Den Beste hits the "Big Time." An Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal.
We Won't Back Down
The real reason we're in Iraq--and why we we'll stay.
BY STEVEN DEN BESTE
Thursday, July 24, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Opponents of American foreign policy in Iraq are attempting to focus the entire debate on one small and extremely unimportant event. They're trying to claim that the inclusion of one specific sentence in this year's State of the Union address is the total political issue, and since that sentence appears to have been based on faulty intelligence, they are trying to claim that this somehow shakes the entire foundation of the case for war.
In fact, the real reason we went into Iraq was precisely to "nation build": to create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation. To create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators. This would demonstrate to the other people in the Arab and Muslim worlds that they can succeed, but only if they abandon those political, cultural and religious chains that are holding them back.
We are not doing this out of altruism. We are not trying to give them a liberalized Western democracy because we're evangelistic liberal democrats (with both liberal and democrat taking historical meanings). We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self-interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us.
So why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in making the case for war, put so much emphasis on U.N. resolutions and weapons of mass destruction? Honesty and plain speaking are not virtues for politicians and diplomats. If either Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair had said what I did, it would have hit the fan big-time. Making clear a year ago that this was our true agenda would have virtually guaranteed that it would fail. Among other things, it would have caused all of the brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs in the region to unite with Saddam against us, and would have made the invasion impossible. But now the die is cast, and said brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs no longer have the ability to stop the future.
But does America have the stamina to finish the job? Yes. This kind of thing takes on momentum. Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a platform that essentially opposed the war in Vietnam. (The catch phrase was "Peace with honor.") But we fought for several more years before finally giving up.
Whenever Mr. Bush leaves office, whether in 2005 or 2009, whoever follows him will face a situation in which he'd take far more political heat for pulling out with the job half done than for continuing the process. There's another year and a half in Mr. Bush's current term, and by the end of it, the process will either be a complete shambles or else it will clearly be on the road to success, and I think it's unlikely to be a shambles.
Mistakes will get made, and there will be problems. We're going to be making a lot of this up as we go. But if there's anything you should know about Americans by now, it's that we're problem solvers. Americans have gained a reputation elsewhere for being flighty, mercurial; there's some truth to that, but it's also true that we can stick with things for decades if we think it's worthwhile. We stuck with the occupations of Germany and Japan for 50 years. I feel confident we'll stick with this, too.
Much of the reputation we've gained in the world comes from how we act when we're not challenged. There's steel in us, too, but we don't show it much. It only really comes out in war, and when we've been at peace for several decades there's a tendency to think that we used to have that kind of steel, but that we don't any longer. That's wrong, and every generation the world learns that anew. Going into World War II, many in Europe said that Americans used to be willing to fight back in the days of Lincoln but had become decadent and soft. History proves otherwise, of course.
That steel is still there, it's just that we don't feel any need to show it when it isn't needed. But when the issues are sufficiently important to us, we'll still make major sacrifices.
The memory of 9/11 runs deep. I'm becoming convinced that few in Europe truly understand just what that really meant to us, the anger and the hatred it raised. It's not the kind of thing we get over. We're not going to forget it.
We haven't forgotten Pearl Harbor, either. That doesn't mean we consider Japan an enemy, but it does mean that we did what we needed to in order to make sure Japan would never do anything like that to us again. When we truly decide to solve a problem, we try to solve it permanently.
And we're not going to forget 9/11. On some level or another, it's going to be a major political issue here for the next few decades, until we're convinced that the danger is gone. Arab extremism is no longer something that happens a long ways away and that we can ignore, so we aren't going to. It is their problem, but 9/11 made it ours. Now we'll solve it.
In order to remove the danger to us that Japan represented, it had to be reformed. So that's what happened. Now we're going to try to do the same to the Arabs. And we'll do whatever we need to in order to make sure nothing like 9/11 happens again. We're not fundamentally cruel, and if we can we'd like to solve this for everyone's benefit. Japan is a better place now than it was before World War II. So is Germany. I hope that the Arab and Islamic nations will be better, too.
But the one thing we're not going to do is to surrender. We'll try to solve this as humanely as we can, but solve it we must, and I believe that this nation will do whatever it needs to in order to remove the danger facing it. If an American city gets nuked by a terrorist, things are going to get extremely ugly. So even America-haters in Europe had better hope that this works, because the alternative is much worse. (Which is a really good reason why they'd also better stop trying to make it fail.)
Right now the Democrats are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, in thrall to their extreme wing, and trying to peddle a message full of recriminations. But they'll soon realize that their message of hatred, panic and shame isn't selling to the majority of voters here, and they'll either fade into political insignificance for the next 20 years, or (far more likely) the idiots will get marginalized and more-practical voices will emerge. Within a year, the argument will no longer be about whether we should have gone in. It will be about what we should do next.
The Democrats won't have any influence until they actually look toward the future and start talking about what they think we actually should do. Bitching about what actually happened will get them headlines, but it isn't ultimately going to get them enough votes to win. And I think that they know it.
As combat started, I felt enormous pressure and worry, for the people involved. But on another level I felt a great deal of relief. Once we actually began the invasion, certain political issues became faits accomplis. The question of engagement in the Arab sphere is no longer debatable; we're going to be engaged. That was still in doubt, right up until the first tanks rolled over the border from Kuwait into Iraq. Now it isn't.
The 9/11 attack awoke America's Jacksonians, what Walter Russell Mead called our "folk community with a strong sense of common values and common destiny." They don't wake easily. But they also don't go back to sleep easily.
No, we're not going to give up on this. The degree of our commitment may change up or down; there will be debate and argument. But one way or another, we're going to stick with this. Ultimately, we have no choice.
Mr. Den Beste writes at DenBeste.nu. |
