Next Stop: Mount Rushmore? 

Next Stop: Mount Rushmore?

I saw a few minutes of This Week yesterday. George Will said Bush's speech was nothing truly new--everything in it could be found in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson would be comfortable with it. Bush was also compared to Truman--he seems to have a "Doctrine" like the "Truman Doctrine," although some of his defenders are denying that.

Jefferson/the Declaration: Would Jefferson really have said: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands"? I don't know, this seems to be part of "9/11 changed everything." Before 9/11, Bush could be an isolationist Republican: we're powerful enough that we don't really have to worry about anyone else--and God knows, we don't want to. After 9/11, he has no choice but to spread democracy over the whole world in order to prevent future attacks. Or something.

Kevin Drum has some comments on a book which, by the sound of things, may have been influential as Bush's speech was written: The Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

[blockquote]...the primary division in the world today, he says, is between two sets of countries that he calls the Core and the Gap. The Core consists of advanced countries that play by the rules and are committed to globalization (primarily Europe, North America, and Japan) plus countries that are committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some others). The Gap is everyone else: a collection of disconnected, lawless, and dangerous countries such as Colombia, Pakistan, and North Korea, plus most of the Middle East and Africa. [snip] American military action since World War II has been confined almost exclusively to the Gap, which means the task of the United States over the next several decades--and in particular the task of the United States military--is to shrink the Gap and eventually convert the entire world to the values of the Core. Only then will America and the rest of the current Core be safe.[/blockquote]

This is different and more realistic than the Inaugural. It is really only Gap states that are threatening--because they are failed states, unusually or cruelly tyrannical, they harbour terrorists or collaborate with them, they have nukes, etc. Core and near-Core states, even if they're not "free" by American standards, are rational actors, and everyone is fine with giving them lots of time to become more free. Fareed Zakaria says something similar in Newsweek.

As for the Declaration, you don't have to be Michael Moore or John Kerry to notice the phrase "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." I'll link again to some comments by Nathan Tarcov in an essay published in the 80s. (I don't know if Tarcov would still say the same things or not). He says it would be better if presidents didn't have doctrines. The Declaration encourages or authorizes one sovereign or potentially sovereign people to help another people achieve their freedom. But Tarcov stresses that this is really a counsel of prudence. There should be a pretty clear resistance movement, with well-known leaders, in existence. A rebellion should be more or less underway; as Locke says, when war is waged on behalf of the just rights of a people, against a tyrant, it is the tyrant who has literally "re-belled," or returned to war. The "foreigner" should be helping the resistance, not taking over. And there should be some caution as to what counts as "the expression of the people." An election is not necessarily reliable, and a very broadly supported government might not hold elections.

Tarcov goes so far as to say there is "no right" to "vindicate [the] violated rights" of another people "without having conscientiously weighed the costs to all innocent parties, the precedents and consequences, and the power, will, and opportunity to win."

Of course, in today's world an election may be a kind of moral trumps. Otherwise, the Americans might say that in a case like Iraq they were pretty sure there would be a good-sized resistance movement--if not led by Chalabi, who still hasn't disappeared completely, by someone. The Shiite leaders are acting in a very statesmanlike fashion--not supporting violence, even in retaliation for Sunni attacks, and promising that if they win a majority in the election they will support a secular, pro-American leader such as Allawi or Chalabi. The Shiites seem quite experienced by now at working with Kurdish leaders, and they are all reaching out to Sunnis as much as they can.

So it was reasonable to hope and expect that invading would bring about a legitimate expression of the will of the Iraqi people, and voila! so it has come to be.

I still haven't gotten to Wilson, and now I have to catch up with the Truman analogy.

Joe Knippenberg, who was a fellow student of mine in grad school, has written very favourably about Bush's speech here.

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