Bush Fails History
- By Thom Hartmann
www.guerrillanews.com
Bob Woodward: "How do you think history will regard
the war in Iraq?"
Bush, (hesitating): "It won't matter. We'll all be
dead." - from Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought they could
bomb Vietnam into accepting democracy. George W. Bush
thinks he can do it with Iraq.
But the first American president to consider how best
to grow democracies - Thomas Jefferson - had some very
different thoughts on the issue. LBJ and Bush would
have done well to listen to his thoughtful words in a
letter he wrote on February 14, 1815, to his old
friend in France, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Discussing the French Revolution, the Terror that
followed, and the reign of Napoleon, Jefferson noted
that building democracy is an organic process: The
democracy movement in the colonies had been fermenting
for a century prior to Jefferson's birth.
"A full measure of liberty is not now perhaps to be
expected by your nation," Jefferson wrote, about the
democracy movement within France, "nor am I confident
they are prepared to preserve it. More than a
generation will be requisite, under the administration
of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge
in the general mass of the people, and their
habituation to an independent security of person and
property, before they will be capable of estimating
the value of freedom, and the necessity of a sacred
adherence to the principles on which it rests for
preservation."
He added that it's nearly impossible to force
democracy on a people, and the consequences of trying
could be disastrous. "Instead of that liberty which
takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if
recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes, with
an unprepared people, a tyranny still, of the many,
the few, or the one."
Lafayette, at the time of the French Revolution
(1789), had expressed his concerns to Jefferson that
the movement for democracy wasn't sufficiently
widespread among the average people in France to take
hold as it had in America, and they should thus make
the transition via a constitutional monarchy much like
today's United Kingdom. At the time, Jefferson had
disagreed with his friend, but in this 1815 letter, he
noted: "And I found you were right.... Unfortunately,
some of the most honest and enlightened of our
patriotic friends...did not weigh the hazards of a
transition from one form of government to another."
Many in the revolutionary movement of France of that
era opposed Lafayette's deliberate and careful push
for an organic democracy, rather than a sudden lurch.
"You differed from them," Jefferson noted. "You were
for stopping there, and for securing the Constitution
which the National Assembly had obtained. Here, too,
you were right; and from this fatal error of the
republicans, from their separation from yourself and
the constitutionalists, in their councils, flowed all
the subsequent sufferings and crimes of the French
nation."
The lack of a truly widespread, average-citizen-based
movement for democracy in France, Lafayette had
privately argued to Jefferson two decades earlier,
could simply lead to a transition from the tyranny of
the king to another, perhaps worse, form of tyranny.
While Jefferson had, at first, embraced the French
revolution, in his letter to Lafayette he confessed
that he had now come to agree that without a broader
base of support, a sudden change of government was a
disaster, and the primary beneficiaries would only be
war profiteers and the rich, Frenchmen who were so
opposed to democracy that they could even be called
foreigners.
Thus, Jefferson wrote, "The foreigner gained time to
anarchize by gold the government he could not
overthrow by arms, to crush in their own councils the
genuine republicans... and to turn the machine of
Jacobinism from the change to the destruction of
order; and, in the end, the limited monarchy they had
secured was exchanged for the unprincipled and bloody
tyranny of Robespierre, and the equally unprincipled
and maniac tyranny of Bonaparte."
Comparing France to America, Jefferson noted how -
unlike France - we had overthrown an external occupier
all by ourselves. For American colonists, the
repression and occupation of the English in the
Colonies "has helped rather than hurt us, by arousing
the general indignation of our country, and by marking
to the world of Europe the vandalism and brutal
character of the English government. It has merely
served to immortalize their infamy."
And now Arab leaders like Egypt's Mubarak say that,
across the Arab world, our infamy is being
immortalized by Bush's unprovoked invasion and
occupation of oil-rich Iraq. America, Mubarak says,
faces "a hatred never equaled" in the Middle East,
even as Iraq totters on the edge of civil war.
It's as if the cycles of history are repeating
themselves, and Iraq may now suffer the Terrors that
racked France in the 19th Century.
When John Adams wrote to Jefferson on July 13, 1813
about a French politician, he could just as easily
have been speaking of George W. Bush: "In plain truth,
I was astonished at the grossness of his ignorance of
government and history."
Adams added, speaking of those who think they can
create empire and have a stable rule purely by
military force, "Napoleon has lately invented a word
which perfectly expresses my opinion, at that time and
ever since. He calls the project Ideology; and... it
was all madness."
But like Iraq with Saddam, Jefferson wrote that true
democracy would take time in France because the
overthrow of a tyrant had been done so hastily. "You
are now rid of him, and I sincerely wish you may
continue so. But this may depend on the wisdom and
moderation of the restored dynasty. It is for them now
to read a lesson in the fatal errors of the
republicans; to be contented with a certain portion of
power, secured by formal compact with the nation,
rather than, grasping at more, hazard all upon
uncertainty, and risk meeting the fate of their
predecessor...."
As we "hazard all upon uncertainty" in the Middle
East, Iraq is proving the prescience of our greatest
presidents yet again. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said on
September 22, 1936, "In the truest sense, freedom
cannot be bestowed, it must be achieved."
If only George W. Bush had paid attention during his
study of history at Yale...
Thom Hartmann is an award-winning best-selling author
and the host of a nationally syndicated daily talk
radio show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent book
is titled "We The People: A Call To Take Back
America," and his newest book, based on Jefferson's
writings, "We A Return To Democracy: Reviving
Jefferson's Dream," will be released on July 4th by
Random House/Crown.
=====
Mario Gagho
Political Science,
Agra University, India
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