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on
war and politics. But, as our purpose is similar,
perhaps he won’t come back to haunt us.
War
is ugly. People get killed -- and survivors often
wish they had been. Lives are shattered, limbs
lost, homes destroyed, families torn apart,
civilians cast into refugee exile. For Americans,
war is an unpopular instrument of foreign policy,
as is evident in the negative reaction against the
military action in
Iraq
to eradicate those support terror and wield
weapons of mass destruction. Despite having fought
a civil war over the constitutional issue of
slavery, Americans sometimes fail to understand:
War, as the good Baron instructed us, is
ultimately a form of political expression.
History
has bequeathed the United
States
a strong executive office which, subject to
carefully crafted checks and balances, has seen
the nation through innumerable wars and crises.
With so much power residing in the presidency, it
has been a subject of continual media and public
fascination to see how Lord Acton’s famous
dictum on the effects of power will play out in
individual leaders. Some presidents concentrate on
privilege, others on responsibility and duty. Some
tie up airports while getting their hair cut, have
interns pay obeisance on their knees, and steal
the china on the way out the door. Others redefine
the country’s role on the world stage in ways
that inspire vocal opposition. Interestingly, the
judgment of the latter often has been validated
by subsequent events.
The
current president is accused of -- or credited
with, depending on your point of view --
establishing a new doctrine that moves the United
States from a policy of containing bad actors in
their hellholes to actively seeking to destroy
them before they do us harm. Thus, we exert
ourselves to remove from positions of power in
Iraq
a bunch of old, fat, men with big noses and funny
hats. (NOW we know why the French couldn’t join
the effort.)
This
sea change in American foreign policy no doubt
will take time to be validated in the public eye,
just as in the post-WWII period, it took a while
for the public to embrace deterrence – and,
eventually, mutual assured destruction— as
appropriate strategies to deal with the Soviet
Unioin. Of course, the threat of the Soviet war
machine was visible and more easily grasped than
the machinations of suicidal lunatics who stay out
of sight until they perform their disgusting
deeds.
We
do not criticize Americans, or even those
otherworldly types who seem especially attracted
to anti-anything demonstrations, for disliking
war. But in the present case, when our society and
culture is under attack by terrorists who are
motivated by an inimical world view, we have the
right and duty to proactively defend ourselves and our democratic,
participatory, free-and-open social order. Those
who take their disagreements into the streets
either miss the irony that it is those values and
the willingness to defend them that allow
Americans to protest things they disagree with --
without suffering the fate of those crushed
(literally) in
Tiananmen Square
.
Americans
really don’t understand power and the
responsibilities it entails – or maybe they just
don’t want to deal with it. If you are the big
guy on the baseball team that can hit the long
ball, opposing pitchers will occasionally throw at
you instead of to you. You don’t like it – it
hurts to get hit by a baseball– but the team
counts on you, so you stand in and try to help
your team win the game – that is, after all, why
the game is played. We traditionally seem to throw
(brickbats not a baseball) at presidents who see
the need to use our national power to maintain our
way of life. If you doubt that, take the time to
read the things people said about FDR in the days
leading up to WWII. How many today think it was a
bad idea to defeat Nazism?
As
President Bush urges the
U.S.
to adopt a new approach to dealing with the world,
we think he should go the whole way. The U.N. is
clearly defunct for anything other than
humanitarian and housekeeping functions (WHO,
UNESCO, etc.). It has been made so by those who
are trying to play traditional 18th-
and 19th-century balance-of-power
politics in a world organization that presupposes
a community of interest. Let’s acknowledge the
obvious and pull the plug. In a world where only
the U.S. has the resources to collect and analyze
intelligence of the types and detail necessary to
make a case against state-supported terrorism, why
do spend time convincing the clueless, the
spineless and the corrupt what we have found?
Rather
than issue color-coded alerts for our country, the
Department of Homeland Security should adopt a new
calculus. Issue alert for those countries we
believe pose a threat. Yellow can mean we are
starting to get concerned about their activities.
Orange
can mean you are seriously pissing us off. Red can
mean you’re dead.
The
powerful don’t become victims.
In
the final analysis, our power is real and should
be used with our eyes wide open. It will always
have a political dimension and political
consequence. It is a necessary component to
maintaining not only our position in the world
order but our very way of life. As a nation, we
must decide how the exercise of power meshes with
our ideals and our role in the world. Can our
political leaders debate the real issue? We hope
so, because it is going to come up again and
again.
--
March 31, 2003
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