March 19, 2003
THE BAD PEACE:
D-Day (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 3/19/03, NY Times)[H]ere we are, going to war, basically alone, in the face of opposition, not so much from "the Arab Street," but from "the World Street." Everyone wishes it were different, but it's too late — which is why this column will henceforth focus on how to turn these lemons into lemonade. Our children's future hinges on doing this right, even if we got here wrong.The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become "self-legitimating" when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out.
But wars are fought for political ends. Defeating Saddam is necessary but not sufficient to achieve those ends, which are a more progressive Iraq and a world with fewer terrorists and terrorist suppliers dedicated to destroying the U.S., so Americans will feel safer at home and abroad. We cannot achieve the latter without the former. Which means we must bear any burden and pay any price to make Iraq into the sort of state that fair-minded people across the world will see and say: "You did good. You lived up to America's promise."
To maximize our chances of doing that, we need to patch things up with the world. Because having more allied support in rebuilding Iraq will increase the odds that we do it right, and because if the breach that has been opened between us and our traditional friends hardens into hostility, we will find it much tougher to manage both Iraq and all the other threats down the road. That means the Bush team needs an "attitude lobotomy" — it needs to get off its high horse and start engaging people on the World Street, listening to what's bothering them, and also telling them what's bothering us.
Some 35 years ago Israel won a war in Six Days. It saw its victory as self-legitimating. Its neighbors saw it otherwise, and Israel has been trapped in the Seventh Day ever since — never quite able to transform its dramatic victory into a peace that would make Israelis feel more secure.
More than 50 years ago America won a war against European fascism, which it followed up with a Marshall Plan and nation-building, both a handout and a hand up — in a way that made Americans welcome across the world. Today is a D-Day for our generation. May our leaders have the wisdom of their predecessors from the Greatest Generation.
Mr. Friedman gets this one spectacularly wrong: what the Marshall Plan in fact did was allow the nations of Western Europe to maintain their disastrous welfare systems, rather than undergo the which has led directly to the point where, having sacrificed their own on the altar of government handouts, they can no longer summon the will to defend freedom abroad. We should really be confronting the World Street and putting pressure on Europe to reform itself--with smaller government, lower taxes, privatized social welfare programs, higher birth rates, religious revival, etc.--rather than truckling to that Street's self-centered, Statist demands. Those who believe in the idea of progress in human history would do well to consider that 70 years ago Ortega y Gasset warned an unlistening West of the dangers inherent in the Revolt of the Masses, yet here we are today, after those masses have nearly destroyed Western civilization on Europe, with the leading voice on foreign affairs in the world's leading nespaper urging us to listen to the wisdom of the masses (the World Street). Look at it this way--Mr. Friedman is asking us to turn Iraq into France. Sound good? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2003 9:55 AM
I agree Friedman is wrong, but I don't share your analysis.
The last thing Iraq needs is meddling Eurocrats. Well, second to last. The last thing it needs is to remain Muslim.
The first thing it needs is to embrace some sort of modernist ideology, social and political. I very much doubt any significant number of Iraqis see it that way. But it will not matter who offers what to Iraq if Iraq remains stuck in a medieval way of life. It will be like feeding coal to a horse.
Friedman also apparently blames the Six Day War for Israel's problems with her neighbors, for some weird reason.
Posted by: scott h. at March 19, 2003 2:26 PMIf Iraq is to be nmore like Amnerica than like France it will require a universalist religious faith. What remains to be seen is whether Islam can coexist over the long term with secular government, as it has been doing for some time in Turkey, or whether Islam inevitably and inexorably extends its grasp until it controls governance too.
Posted by: oj at March 19, 2003 2:30 PMBack when I was a history major, I wrote my junior thesis on the internment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. Now, lots of people take lots of different lessons from that episode. What I learned is that it was, in structure and, over time, rhetorically, just another New Deal program.
In the fifty years since, the Left has come to believe that the only legitimate use of federal power is large social welfare programs. As a result, everything government does has to be presented in this way. We cannot simply go to war. We must go to war as Phase I of a multi-phase, multi-year, multi-billion dollar program to remake Iraqi society into a liberal democracy with, I'm sure, a generous welfare state. If we don't attempt this then, regardless of the how the fighting turns out, the war will be lost.
I agree that rebuilding Iraq is important to the US. Creating, or recreating, a prosperous, educated middle class supporting democratic institutions would be great. But the first job is to go in, take over, kick our Hussein and the Ba'athists, and advance our security by finding and destroying their ability to attack us, overtly or covertly. The rest is icing and not necessary for victory.
Are there any sites out there with data on which sections of the US population are responsible for its' rising birth rate?
Do Blue Staters make as many babies as Red Staters for example? And does population growth vary by income, religion, race etc.?
Since France seems to be going the way of Iraq, it's only fair of Mr. Friedman to ask the US to turn Iraq into France.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at March 19, 2003 3:54 PMI think it's a stretch to blame the Marshall Plan for European welfarism, which is alive and well in places that never received a Marshall penny.
The Marshall Plan allowed a continent of starving people to rebuild a destroyed industrial and transportation system and begin farming again. What happened after that was not a necessary consequence -- except in the sense that in 1918, the British government promised the men it was sending to their deaths that if any of them managed to come home, they would have something to come home to, and then failed to deliver. This was a conservative failure, not liberal, as the liberals were not in power.
I've studied the Japanese relocation, too, and even more so, the fact that the AJAs in Hawaii were mostly left alone. (I've talked to the old-timers about how it worked out in practice; no history I've seen captures that). I cannot begin to imagine how the relocation can be morphed into a New Deal program.
Harry:
The Liberals were in powqer in Britain not the Tories in 1918, right?
Meanwhile, France spent almost exactly the amount it received in Marshall plan money trying to hold onto Indochina, likewise the Dutch in Indonesia. They had plenty of money to rebuild their countries without our dumping more in.