Prometheus 6

Quote of note:

Safely reelected, President Bush vows to press on. He has already restated his commitment to securing "the freedom of all mankind." He has seized the opportunity to refresh the camouflage cloaking the actual enterprise to which he has committed the U.S. He thereby prevents the American people from gauging the costs entailed by that enterprise and the risks that it involves.

Through incessant repetition, words like "freedom" and "democracy" have become like an old coin, worn so thin as to defy even the most conscientious effort to distinguish between the real and the counterfeit.

But the course on which we have embarked since 9/11 — and that has landed us in Iraq — is not a true one. It is unwise, unsustainable and doomed to fail. How regrettable that in the presidential contest just concluded we have squandered the opportunity to discover that.

Unsafe for Democracy
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Andrew J. Bacevich teaches international relations at Boston University and is the author of "The New American Militarism," forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

November 8, 2004

In justifying the exercise of U.S. power, all modern presidents read off the same script. The United States stands for liberty. It champions democracy. It aids the oppressed and succors the afflicted. Alone among history's great powers, the U.S. acts on behalf of the "inalienable rights" that form the birthright of all humankind.

That script was the handiwork of Woodrow Wilson. When it comes to describing this nation's purpose, each of the dominant political figures of our own day — Ronald Reagan no less than John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush no less than Bill Clinton — has embraced Wilson's legacy. Doing so has served these presidents well, enabling them to exercise extraordinary latitude in the conduct of policy while insulating them from accountability for failure.

In practice, however, ideals inform U.S. policy precisely to the extent that they happen to coincide with more tangible considerations. As a consequence, adherence to Wilsonian principles becomes highly selective: In the 1990s, Clinton called armed intervention to halt ethnic cleansing in the Balkans a moral imperative, yet averted his eyes from the Rwandan genocide; today, Bush adamantly insists that preventive war to liberate oppressed Iraqis was "the right thing to do," even as his administration dithers in the face of the genocide unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan. Unfortunately for the doomed Tutsis in Rwanda, U.S. interests in the Great Lakes region of sub-Saharan Africa fell somewhat short of those in Europe. And too bad also for the Sudanese: Their country does not sit astride an ocean of oil.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a monopoly on this hypocrisy. Nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly American. In Paris and Berlin just as in Washington, politicians gild their speeches with claims of altruism and good intentions. But at least the French and the Germans appear to recognize such expressions of high-mindedness for what they are: a benign ritual lending dignity to an otherwise brutal business in which the strong inevitably do as they will and the weak as they must.