August 23, 2007

History Trumps Cacophony, Meaning Bush is Right About Iraq

In a cacophonous political environment, it matters a great deal that on the largest questions of the day, the president is right.

For anyone who was willing to invest 43 minutes to actually listen, President Bush during an appearance yesterday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention cut through the cacophony to remind Americans of why we are in Iraq – and why the conventional storyline is wrong.

To a Bush-hater, this may represent arrogance and bull-headedness, but Bush has changed neither his rationale nor his primary arguments since the war began. And while the coverage of yesterday’s speech predictably fixated on a single Vietnam comparison – and how mad it made some people – the speech in its entirety demonstrated that it is Bush, not his critics, who is heeding the lessons of history and applying them to today’s struggle.

Bush’s historical context comes from Asia – Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. The former two mirror Iraq in that many Americans questioned the plausibility of democracy in either country, even as they were flyspecking the execution of both war efforts and insisting the presence of American forces were really causing all the problems there.

Sound familiar?

In Vietnam, Bush finds the historical context to inform his belief of what will happen if America abandons Iraq. Wonderfully citing a 1975 New York Times column, Bush reminded us that the left at that time was sure life would improve in Indochina if only America would leave. One of the leading voices predicting this was a sniveling soldier-turned-protester named John Kerry, who amazingly continues to deny that the carnage wrought by the Khmer Rouge was worse than life before the Americans left.

Americans were thinking things through a little more seriously in November 2004.

Bush’s mantra has always been that the spread of democracy in the Middle East will fundamentally change the region and starve major terrorist organizations of the environment they need in which to operate effectively. Many critics of this notion – on the left, in the center and on the right – have countered that America cannot impose its concept of democracy on a region with no tradition of it, and at any rate, America only asks for trouble when its gets itself mixed up in such foreign entanglements.

Regarding the former argument, Bush reminded his audience that critics likewise predicted Japan could never embrace democracy, largely because of the belief that Shinto, the national religion, was too fanatical in its devotion to the emperor. The critics were wrong. The last time anyone worried about a threat from Japan, it came in the form of Lee Iacocca’s hysterics over the threat from Toyota and Nissan.

Regarding the latter argument – that America should not become mixed up in foreign entanglements – the facts speak for themselves whether critics like it or not. When despotic ideologies become aggressive and threaten freedom – and thus America’s national interests – America has long been in a mode of going wherever it needs to go to stop them.

This did not start on September 11, 2001. It was America’s essential global role throughout the 20^th Century. America has constantly engaged the world both diplomatically and militarily throughout the past century. The most high-profile diplomatic efforts – the League of Nations and the United Nations – have achieved very little. The military efforts, on the other hand, have taken down Wilhelm II, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Noriega, Hussein and the Taliban. Not bad work. And the one major diplomatic success, the takedown of the Soviet Union, occurred because we engaged in an arms race and won it.

America is the world’s policeman. It always will be. Bush is not the first president to understand this. All his predecessors for the past 100 years, with the probable exception of Jimmy Carter, have understood it as well. The difference is that most of Bush’s predecessors saw the policeman role as reactive, whereas Bush sees it as transformative.

Finally, Bush reminded his audience that every American war has been rife with mistakes, and critics have always made much of the mistakes. Fair enough. War is a nasty business in which much goes wrong, and even the things that go right are pretty ugly. Those who think Iraq is the first mistake-ridden conflict, or the worst, don’t know their history.

Bush is far from a perfect president, both domestically and abroad, and the effort to militarily take the fight to the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere could surely have been executed better.

But Bush is right. About the reasons for our actions, and about the historical context that argues for them. In a political environment that tends to portray everything Bush says as wrong, that matters a lot.