative Interventionism, and they are unalterably –and correctly, I would say–opposed to this form of interventionism.

Conservative Interventionism is essentially imperialism in evening clothes. Conservative Interventionists want to intervene in the affairs of other nations precisely in order to serve America’s self-interest. Whether that self-interest is something as amorphous as “the projection of American power,” or whether it is a grab for land, or an attempt to force open a market for American products, the Conservative Interventionist are most assuredly doing it for us, for our self-interest. If it were ever true, for example, that one reason we invaded Iraq were to get our hands on their oil, this would indeed by an expression of the principles of Conservative Interventionism. The only legitimate form of Conservative Interventionism is a clear-cut case of self-defense. Our entry into World War II is one such example.

Liberal Interventionism is the least understood of the four policies because it is the least commonly practiced. Essentially, Liberal Interventionism is the idea that the values and principles of social justice upon which we found our own nation should be extended into other nations as well–for the cause of social justice, internationally, not for our immediate self-interest. It is thus an inherently liberal posture. But it is liberalism with weaponry. It can contain both a positive focus–free trade, international aid, election monitoring, encouraging democracy, etc.–and it can have a negative focus, that is, fighting injustice elsewhere in the world. The Liberal Interventionist believes that just as we have a moral duty to fight injustice at home, we have the same duty everywhere in the world. That national borders are not barriers to moral obligation. Thus, if it were ever true that America intervened in Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny and bring them freedom and democracy, then this would be an example of a Liberal Interventionist rationale for our involvement.

There are not many of us in the Liberal Interventionist camp. Most of my generation, the generation of Watergate and Vietnam, became deeply cynical about our foreign policy and our government and became Liberal Isolationists as a result. And in the early days of the War in Iraq there sure were not many of us Liberal Interventionists, and the few of us who urged regime change in Iraq on grounds of social justice for the Iraqis, had to endure a barrage of angry criticism from our Liberal Isolationist friends. We also had, from time to time, to face the unpleasant fact that we were on the same side of the issue as the Conservative Interventionists–although, please God, for entirely different reasons.

Of the few public voices among the Liberal Interventionists, the best known is probably the columnist Thomas Friedman. On the very day that I write these words, Friedman’s syndicated column put matters as only he can:

“. . . even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important, liberal revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. Forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don’t know if we can pull this off. . . . But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad, and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot.”

So, the important sea-change which has happened in America’s policy in Iraq is that we have gone from justifying our actions on the grounds of Conservative Interventionism to justifying them on the grounds of Liberal Interventionism –which is the point of the extended quotations from the President’s speech. I never cared what Bush’s motives were, just so long as he did the right thing–which was to remove Saddam and his regime from power. I never dreamed that things would turn out such that Bush would end up with no other options in Iraq but to embrace this aim of the Liberal Interventionists as the core rationale for our involvement in Iraq. But that is precisely what has happened.

It simply no longer matters what Bush’s real motives were for invading Iraq. It does not matter because he has been forced into a position where the only context in which he now is able to rationalize our presence in Iraq is that of bringing democracy and freedom to the Iraqis. Bringing democracy to Iraq is now the only acknowledged test of our success. This means that America will have to live up to the Liberal Interventionist rhetoric which the President has articulated. We are going to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, or our intervention is going to fail. Every liberal should, therefore, at this juncture be wishing George Bush godspeed. May he rise to greatness, in spite of himself.

12/2/03

Iraq and Liberal Interventionism in American Foreign Policy– PART 2

by

Larry DeWitt

Now that we understand there are two varieties of isolationism and two varieties of interventionism we can look at a couple of examples of how these four ideas affected America’s foreign policy in the 20th century, and what we have to learn from them.

World War II & the Folly of Conservative Isolationism-

What little most Americans know of the issue of appeasement in the face of foreign tyrannies they understand only in the infamous incident of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s naive announcement to have secured “peace in our time” by letting Hitler take Czechoslovakia without firing a shot and without fear of opposition from the civilized nations of the world. In Chamberlain’s wain performance–waving a piece of paper in the breeze and proclaiming it to be England’s bulwark against totalitarianism–we tend now to see only a kind of pathetic weakness, and an advertisement for Conservative Interventionism.

But Chamberlain’s folly was not nearly so foolish as it seems in retrospect because it was in many respects a reasonable response to repeated American failures to intervene in world affairs. Chamberlain was not an appeaser by nature or policy. Indeed, when Japan invaded Manchuria and began the long Sino-Japanese War of the mid-1930s, it was Chamberlain who took the lead in trying to form an international coalition to resist Japanese expansionism in the Far East. The coalition failed because the U.S. refused to join–the isolationist sentiment being too strong for Franklin Roosevelt to overcome. This taught Chamberlain a bitter lesson, which he confided to his diary, that “the Untied States could not be depended upon if Britain should get into trouble.” And it was this realization which led to the appeasement at Munich.

This was not by any means the first failure of American moral courage in the face of foreign tyranny. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 a modest response from the Europeans (such a simple action as closing the Suez Canal) could have thwarted Italy’s war plans. But Europe, and America, refused to get involved, allowing Mussolini a free-hand for his rein of terror in Africa, in which the Italians used aerial bombardment to destroy Ethiopian villagers in their mud huts. Mussolini’s son publically boasted about the “magnificent sport” of watching the villagers get blown apart by the bombs, like “a budding rose unfolding.”

In 1936 when the fascist general Francisco Franco launched his coup d'etat against the democratically elected government of Spain, American foreign policy was one of non-involvement. The forces of tyranny on the other side–Franco’s fellow fascists, Hitler and Mussolini–had no such compunction against intervention in the affairs of other nations and thus generously provided arms and troops in Franco’s aid. The effect was intervention by the forces of tyranny, and neutrality by the forces of democracy. The result was, of course, forty years of fascist dictatorship in Spain.

The most wicked and corrupt failure of moral leadership by the democracies of the world was of course our failure to stop Hitler early in his march to world domination. When Hitler made his first move toward the conquest of his neighbors by occupying the Rhineland in 1936 with 35,000 Nazi troops, thereby violating the Treaty of Versailles and signaling the start of World War II, America and the western democracies stood by in silence. France wanted to fight the invasion, but without help from America and Britain it was fearful of failure. A simple intervention at this moment would have blocked Hitler’s agenda and slowed, if not prevented, World War II. Hitler himself would provide the necessary admission of Germany’s vulnerability by admitting to confidants: “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

In the Japanese we faced an expansionist totalitarian regime intent on standing astride the Pacific world; and in the Nazis we faced an expansionist totalitarian regime intent on standing astride the Atlantic world. And one of our allies–Joseph Stalin–was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world. No wonder we wanted to hide our heads in the sand. But thank God for Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, one (Churchill) who openly urged his country to jump into the breach, and one (FDR) who understood the vital need of American intervention, but had to virtually seduce the nation into going along. And it was only the self-aggrandizing madness of one of these tyrants (Japan) who foolishly attacked the U.S. in Pearl Harbor which finally broke the grip of the conservative isolationist hold on America’s wealth and power and provoked us to become Conservative Interventionists–on the quite sensible grounds that our survival was at stake and so self-interest was imminently called for. And it was only the self-aggrandizing madness of one of these tyrants (Hitler) who foolishly attacked Russia which kept England alive long enough for America’s aid to come to the rescue. Without America, England would have been lost. Without England, Western Europe would have been lost. And the world would have been reduced to a struggle for domination between three bestial regimes–the Soviets in Eastern Union, the Nazis in Western Europe, and Japan in the Pacific. And all the world would have become mere collateral damage along the way.

The folly at the heart of all of America’s failures during the interwar years was not a failure of heart–Americans generally identified with the victims of aggression, feeling sympathy for the Chinese and the Ethiopians, for example. Probably most Americans were also in sympathy with the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, many hundreds of Americans going so far as to fight in a futile effort against the fascists. America’s failure during the interwar years was not a failure of heart, it was a failure of vision. America still believed in the dangerously false and naive view that we were Fortress America, that we could somehow remain uninvolved in Europe and Asia and thereby secure our own peace, even if we had to let the rest of the world descend into the hell of dictatorship and tyranny. This was of course ignorant in the extreme. The world was already even then a small global village. The blessings of our remote geography, which had protected us from troubles abroad during the early years of our nation, had vanished already in the early 20th century due to revolutions in technology, transportation and world trade. There was no fortress America, and so we could not afford the folly of isolationism, for any reason.

But America did intervene. And America’s intervention in World War II saved the whole of the civilized world. As Churchill put it: If Britain were defeated “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.” That this did not happen, is a tribute to America’s conservative intervention in World War II.

Vietnam & the Folly of Conservative Interventionism-

Having learned the lessons of World War II–we thought–America then proceeded to apply the attitude of Conservative Interventionism throughout the Cold War. This led to some small mistakes, and some large ones. We should, however, acknowledge at the outset that the singular success of the Cold War era–containing the hegemonic ambitions of Stalin and his successors–was achieved, and without going to war directly with the Soviet Union. But lots of other “collateral damage” happened along the way.

When we launched the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 we did so out of a misguided sense of conservative intervention. We thought it was somehow our right to purge communists from the neighborhood, because we thought communism was a bad idea (it certainly is) and because we abrogated to ourselves the right to decide this for people who were not even implicitly asking for our help. Thus we intervened in Cuba and made fools of ourselves and a lasting enemy out of a neighbor who could never threaten us in any way and with whom we could just as easily have learned to live.

One of the ugliest episodes came at the hands of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. In 1973 the two of them decided to overthrow a democratically elected communist government in Chile, because they did not like how the Chileans had voted. The Chileans, understanding the principles of democracy to mean they could elect anyone they liked, voted into office the communist Salvador Allende. This outraged Nixon and Kissinger–not the democracy part so much as the outcome of the democracy part. They apparently failed to grasp that this was the essence of democracy. Nixon and Kissinger thus enlisted the CIA to plot the overthrow of Allende. The result of their conservative interventionism was the assassination of the elected President of Chile. As a result of all this, Henry Kissinger is today virtually a land-bound prisoner in the United States. He cannot leave the U.S. for fear of being hauled before a bar of justice in some international tribunal. On Memorial Day 2001, while staying in his $1,700 a night suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, he was served with a subpoena by the French Magistrate who is investigating some of the abuses of the fascist dictator (Augusto Pinochet) whom Nixon and Kissinger put in power by supporting the coup against Allende. Kissinger had to flee Paris, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, and get on the next plane out of France to escape being hauled before a French court. Subpoenas have also been issued for Kissinger to appear before courts in Chile and Argentina. So he is–at the very least–a scoff-law on two continents. Nixon, alas, is beyond the reach of any process of law–except, perhaps, for divine retribution.

Of course, the ugliest and most brutal and most disheartening of all the follies of Conservative Interventionism during the Cold War was America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Although both were instances of conservative intervention, there were deep differences between Vietnam and World War II. In World War II we were faced with three hegemonic regimes bent on world domination, and each of which had almost enough power to achieve their aims. Their victims were both domestic and international. These regimes were not the victims of imperialism, they were the imperialists. In some very real sense, freedom and democracy, and civilization itself–as Churchill often put it–were at stake.

The contrast with Vietnam is striking. Vietnam had long been the victim of European imperialism, having been conquered first by Napoleon III in 1860. By the 1930s an effective nationalist force was operating, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Ho, who was educated in the west, turned to the western nations for assistance in freeing his country from the occupying French, expecting that the nations who were the champions of democracy would of course support the aspirations for democracy of the people of Vietnam. But the U.S. and the other western powers sided with the French–betraying Vietnam. Ho then turned to the communist world for help and the communists were only too happy to use Ho as a client vassal for their expansionist agenda. Thus the clash became one of communists versus non-communists.

When the Japanese invaded Indochina soon after attacking Pearl Harbor, the allies suddenly needed Ho and his fighters and they formed a wartime alliance, on the promise that the Vietnamese would be freed of all colonial powers after the war. But after the war the French tried to reassert their imperialist power over Vietnam, and the allies took a walk–betraying the Vietnamese again.

As part of Truman’s concessions at Potsdam, Vietnam was partitioned into a North and South Vietnam. The French seized power in the south and the Vietminh, under Ho, hunkered down in the North. Thus began the first Vietnam War. By 1954 the Vietminh had defeated the French and won the war. In the peace negotiations in Geneva the western powers arranged a peace, on the promise of country-wide free elections in 1956. The head of the U.S. client regime in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, realizing that he would lose the election, cancelled it. The U.S. supported the murder of this infant experiment in democracy–betraying Vietnam for the third time. Thus began the long involvement of the U.S. in propping-up non-communist regimes in the South, to fight the unification of Vietnam by the popular election of a communist from the North. Thus also began the second Vietnam War–the one in which the United States squandered its honor.

When we intervened in Vietnam, we were profoundly deluded as to what we were doing. As Robert MacNamara recently admitted: “We saw Vietnam as a war against the ideology of communism. The North Vietnamese saw it as an internal war of liberation. We were wrong.” How we could have gotten it so wrong for so long is one of the mysteries of American foreign policy history. But I think I have a clue in an observation about Lyndon Johnson.

In his magisterial biography of Lyndon Johnson’s career in the Senate (Master of the Senate), Robert Caro put his finger on one singular quality in Lyndon Johnson’s repertoire of political skills. Johnson, Caro concluded, had the rare ability to put himself in the other guy’s shoes, or to see the situation through the other fellow’s eyes. Johnson developed this skill so he could more keenly discern where the other guy’s real core interests lay, so that Johnson could figure out how to get what he wanted by giving the other fellow what he really wanted. While other politicians saw what they wanted to see, or saw things sentimentally, Johnson saw with a searing clarity just what the real truth was, shorn of sentiment and wishful thinking. Johnson applied this skill in every domain of his political action, save one. He never could apply it to his predicament in Vietnam.

As the secretly recorded LBJ White House Tapes have now revealed, Johnson was deeply conflicted about the war in Vietnam. He was not, as we all believed of him at the time, a warmonger. He desperately wanted to find a way out of the quagmire. But the way the issue was framed for him was that Vietnam was a world-scale conflict between two competing world ideologies–communism and democratic capitalism. This is how every one of his advisers saw it–through the perspective of their geopolitical calculus. Thus, the policy prescription was to continually rachet-up the military pressure on North Vietnam in the confident assumption that when the war became too costly for them, they would sue for peace. But no matter how much he escalated the war, it was never enough, the North Vietnamese just kept coming.

Johnson never stopped to apply his greatest political skill to his greatest political problem. He never asked himself how the other fellow saw it. He never asked himself who Ho Chi Minh saw in the mirror each morning as he trimmed his beard. Had he asked that question, he might have gained a vital insight. When Ho looked in the mirror each morning, did he see Karl Marx? No, he saw Abraham Lincoln. For Ho, the war was about the salvation of his divided nation, just as for Lincoln the Civil War was about the salvation of his. The reason Ho would never respond rationally to the calculus of geopolitics was because this was not an ideological conflict for him, it was a struggle for the very survival of his nation.

For more than a 100 years America betrayed the democratic aspirations of the Vietnamese people; first with decades of Conservative Isolationism, then with decades of Conservative Interventionism. There were–and should have been–some hard lessons to be learned from this. But we learned some of the wrong lessons.

The Post-Vietnam Syndrome & the Folly of Liberal Isolationism-

In the Cold War period a new form of isolationism would appear–Liberal Isolationism–created as a reaction to the icy indifference of Conservative Isolationism and the haughty excesses of Conservative Interventionism. It came about, more than any other single factor, from our experience in Vietnam.

Liberals in America looked at the last few decades of our Vietnam policy–the phase of our active Conservative Interventionism–observed the evils they saw perpetrated in the name of American power, and concluded that the lesson of Vietnam (and Chile and other Cold War interventions) was that America had no business involving itself in the affairs of other nations. We became deeply distrustful of America’s intentions and came to believe that anytime we spoke of trying to help another nation by intervening in their affairs, that this was just a cover-story for more Conservative Interventionism. We came to believe that intervention was invariably corrupt and self-serving.

Riven with this guilt and this resentment and this distrust, Liberals began to turn a blind eye to the sad saga of treachery and brutality that unfolded in the post-Vietnam years. Thus when Pol Pot turned the nation of Cambodia into the Killing Fields, we could not get involved. When Idi Amin terrorized his own nation in Uganda, we could not get involved. When Papa Doc and then Baby Doc Duvalier terrorized the Haitian people in our own backyard, we could not get involved. When Iraq under Saddam Hussein began its three-decades long descent into barbarism, we could not get involved–unless it was to sell him arms to fight the Iranians. And on and on and on it has gone, for the balance of the 20th century. There is literally no accounting of how many millions of human beings have been raped, and tortured and murdered in the last 30 years because Liberals–who should by their professed values be at the forefront of the crusade against these barbarians–have taken refuge in common quarters with the conservative isolationists in America. One of our great shames as humanity is that Stalin and Pol Pot and Idi Amin all died peacefully in their sleep as old men, rather than in a prison cell or on the gallows. Of those liberals who find ourselves in bed with strange conservative bedfellows, I judge that the moral vacuity of the isolationists will weigh more heavily in the scales of guilt.

The Potential Dangers of Liberal Interventionism-

Finally, we need to reflect a little on the very real hazards of interventionism, even of the liberal variety. I think the principle I am urging here is sufficiently clear and straightforward: whenever tyranny is occurring anywhere in the world, it is the moral duty of the civilized nations of the world to stop it. National borders notwithstanding.

There is admittedly one very large problem with this principle. It is what we might call the epistemological problem.

Simply put: how do we know in any given situation that injustice is occurring? It is conceivable (some might say, even likely) that we could be wrong in our judgments about what we perceive to be tyranny. This concern resolves itself down to three possible types of error:

1- We might use an alleged tyranny as a pretext for other agendas of our own, say imperialistic aims–whether they be “oil,” or territory, or “the projection of American power,” or whatever;

2- We might be self-deluded, honestly trying to avoid serving our own self-interest, but unable to separate our own interests from our perceptions of the interests of others. This happens most often when we come to the “close-call” cases where we know something is bad, but it may not be bad enough to justify intervention;

3- We might be just plain wrong. We might think we know what is going on in a given country in a given situation, but our information, or our perceptions, or worse, our presumptions, about it might be mistaken.

There are of course plenty of examples of the U.S. making all these types of errors.

When the U.S. liberated the Phillippines from the Spanish imperialists in the 1890s we did so not just for the good of the Filipinos (although that was our cover story), but in order to substitute our own imperialism for one from Europe. An outrageous and recent example of being plain wrong due to arrogant presumptions is the way that the issue of weapons of mass destruction was used by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to justify the war with Iraq. As I have made clear by now, I do not believe the correct justification for regime change is Iraq was WMD. But in arguing this rationale, the Secretary of Defense illustrated very starkly how dangerous presumptions can be when contemplating armed intervention in the affairs of another nation. In response to a December 2002 press conference by the Secretary I wrote the following:

“I agree with the implicit premise of our involvement in Iraq–which I take to be the idea that civilized nations have a moral obligation to depose tyrants. But the Secretary of Defense, in his routine Press Conference of December 3rd, expressed a set of ideas which frighten me even more than the threat of terrorism. Secretary Rumsfeld told us that his understanding our nation’s policy is as follows: 1) We know Iraq is guilty of having weapons of mass destruction (not suspect or believe or presume, but know–which means evidence is irrelevant); 2) If they claim they are innocent, this claim proves their guilt; 3) they can establish their innocence only by declaring their guilt and letting the U.N. disarm them. The Secretary started his remarks on Iraq with these declarations, and made a big point of telling us that we had to get this clear in our minds before we could even talk about the details of our policy. The logic is iron-clad to be sure. It means that Iraq is guilty. There is no logical option under which we can discover that, against our strongest beliefs, they are innocent after all. Like most Americans, I believe they are indeed guilty of possessing weapons of mass destruction–but I could be wrong. But as I have always understood our nation’s values, their guilt must be proven by evidence, not guaranteed by a fiat of logic. That no journalist present even thought to question the Secretary’s logic, frightens me. That the Secretary’s view may now be what American values have come to mean in a time of national stress, frightens me even more.”

We have discussed Vietnam at length. The bin of American history is stocked full of many other examples.

We have a right to be suspicious of ourselves and our motives, and we have a need to be vigilant about our own conduct when we set sail on the sea of intervention. So, how are we to guard against the epistemological problems associated with intervention?

The short answer is: the same way that we guard against similar problems in the general realm of epistemology. We submit our conjectures about the world to the consensual validation process of the broader community. In this context, this means we work in an international organizational context through the United Nations. The idea here is that if there is a consensus among the nations of the world then it is more likely we are doing the right thing by intervening. But this too has its own set of problems.

First, we need a process which has some of the attributes of a legal proceeding in which we try to frame an objective judgment by relying on independent judges and juries–that is, persons who are not parties to the conflict. We cannot just call the matter to a vote in the U.N. where persons with interests are permitted to be on the jury, so to say. This is, for example, why the French and Russians could legitimately be excluded from the decision about Iraq since their own economic ties to the Hussein regime rendered their judgments suspect.

Second, what do we do when the court refuses to indict, so to speak? What do we do when the international community simply defaults on its responsibilities and refuses to get involved. Not because the moral situation is ambiguous, but because, let’s say, key players have billions of dollars in oil contracts with a despotic regime? Or what if the international community just doesn’t want to get involved, because the problem is not yet on their doorstep? As a clear-cut example of how this really happens sometimes consider the matter of the lynching of African-Americans during the 1920s in America. During that period the courts and the police simply ignored the violence in their midst. They didn’t what to be bothered. I think we say of America’s conduct in the 1920s that it was a moral failure. In the same way, the nations of the world may well fail to do their duty as well.

Clearly, the weak point in the U.S. involvement in Iraq is the limited international consensus around our intervention (although it is unfair to describe it as unilateral as more than 50 nations signed on to our action). It would have been much better for everyone concerned if the international community had achieved something closer to a universal consensus. But sometimes nations, like people, evade and equivocate and vacillate and temporize and avoid. At the end of the day, the bottom line is that something has to be done about despots like Saddam Hussein. It is far and away the best idea–because of the epistemological problem–that the U.S. act in concert with the international community. But if the international community will not act, then it remains for the nations who are willing, to do so. Despite all the risks that such unilateral action entails, it is morally obligatory. And in the case of Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the epistemological problem is not real, only theoretical. There is no moral ambiguity among civilized people in the judgment that Saddam was a tyrannical despot who terrorized millions of people. That is enough to justify action. And given that set of facts, nothing can justify inaction.

As a practical constraint on intervention run riot, I suggest, in addition to the consensus among civilized nations, that we ought to restrict military intervention to those instances in which the injustice is patent and not really in serious dispute. Such as Iraq. Such as Afghanistan. But not, for example, Cuba. Yes, we may have to fight and debate and argue about individual cases; but in the end, if we decide that a clear tyranny is present, then I think we should intervene in whatever ways necessary to end that tyranny. We can no longer morally afford to live in a world in which national sovereignty is allowed to be a cover for criminality.

As a final practical point, explicitly adopting an ethic of Liberal Interventionism would not require us to promulgate any new principles of international relations. The authority is already fully present in the founding documents of the United Nations. One of the U.N.’s founding documents is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in significant part by Eleanor Roosevelt. All I am suggesting is that whenever a nation is found to be violating the human rights of its own citizens or of its neighbors, as defined in the Universal Declaration, that the members of the United Nations have a legal and moral right to stop it from doing so. Not just to talk about it, but to take action. Otherwise, as George W. Bush correctly observes, the U.N. risks becoming irrelevant.

A World At Perpetual War?

Now, one quite sensible worry about the type of world order I am suggesting is that it seems on its face to imply that we would end up with a world perpetually at war. Or at least, that the U.S. and other powerful nations might find themselves entangled in an endless series of policing efforts around the world. Perhaps. But a few counter-points need to be thought about.

First, I think it is actually likely that in the kind of world order I am advocating that conflict would be dramatically lessened. The reason is simple. We all understand that one of the dynamics of life is that if a bully goes unchallenged he tends to become an even bigger bully. I would suggest that much of the barbarity that happens all too regularly around the globe exists precisely because there is no effective police power to prevent it. If we had a social order in which the decent nations of the world were certain to smash the Pol Pots and the Idi Amins and the Saddam Husseins, there would I suspect be many fewer Pol Pots and Idi Amins and Saddam Husseins. But if I am wrong about this, so be it. The job of producing a more just world is however big it is, and we cannot by wishing and hoping and turning a blind eye, make it any smaller. Which brings us to the second point.

To think that I am advocating a warlike future world–that is somehow a departure from our present peaceful ways–is to betray a colossal indifference to the suffering that is already present. To put it plainly: the world is not now a remotely peaceful place. War and tyranny and terror are the daily experience of millions of people all over the globe. It is just that it has been (up until 9/11) rather peaceful in our neck of the woods. But for the 25 million human beings who lived for three decades under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the world was not at peace. Nor for the millions slaughtered by Pol Pot was the world a peaceful place. Nor for the citizens of Uganda during Idi Amin’s rain of terror was the world at peace. So to think that what I am suggesting means more conflict may be true, in the selfish sense that it may well mean more conflict FOR US. But it would not mean more conflict for the world (indeed, I believe it will result in less). But being content with the existing world order in which despots have a free hand to brutalize millions of people, provided they keep their evils confined to their own borders, is rather like the police department permitting crime to rage unchecked so long as the criminals don’t make the mistake of committing their crimes on the steps of the police station.

The last thing we need to add to the ideals of Liberal Interventionism is the obvious caveat that this is in no sense a blank check for any leader who wants to indulge in any intervention. The test is on a case-by-case basis, and the test is always the same. Is a despot terrorizing large numbers of people, and is there any way to prevent this other than intervention? If not, intervention is required. And we as democratic peoples have to face each putative situation on its own terms and make a judgment each time as to whether we think the moral case has been made and the epistemological problem overcome.

If, at the end of the day, Liberal Interventionism produces, at least in the short run, more conflict, more expense, and more death for the civilized nations of the world, I still say we have a moral duty to intervene. The price we may have to pay is probably exaggerated in our fears, but whatever the price may be, we should pay it. This is the only way, in the long run, that there will be anything remotely like a more peaceful and secure world.

12/3/03