Coloquio Column

Iraq and Liberal Interventionism in Foreign Policy: Part 1

by Larry DeWitt
December 3, 2003

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.