Globe and Mail Coomment Saturday, May 8, 2004 - Page A23 Cut and run, and do it now
To hell with Wilsonian crusades -- the U.S. must get out of Iraq. The longer it stays, the worse things will get for everyone By John MacArthur Not long before U.S. soldiers made news with their sadistic, co-ed photo shoot of Iraqi prisoners, I dined with a small group of pedigreed New York liberals -- the ones known as Bush-haters -- and a ghost. The conversation was following a predictable course -- contempt for the President pouring forth as freely as the wine -- so I didn't think twice about proposing a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops, the very opposite of saving face, and a strategy already labelled "cut and run" by Karl Rove. All the living beings at the table were old enough to remember the crazy rhetoric of Vietnam troop escalation, as well as the cruelly absurd policies of de-escalation, Vietnamization and peace with honour, so why the awkward silence when I had finished? Suddenly the ghost spoke -- through the medium of a law school professor, who informed me that America had a "moral obligation" to remain in Iraq. Before the medium could go on, his socially astute wife aborted the seance, and we moved on to safer topics. The ghost was Woodrow Wilson. Sadly, every debate on Iraq is dominated by his notion of moral obligation, not by George W. Bush's lies about atomic-bomb threats; not by the mounting corpses; not by the foolish distraction from tracking al-Qaeda; not by the war profiteering by Mr. Bush's friends and patrons; not by the violation of the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Convention; not by the waste of money that could rebuild the United States's degraded public school system; not by the lessons from Vietnam. The Democratic "opposition" carps, but its presidential candidate suggests escalation -- more troops (some in different uniforms) to stabilize a situation that cannot be stabilized. Mr. Bush and his friends from Halliburton are busy looting Iraq to enrich their temporal bank accounts, but Wilsonian liberals remain preoccupied with their immortal souls. The high-spirited U.S. volunteer army builds pyramids out of terrified, naked detainees, and John Kerry insists that "we cannot let the actions of a few overshadow the tremendous good work that thousands of soldiers are doing every day in Iraq and all over the world." What will people say about us if we pull out? Last week, a Democratic congressman too young to remember Vietnam even told me that U.S. credibility is at stake in Iraq, that "we can't leave . . . can't cut and run." Who says we can't leave? Sir Woodrow of the 14 points, that's who. Liberals rarely invoke Mr. Wilson by name, yet I can always hear the pious, self-righteous and intolerant intellectual from Virginia creeping into their voices. If ever there was a time to argue against Mr. Wilson's faith-based ideology, it's now, before too many more people die guarding gas stations and oil-field contractors. Mainstream historians typically attribute Mr. Wilson's simplistic, Manichean view of the world to his fervent Presbyterian beliefs -- what political historian Walter Karp summarized as "Wilson's tendency to regard himself as an instrument of Providence and to define personal greatness as some messianic act of salvation." Mr. Wilson's relentless perversion of Enlightenment ideals struck a chord in predominantly Protestant America, this country having been formed partly on a Calvinist idea of an elect people. At the same time, he sought to impose Rousseau's and Paine's rights of man on the non-elect peoples of the world, whether or not these noble savages wanted any part of them. "The world must be made safe for democracy," he famously cried in his war message to Congress in April, 1917. Forcing democracy down the throats of tribal-based Arab clans was likely not at the top of Mr. Wilson's agenda at the Paris Peace Conference, but his lofty language masked the essential contradiction of ordering self-government at the point of a gun. (When they colonized Iraq, the British didn't hesitate to borrow Wilsonian rhetoric about self-determination and liberation from Turkish despotism.) Mr. Wilson had made a test run of his ideals with his senseless and bloody interference in domestic Mexican politics, at Vera Cruz in 1914, but it was the U.S. intervention in the First World War that set the course of 20th-century U.S. foreign policy. Most Americans wanted to remain neutral in the European butchery; indeed, political self-interest compelled Mr. Wilson to campaign for re-election in 1916 on a promise to keep us out of the Great War. But before long, on the grounds that "the right is more precious than peace," Mr. Wilson was sending unwitting farm boys off to inhale poison gas and die in the trenches of Flanders. Didn't the Wilsonian Bush-haters like my dinner acquaintance note Mr. Bush's cynical invocation of St. Woodrow during his state visit to London in November? Referring to the "God-given [not secular law- enforced] dignity of every person" Mr. Bush observed that "the last president to stay at Buckingham Palace was an idealist, without question." Mr. Wilson, he recalled with misplaced irony, "made a pledge; with typical American understatement, he vowed that right and justice would become the predominant and controlling force of the world." Mr. Bush's smirking pieties fall flatter with each wasted life of an American soldier, with each dead Arab woman or child. But they also reveal both his insincerity and his grandiose identification with his predecessor. He has no intention of establishing anything more than a puppet government in Iraq; when it comes to sheer effrontery, George Bush has perhaps only one peer: Woodrow Wilson. Even severe critics of the Iraq fiasco, like Peter W. Galbraith, feel obliged to endorse the smug Wilsonian premise of the invasion. (Does anyone remember that Hitler initially achieved power through the democratic "process"?) Writing in the latest New York Review of Books, he flatly states that "except for a relatively small number of Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Arabs who worked for his regime, the peoples of Iraq are much better off today than they were under Saddam Hussein." How can he be so sure? A recent USA Today poll found that 46 per cent of the Iraqis surveyed felt that more harm than good had come of the invasion, with only 33 per cent responding that more good than harm had been done. More than 56 per cent thought U.S. and British forces should leave promptly. Unable to answer pollsters are the uncounted thousands of dead Iraqi non-combatants; are they better off today than they were under Saddam? It doesn't matter too much to the Wilsonians; they always mean well when they spill blood. Count me out of the Woodrow Wilson brigade. Maybe there is a role for the United Nations in Iraq, although I suspect that occupying soldiers wearing different uniforms will be taken about as seriously as a League of Nations mandate. We do have a moral obligation: to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible, not build a Potemkin village and call it democracy. I understand that full-scale civil war between Sunnis and Shias may well break out after we leave, with or without UN peacekeepers. Of course, I hope that author Mahmood Mamdani was correct when he told Bill Moyers in a recent interview, that everything becomes negotiable (even elections) once the United States announces a genuine withdrawal because "it will separate the terrorists from the nationalists . . . the nationalist then has no reason to confront the U.S. militarily; the terrorist does." In the event of civil war, we must assume a second moral obligation: to accept as many refugees as possible, just as we did with some of the non-communist Vietnamese who fled Hanoi's advancing armies. We welcomed President Nguyen Van Thieu and Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky; we should even find a place for stalwart members of the Iraqi Governing Council. John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper's Magazine.
