Schlesinger on American infamy

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Severo Ornstein <severo () poonhill com>

Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War
Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy.

By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

We are at war again -- not because of enemy attack, as in World War II, nor
because of incremental drift, as in the Vietnam War -- but because of the
deliberate and premeditated choice of our own government.

Now that we are embarked on this misadventure, let us hope that our
intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with
minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties.

But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The
choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic
doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory
during
the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The
president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is
alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl
Harbor
on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in
infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in
infa
my. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11
has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and
militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush
as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the
planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president,
assail
the United States on a daily basis.

The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner
--
a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to
corrupt
our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental
maxims of our policy "would insensibly change from liberty to force ...
[America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be
the ruler of her own spirit." Already the collateral damage to our civil
liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic
who
is our attorney general, is considerable -- and more is still to come.

What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military
force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been
exposed and destroyed under the United Nations' inspection regime. The cause
of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather.
American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian
Gulf's midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to
rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army -- and a professional
army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.

There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that
is the only war we can win. We can't win the war against Al Qaeda because Al
Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can't win a war
against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from
North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from
Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive
for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has
been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma
disclaimers,
President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the
start.
Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party?
Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?

I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional
efforts
to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts
and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful
speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the
media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text
of
Byrd's powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement -- a speech
ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass
demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.

According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes
Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon
and
resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great
villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11. Many, perhaps most, Americans
believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism.
But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make
recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.

What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair
break
from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war -- that Hussein
might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq
deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.

Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms -- and their production
facilities -- are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping
telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on
Hussein's
part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.

The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill
grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections
to
Hussein's human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we
have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?

Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly
remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence
has
been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there
will
her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in
search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a
monster.
The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will
provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must
face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States
is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's
population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind
--
that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that
therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a historian and the author, most recently, of "A
Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings." He served as special
assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-war-opschlesinger23mar23
,1

-- 
Severo M. Ornstein
Poon Hill
2200 Bear Gulch Road
Woodside, CA 94062
Tel: 650-851-4258
Fax: 650-851-9549

"What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to
be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called
reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane
is now called solid conservative thinking" (Tony Kushner)

------ End of Forwarded Message

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