INAUGURATING ENDLESS WAR

[Zlatko Waterman]

( Strangely enough, I often find myself on the same track as Pat B.. But often not. This time, yes.)



Inaugurating Endless War

by Patrick J. Buchanan
Where Woodrow Wilson was going to make the world safe for democracy, George W. Bush is going him one better. President Bush is going to make the whole world democratic. As he declared in his inaugural address, our "great objective" is "ending tyranny" on earth.

And how does the president propose to achieve it?

"So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

The president is here asserting a unilateral American right to interfere in the internal affairs of every nation on earth, without regard to whether these nations have threatened us or attacked us. Their domestic politics are now our concern, because if they are not democratic, we are not secure.

Let it be said: This is a formula for endless collisions between this nation and every autocratic regime on earth and must inevitably lead to endless wars. And wars are the death of republics.

President Bush also plans to badger and hector foreign leaders on the progress they are making, or failing to make, in attaining U.S. standards of liberty and freedom:

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. ... We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own peoples. ..."

One awaits with anticipation the next visit of the Saudi crown prince. And as there are at least 50 autocracies or tyrannies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, questions arise.

If President Musharraf refuses to yield dictatorial powers, will Bush sanction Pakistan, and risk his overthrow and the transfer of his nuclear weapons to pro-Taliban generals sympathetic to al-Qaeda?

If Beijing declares its treatment of dissidents to be none of Bush's business, will Bush impose sanctions and enrage a regime ruling 1.3 billion people with whom we have $200 billion in annual trade?

When a Chinese fighter crashed a U.S. reconnaissance plane and Beijing held its crew hostage, Bush meekly apologized. Now, he's going to take these xenophobic Chinese communists to the woodshed?

If President Putin tells Bush the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky will stay in prison and he will decide how elections are run in Russia, what is Bush going to do? Isolate him and drive Russia into the arms of China, as we have already done with our sanctions on Burma?

If the Saudis reject democracy, are we going to stop buying their oil? Somewhere, Osama is praying that Bush will undermine the Saudi monarchy, as another democracy-worshiper, Jimmy Carter, helped to undermine the Shah – after whom we got the Ayatollah.

President Bush is championing a policy of interventionism in the internal affairs of every nation on earth. But did we not learn from 9/11 that intervention is not a cure for terrorism, it is the cause of terrorism?

Clearly, the president does not understand this, or believe it. For in his inaugural, he describes 9/11 as the day "when freedom came under attack." But Osama bin Laden did not dispatch his fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hated our Bill of Rights. He did it because he hates our presence and our policies in the Middle East.

President Bush says we have no other choice than to end tyranny on earth because the "survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But this is ahistorical.

The world has almost always been a cesspool of despotisms, but America has always been free. We have retained our liberty by following the counsel of Washington and staying out of foreign wars that were not America's wars. It has been when we intervened in wars where our vital interests were not imperiled – crushing the Philippine insurrection, World War I, invading Iraq – that America has come to grief.

Occupying the Philippines led us to intervention in Asia, war with Japan and, soon after, wars to defend the South Korean and Indochinese remnants of the Japanese empire. Wilson's war gave us the Versailles peace treaty that tore a defeated Germany apart and imposed unpayable debts on her people, leading directly to Hitler.

The invasion of Iraq has reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world, cost us 10,000 dead and wounded and $200 billion, and created a new training ground and haven for terrorists to replace the one we cleaned out in Afghanistan.

In declaring it to be America's mission in the world to end tyranny on earth, President Bush is launching a crusade even more ambitious and utopian than was Wilson's. His crusade, too, will end, as Wilson's did, in disillusionment for him and tragedy for his country.

[whimsicaldeb]

Pat B., you ... myself ... we are not alone in these thoughts. Sharing .....

http://www.workingforchange.com/article ... emid=18413

Stirring words, flawed policy

E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

01.21.05 - WASHINGTON -- President Bush believes that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, called our nation to a long struggle to spread liberty throughout the world -- seemingly without any limits of geography, resources or time.

The president's second inaugural address thus laid out the terms of the nation's essential debate for the next four years: Are Americans prepared to make this open-ended commitment? Will the administration offer a consistent and realistic strategy to achieve its sweeping ambition?

Every American will cheer the president's repeated references to the United States' obligation to hold high the torch of freedom. "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," the president declared, and that is right. "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery." That is right, too.

But Bush's description of the years before Sept. 11 was disturbing. He dismissed a decade that saw the triumph of freedom, the spread of prosperity and a modest but measurable increment of social justice as "years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical." His next line: "And then there came a day of fire."

Repose? Sabbatical? Put aside that in the years Bush dismisses, the United States stood up, slowly and reluctantly to be sure, for freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo and Haiti. Are years of "relative quiet" somehow inferior to an era defined by war? Is the assumption here that Americans are better off when we are embattled and less noble when we are at peace? Is this a call for unending conflict and confrontation?

"Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty, though this time in history -- four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen -- is an odd time for doubt," Bush said. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals."

But the issue here is certainly not "the power of our ideals." Most of us believe in "the global appeal of liberty." What's in question is whether the president has been candid about the costs of his all-embracing vision, about how to pay for it and raise the troops to fight for it.

Iraq, so far, has been anything but a model of success. If the president had offered even a hint that he had made mistakes and bad judgments, his call for "the expansion of freedom in all the world" would have rung so much truer. If the real meaning of the president's words is that there are more Iraqs in our future, many Americans who share the president's love of freedom will say no. Stirring words, alas, cannot mask a flawed policy.

I loved what the president said about our obligations to dissidents around the world. "No one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave," Bush declared. "Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know: America sees you for who you are, the future leaders of your free country." Exactly right. And what, precisely, do those beautiful words mean for the president's policy toward China or Russia or Saudi Arabia? How consistently will we stand up for embattled democratic reformers? Always? Or only when convenient?

And then there is the profoundly uncomfortable question: Do we want 9/11 to dominate how we define ourselves indefinitely? The president seems to think so. It's not polite to say at a moment of pomp and ceremony, but defining our politics in terms of that horrific event served the president's interest and was a central reason why he was standing before us on Thursday.

Many who supported the president in his bold response to the terrorists in Afghanistan cannot escape the suspicion that 9/11 will be used again and again as a political rallying cry to justify genuinely radical foreign policy departures that serve neither our nation nor the cause of freedom.

I pray that I am wrong, that the coming elections in Iraq will begin to "break the reign of hatred and resentment," and that the idealism of the president's words will translate into realistic policies. But I do not want our nation to be defined for decades by what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. I want a nation that loves liberty so much that it can move beyond tragedy and embrace not only the call to battle, but also the promise of peace.

(c) 2004, Washington Post Writers Group

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article ... emid=18413