Ancient History

Another excellent essay by Robert Kagan on the fact that the American phenomenon of enthusiastic support for idealistic international intervention, followed by accusations of deceit when things don’t go as swimmingly as hoped, goes back a long way:

The Spanish-American War was probably the most popular war in American history, uniting left and right, southerners with northerners, Theodore Roosevelt with William Jennings Bryan. But when the aftermath of the war left a sour taste in the mouths of many, a new account of the war emerged, according to which a very small number of people had managed to manipulate the levers of power and the emotions of millions in order to pursue their imperialistic conspiracy. This account became the accepted version of events, so much so that to read many history textbooks today, you would imagine that the war was foisted upon an unsuspecting nation by a handful of cagey “imperialists”—Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan—rather than having been launched enthusiastically by a bipartisan majority in Congress that all but trampled McKinley in its rush to war. When Americans came to regret their equally enthusiastic rush into World War I, many chose to blame the nefarious manipulations of bankers and munitions makers. Opponents of American entry into World War II, from Charles Beard to Robert A. Taft, insisted that Franklin Roosevelt “tricked” or “lied” the nation into war. Today it is the Iraq War, once approved by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the Senate and by large majorities of Americans, that is now inexplicable except by reference to a neoconservative conspiracy.

When [Hillary] Clinton rose on the Senate floor [in 2002] to cast her vote in favor of the resolution “to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” the arguments she used were neither novel nor obviously disingenuous. They were the old Clinton administration arguments with which she was very familiar from her own experience in the White House. Thus Saddam Hussein, she noted, was “a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family members, to maintain his iron grip on power.” He had used “chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20 thousand people.” He had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” He had “invaded and occupied Kuwait,” and when the United States withdrew its forces after driving him out, he had taken his revenge against Kurds and the Shiites “who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging.”

No doubt there are things Hillary Clinton would have done differently had she been sitting in the White House in the spring of 2003. It is possible she would not, in the end, have gone to war. But there was certainly nothing in Hillary Clinton’s own foreign policy doctrine that precluded her from going to war. The Clinton administration had itself used force on several occasions, in Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, of course, against Iraq. It had used force without UN authorization. It had bombed and fired missiles into Iraq over the heated objections of France and other allies, and it had done so based on the same evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs that the Bush administration used to justify its war. Certainly there was nothing in the worldview of the Clinton administration to stop it from going to war against Iraq in 2003, and much to support it—which is why nearly every former Clinton official and many Democrats in and out of Congress did. Only when the war went badly did it turn out that, as in 1898, 1917, 1941, and 1965, Americans had once again been lied and tricked into war.

the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive, and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their willingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with the status quo and belief in the possibility of change.

Historical Revenant

The last outpost of feudalism in Europe is becoming a democracy:

John Michael Beaumont makes an unusual despot. In his standard-issue pensioner’s outfit – cosy crewneck jumper, blue work trousers, grey leather-look shoes – the 79-year-old ex-aircraft engineer looks much like any other septuagenarian. He drinks tea. He tends his garden. He potters. Kim Jong Il he most certainly is not. However benign, though, Beaumont is an old-fashioned sort of dictator – the hereditary overlord of the last independent feudal state in the world.

A Thousand Words

Via the indefatigable Instapundit:

Michael Yon emails: “I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome. A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from ‘Chosen’ Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope. The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the people were saying. One man said, ‘Thank you for peace.’ Another man, a Muslim, said ‘All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.’