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My original post was written in mid-January,
and predates but was in spiritual accordance with these words from the
President's second inaugural
address:
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We have seen our vulnerability
– and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the
world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed
hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in
destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal
threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred
and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of
the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
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We are led, by events and common
sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly
depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our
world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
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America’s vital interests and
our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have
proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and
matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.
Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government,
because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.
Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the
honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our
nation’s security, and the calling of our time.
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A confluence of events now lead me to wonder
whether we as a people still have the strength of character to see this through,
even as far as we have come, and as much blood and treasure as we have spilled.
It is not just the ceaselessly and reflexively pessimistic way in which the news
media spins events in Iraq and Afghanistan through a defeatist lens. Read, for
example, the way the Washington Post covered the smashing of Taliban
remnants as they massed in formations large enough to potentially be combat
effective: Their destruction, rather than a victory for the forces of democracy
and liberalism against those of an indisputably fascist reaction is through the
alchemy of tendentiousness miraculously transubstantiated into "fresh evidence
of the Taliban's resilience..." But we have all grown accustomed to the strange
little biases of the chattering class, so it's more than that which has set me
to thinking.
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I am old enough to remember the shameful way in
which our returning Vietnam veterans were treated by some among those who
opposed the war. The soldiers were all too often vilified, hounded with epithets
like "baby killer" and "war pig" and "murderer." They were young draftees, for
the most part, people who had only answered their country's call to arms, like
their fathers and grandfathers had before them. But they were unfortunate enough
to have grown up in a time when Cold War turned for an extended period into
proxy war, and from proxy into intervention at a moment when large swathes of
the opinion making elite had had either grown too personally comfortable,
morally relativistic or fundamentally wooly-headed about the foundational values
of our society to be able to distinguish between an imperfect democracy in our
ally and near-total tyranny in our foe. And anyway, what did all of that have to do with us ? We were coming dangerously
close to a place where people wanted "perfect lives." A place where someone who
got beaned with a foul ball at a baseball park felt that they had a right to sue
somebody. A place where someone spilling coffee in their own lap had a right to
damages. A place where nothing should be attempted in the world unless it be
perfectly motivated and perfectly executed.
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Such vilification of those who actually served
where the bullets were flying, as much as anything else, laid an almost
indelible mark upon an impressionable young Lex, and colored my (I admit it)
prejudices against the latest manifestation of anti-war groups. But although I
recognized with grim disdain some of the animating forces behind their protests, I also
appreciated the fact that most of the anti-war protesters scrupulously avoided
demonizing the troops sent forth to do the country's fighting, and for that they
received my grudging respect. The ones I spoke to promised to oppose the
strategy, but not the soldiers. Fair enough.
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For two long years that has (mostly) held, as
people of good will on all sides disagreed, often vehemently, about the war's
motives, means and effects - but in doing so, left the troops aside. It must
have been frustrating for many on the anti-war left: They were agitating for the
removal of troops from combat who were 1) not draftees, but volunteers, and 2)
apparently very supportive of the mission,
vis
re-enlistment rates in the Army well in excess of historical norms and in the
Marine Corps (an organization whose need for young, first tour riflemen far
outstrips its need for second tour sergeants) far in excess of what could be
supported by end-strength mandates. The soldiers clearly looked at this as a
national security issue rather than a political one, but for the anti's the
effect was the same: Their passion for the mission they were executing, and
their ability to express themselves both in the traditional media and in newer ways as well, kept public support (always
the center of gravity for a democracy) high. This public support, in turn,
served to energize troop morale - American soldiers are profoundly motivated by
the love of their countrymen and for them it is possible to gracefully bear
nearly any burden, so long as they believe that the sacrifices are appreciated
by the folks at home.
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But now public figures (as opposed to fringe radicals)
have for the first time dabbled their toes in the fever swamps of
soldier-smearing. And then quickly (but not too quickly, nor too well) rowing the boat back when they were caught well
outside the boundaries of respectable public opinion.
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But even now the public mood seems to have shifted
from support for the soldiers, the war and its architects to opposition to the war itself, and the
administration responsible for getting us in it. The soldiers, at least, are
still spared. This is an opposition fostered not merely through the relentlessly
negative mainstream spin, nor the politicization of the war, but also one has to
admit from a series of disappointments in expected outcomes, lost opportunities
and above all the steady drip-drip-drip of casualties with no apparent end in
sight. That, and the appalling bloodlust of our adversary, the kind of brutal,
orgiastic bestiality from which a peace-loving civilization naturally recoils in
shock and horror. We ask ourselves, who
are
these people? Are these the same people with the ink-stained fingers whose
courage we applauded in January? How do we square such a jarringly dissonant
circle? It is too much: We would, collectively, like it all to go away. We have
grown tired of the world, tired of its inhabitants. And we have been here
before.
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And in spite of the fervor for the mission by
troops in the field, the Army and Marine Corps are struggling to make their new
accession quotas. Too much of the youth of our nation, grown on a diet of crass
corporate commercialism and cultural relativism, appears to fear a draft more
than it resents the importunities of the Salafist Jihad. Let someone else fight
the war. Many parents feel the same way - and who can blame them? The burger
line at Hardee's is as good as Harvard, so long as it keeps their children out
of Haditha, or Habinaya or Hit.
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When the Army, like all the services faced with
limited resources, quite wisely attempted to narrow their search for new
recruits to a demographic which has historically proven to be most receptive,
privacy advocates (and, one suspects, opponents of the war) parried with privacy concerns - neglecting to mention, or
forgetting, that every 18 year old male must in any case register for the (still
defunct) selective service administration. Just in case. So much for
privacy.
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Now, freedom and democracy are generally taken to
be the same thing in an ordered society. And as an advocate for the one and
defender of the other, it would be churlish of me to do anything but acknowledge
the wisdom of the people as their mood begins to swing and passions shift. For
reasons of their own, the political class is starting to do the same -
whether those reasons are to do with their responsibilities in a representative
democracy or whether they have wet their fingers to the breezes of the upcoming
mid-term elections is one I leave for history to determine. But it is worth
pointing out that in an age of an all-volunteer force, no clearer demonstration
of will against the war can be expressed than that passive denial of the tens of
thousands of American youth who have declined to offer up their own lives to
fill the emerging gaps in the battle line - as is their perfect right. But
before we collectively cry "off, enough, no more," it's worth it to at least
examine what we might abandon with a too-hasty exit from the field of endeavor
we are currently engaged in. To ask ourselves what all of this might
mean.
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Whatever you may have thought the war was about in
the spring of 2003, it is undeniably now the place and time where the avowed
enemies of our civilization are maneuvering their forces in a philosophical and
martial clash of arms and terror against the best soldiers our society can
offer, together with allied Iraqi forces, themselves struggling to stand up and
find their strength. This is where the Salafists go to test their will, strength
and courage against a civilazation they have been taught to detest, and the
modernism and freedoms it represents. And there, in an asymmetric contest of
military power on the one hand and suicidal zeal on the other, with the hapless
citizens of Iraq caught in the grinding middle, is where our forces have been
destroying them root and branch. But like a hydra, every time a terrorist head
gets cut off an new one seems to pop up and take its place. This has become, to
paraphrase Fareed Zakaria , a war that we cannot easily
lose, but one which we are finding maddeningly difficult to win.
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I do not fear an indetermination or lack of
resolve from this president, or his cabinet - they have staked everything they
have ever accomplished in their lives, as Michael Ignatief has noted, on proving Thomas
Jefferson's assertion that democracy would eventually triumph throughout the
world. But there are many other powerful men in government who have no personal
stake in Mr. Bush's war, but rather have a great deal of interest in remaining
in office, or enhancing their power - men who know how to tack the ship of state
with the breezes of public opinion. And there are some among his opponents who
by their words and actions apparently wouldn't mind seeing the infant of Iraqi
democracy strangled in its crib by the calloused hands of Islamist tyranny, if
that's what it took to cast Mr. Bush and all his philosophies atop the ash heap
of history. Regardless of the human cost, both here and there. Regardless of the
treasures already spent.
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And there are many hard-eyed, even brutal men
overseas, with jealous privileges of their own to guard, who are watching us
carefully, and weighing our resolve, testing our strength against their own, to
see if we really mean what we say, when we say , "Enough - we will not countenance your
tyrannies against your captive populations in the name of stability any more. It
was always a moral affront, and bought us no security in the end." And there are
the captive populations themselves, those who have only now begun to raise their
eyes from the dirt, only know have begun to hope that this time it is different,
this time we actually mean to stand for the ideals which we promote as
foundational. The ideals which form our national myths, those things we still
believe about ourselves, even when almost no one else does. If we betray them to
their deaths again, our ideals and the lives of those who have trusted us, we
can only hope that God may forgive us, for history never will.
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After we left Vietnam, and threw the southerners
there to the northern wolves, it took nearly twenty years before we could muster
the national will to fight even a limited struggle that was clearly in our
national interest. If we leave Iraq too soon, leave the task undone, fall back
upon ourselves, it will be at least another twenty years before another
generation will be able to do anything but talk about the ideal of freedom and
democracy. I wonder if we have that much time.
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All of human history is a vector, and we look back
from where we came to where we are to analyze where we are going. The historian
Paul Johnson, in the opening pages of his magnificent
"Modern Times,"
argues that ideas of Freud (correctly) and
Einstein (inaccurately) were seized upon by their contemporary cultural,
political and artistic elites to destroy the 19th century's philosophy of
personal responsibility - what Johnson calls "the joint heritage of
Judeo-Christianity and the classical world." In its place, 20th century sophists
luxuriated in notions of cultural relativism and psychosexual self-absorption.
We were perhaps all of us fortunate that most of our fathers' generation grew up
in the harsh crucible of the Great Depression, immunized from the corrosive
effects of such thinking by the need to scratch out an existence in trying
circumstances. Otherwise it is doubtful that the men who stormed ashore against
the guns of a different kind of tyranny at Normandy and Saipan could have done
so with a kind of stolid physical courage such that today it nearly defies
comprehension. No, it took a number of years before such high brow notions were
recycled for the consumption of the public masses. But we have been fed a steady
diet of this noxious pabulum ever since, and now I begin to worry what it has
done to us.
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When America grows tired, and Europe exhausted,
from defending our civilization and its benefits, leaving us once again to
withdraw from the world, cringing at our own borders, awaiting the next blow
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When the service of one's country in a time of
need rests increasingly upon the sons and daughters of servicemen (a petri dish
for praetorianism), rather than upon the nation's youth at large -
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When we come to examine cost alone, and not value
of accomplishment -
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When winning at politics trumps winning at war
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When the sacrifices of the many who fight for us
are diminished by an unremitting focus on the failures of the few, sapping the
morale of all -
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When the public will of the greatest power for
good the world has ever known, a country of unprecedented moral, material,
economic and military power blanches in the face of the brutality of a sadistic
few, betraying its ideals and allies -
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Then yes, we could lose.
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And after that, we will have to ask ourselves, as
we travel down our historical vector: What are we now, now that we are not what
we were?
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