Americans rightly admire our troops for their bravery, dedication and integrity. The Marines, for instance, are renowned for abiding by an honorable code — as warriors and as individuals in civilian life. They epitomize the rectitude of America’s soldiers. But a recently disclosed Pentagon study — little noted in the media — has seemingly cast a shadow over our troops.
The study of U.S. combat troops in Iraq finds that less than half of the soldiers and Marines surveyed would report a team member for breaches of the military’s ethics rules. Military and civilian observers have concluded from the study that more and stricter training in combat ethics is urgently needed.
But instead of reinforcing the military’s ethics, we must challenge them. The Pentagon study provides evidence for a searing indictment not of our soldiers but of Washington’s rules of engagement.
Consider the waking nightmare of being a U.S. combat troop in Iraq: imagine that you are thrust into a battlefield — but purposely hamstrung by absurd restrictions. Iraqis throw Molotov cocktails (i.e., gasoline-filled bottles) at your vehicle — but you are prohibited from responding with force. Iraqis, to quote the study, “drop large chunks of concrete blocks from second story buildings or overpasses” as you drive by — but you are not allowed to respond. “Every group of Soldiers and Marines interviewed,” the Pentagon study summarizes, “reported that they felt the existing ROE [rules of engagement] tied their hands, preventing them from doing what needed to be done to win the war.”
And the soldiers are right. In Iraq, Washington’s rules have systematically prevented our brave and capable troops from using all necessary force to win, to crush the insurgency — and even to protect themselves. As noted in news articles since the start of the war, American forces are ordered not to bomb key targets, such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest they offend Muslim sensibilities.
Having to follow such self-effacing rules of engagement while confronting sniper fire and ambushes and bombs from every direction, day in and day out, must be utterly demoralizing and unbearable. No one should be surprised at the newly reported willingness of combat troops to defy military ethics, because such defiance is understandable as the natural reaction of warriors made to follow suicidal rules.
When being “ethical” on Washington’s terms means martyring yourself and your comrades for the sake of murderous Iraqis, it is understandable that troops are disinclined to report “unethical” behavior. It is understandable that troops should feel anger and anxiety (as many do), because it is horrifically unjust for America to send its personnel into combat, deliberately prevent them from achieving victory — and expect them to die for the sake of the enemy. It would be natural for an individual thrust into the line of fire as a sacrificial offering to rebel with indignation at such a fate.
How can we do this to our soldiers?
The death and misery caused by Washington’s self-crippling rules of engagement — rules endorsed by liberals and conservatives alike — are part of the inevitable destruction flowing from a broader evil: the philosophy of “compassionate” war.
This perverse view of war holds that fighting selfishly to defend your own freedom by defeating enemies is wrong; but fighting to selflessly serve the needs of others is virtuous. It was on this premise that U.S. troops were sent to Iraq: Washington’s goal was not to defend America against whatever threat Hussein’s hostile regime posed to us, as a first step toward defeating our enemies in the region — principally Iran, the arch sponsor of Islamic totalitarianism. Instead the troops were sent (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers” — spilling American blood and spending endless resources on the “compassionate” goal of lifting the hostile and primitive Iraqi people out of poverty, feeding their hungry, unclogging their sewers. The result of this “compassionate” war is thousands of unnecessary American deaths, and the preservation and emboldening of the enemies we most need to defeat: Iran and Saudi Arabia.
We must put an end to the barbarous sacrifice of American troops, now. It is past time to abandon Washington’s self-sacrificial rules of engagement, and its broader policy of “compassionate,” self-sacrificial warfare. Instead of subjecting troops to more intensive “ethics” training, we should unleash them from the suicidal military ethics of self-sacrifice.
Bush’s disastrous foreign policy — especially the Iraq fiasco — has led many to conclude that diplomatic “engagement” is our best hope for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. But while Bush’s policy is a failure, engagement is not the solution.
Bush’s “moralistic” approach, we’re told, entails denouncing nations as evil, refusing negotiations, and isolating and punishing hostile regimes. That, many believe, is how we landed in the catastrophe of Iraq.
And now Bush’s moral denunciations of Teheran have supposedly escalated the nuclear standoff, while his policy of pressuring and isolating Iran by limiting its use of foreign banks has made Iran more defiant. That is why, diplomatists claim, Iran responded to the latest American-backed U.N. sanctions by ramping up production of nuclear material. Military conflict, they warn, and an Iraq-like debacle, loom.
But engagement can supposedly end the Iranian threat bloodlessly, because it discards inflexible moral dogmas. Just as Iran has shown it will meet “confrontation with confrontation,” proponents write in the New York Times, so Iran will “respond to what it perceives as flexibility with pragmatism.” Iran’s recent release of 15 British hostages, we are told, was achieved precisely because Britain engaged in nonjudgmental, patient diplomacy. Putting aside our moral qualms about talking with monsters would free us to negotiate a deal whereby Iran stops its nuclear program in exchange for Western carrots.
This scheme presumes that Iran, like us, seeks peace and prosperity and that no one — not even the mullahs — would put their moral ideals before a steady flow of loot. But in the three decades since its Islamic revolution, Iran has dedicated itself to spreading its moral ideal — Islamic totalitarianism — by force of arms. Teheran spends millions every year, not to pursue prosperity for its tyrannized citizens, but to finance terrorism and to build a nuclear arsenal to wield against enemies of Allah. It is Iran’s commitment to the goal of subjugating infidels, not a quest for peace, that motivated its backing of the Hezbollah-Hamas war against Israel and its support for insurgents who slaughter American troops in Iraq.
Would diplomatic “incentives” encourage Iran to mitigate its ideology? No, they would only intensify its hostility. Negotiations buy Iran time; a settlement would provide loot to fund its nuclear program. Above all, diplomacy grants Iran moral legitimacy as a civilized regime: its hostile goals — “death to America” — and its murder of our citizens are made to seem reasonable differences of opinion. Such appeasement confirms the perverse notion that Allah’s warriors, materially weaker but morally self-righteous, can succeed in bringing down the mighty infidel West. The real lesson of the recent hostage incident is how readily Western nations will grovel to appease Iran’s blatant aggression.
The amoral policy of engagement fails for the same reason that Bush’s policy fails: both reject the need of morality in foreign policy. Iran is intransigent — but precisely because Bush’s policy merely pays lip service to rational moral principles.
What has been the administration’s response to Iran’s nuclear quest, to its funding of terrorists and Iraqi insurgents, to its hostilities stretching back to the 1979 invasion of our embassy? Did it morally judge Iran as an enemy regime waging war on America and fight to defend U.S. lives by militarily crushing Iran?
No. After 9/11, Washington cordially invited Iran into an anti-terrorism coalition; later, Bush denounced Iran as part of an “axis of evil”; now, he embraces diplomatic talks. To the extent that his administration does momentarily recognize Iran’s evil, its response has been ludicrous: to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, U.S. diplomats scrounged for votes at the U.N. to pass toothless sanctions, and tried to put financial “pressure” on Iran (e.g., by preventing it from trading oil in dollars), an absurdly futile scheme (Iran now trades in euros).
Moreover, when Bush has gone to war, it was not to crush an evil enemy, but to bring it “democracy.” Bush’s messianic crusade in the Middle East is a selfless war of sacrifice to needy Afghanis and Iraqis — not a war to uphold the moral goal of safeguarding the lives of Americans.
Bush’s self-effacing, immoral foreign policy — like the appeasing gambit of engagement — licenses Iran to pursue its hostile goals with impunity.
The rational alternative to both of these self-destructive approaches is a policy committed to American self-defense, on principle. It is a policy that morally judges Iran — and that ruthlessly renders Iran non-threatening by military force. That does not mean a selfless, Iraq-like crusade to bring Iranians the vote. It means upholding the moral right of Americans to live in freedom by destroying Teheran’s Islamic totalitarian regime. Nothing less will do.
The cause of the U.S. health-care mess is governmental interference. The solution, therefore, is not more governmental control, whether via nationalized medical insurance or a government takeover of medicine.
Health insurance costs so much today because the government, on the premise that there exists a “right” to health care at someone else’s expense, has promised Americans a free lunch. When a person can consume medical services without needing to consider how to pay for them — Medicare, Medicaid, or the individual’s employer will foot the bill — demand skyrockets. The $2,000 elective liver test he or she would have forgone in favor of a better place to live suddenly becomes a necessity when its cost seems to add up to $0.
As the expense of providing “free” health care erupts accordingly, the government tries to control costs by clamping down on the providers of health care. A massive net of regulations descends on doctors, nurses, insurers, and drug companies. As more of their endeavors are rendered unprofitable, drug companies produce fewer drugs, and insurers limit their policies or exit the industry.
Doctors and nurses, now buried in paperwork and faced with the endless, unjust task of appeasing government regulators, find their love for their work dissipating. They cut their hours or leave the profession. Many young people decide never to enter those fields in the first place.
What happens when demand skyrockets and supply is restricted? The price of medicine explodes. What was once to serve as a free lunch for everyone becomes lunch for no one.
The solution? Remove all controls. Recognize each citizen’s right and responsibility to pay for his or her own health care, and return to insurers the entrepreneurial freedom to come up with innovative products.
True freedom would bring health care into the reach of the average U.S. citizen again — just as it has done for other goods and services, such as computers, cell phones and food.
On May 27, environmentalists will celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, the founding mother of their movement.
But Carson’s centenary is no cause for celebration. Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded — discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.
The crusade against DDT began with Carson’s antipesticide diatribe Silent Spring, published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence — Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson’s book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT’s crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.
Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation — alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.
But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost sixty years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began — with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT — yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature “has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” Indeed, in a 1956 study, human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT — fueled by Silent Spring and the growing environmental movement — was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands.
So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today’s malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists — who profess to be the defenders of life — continue to oppose the use of DDT?
The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to “tamper” with nature.
The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT’s sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, “the ’control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.” Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.
On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show “humility” before its “vast forces” and leave it alone. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead “a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.” If the untouched, “natural” state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.
Carson’s current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: “Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”
In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a “necessary” component of a “vibrant biosphere” and seeking a “reasonable accommodation” with them.
Rachel Carson’s birthday should be commemorated, not with laudatory festivities, but with the rejection of the environmental ideology she inspired.
The House of Representatives recently passed the “say on pay” bill proposed by Congressman Barney Frank. The bill forces all corporations to allow shareholders a non-binding vote on CEO compensation. The idea is to shame directors into lowering CEO pay, which the bill’s supporters claim is out of control.
Although the bill is touted as a means of protecting the interests of shareholders, what it actually represents is a usurpation of corporate control. It is therefore a violation of shareholders’ rights.
Those clamoring for this bill insist that legislation is necessary to give shareholders a “say on pay.” But shareholders already have a say on pay — i.e., a means of exercising control over corporate governance. If a shareholder is upset about CEO pay or any other management issue, he has three legitimate, free-market options: 1. “Vote with his dollars” by selling his shares; 2. Accumulate a controlling interest in the company (typically 51 percent) and impose a new board of directors; 3. Persuade a majority of shareholders to replace the board with people sympathetic to their concerns.
If enough shareholders really wanted a vote on CEO pay, they could demand a change to their company’s bylaws. But very few companies have adopted such changes, suggesting that most shareholders are not actually interested in this control. After all, one of the great benefits of the corporate structure is a clear division of labor: shareholders invest capital, but leave the business management to an elected board and its chosen executives. Rational shareholders do not want to micromanage public companies by participating in such decisions as setting CEO pay.
It is a minority of “activist” shareholders — together with antibusiness politicians — who are shrieking about “outrageous” CEO pay packages. And it is highly revealing that, instead of pursuing one of the above methods that respects everyone’s freedom, they are agitating for legislation — seeking to wield the power of government to force their views of corporate governance and CEO pay on the majority of shareholders.
What motivates these activists is not the wellbeing — i.e., the wealth — of fellow shareholders, but an antiprofit, anticapitalist social agenda. It is they who call for corporate “social responsibility” — the idea that executives and shareholders should sacrifice money-making for the sake of sundry “stakeholders.” This is incompatible with the purpose of business and with the responsibility of corporate leaders to maximize shareholder wealth.
Indeed, if these activists were truly concerned with the shareholder and the quality of boards of directors and CEOs that he can hire, they would be advocating for less government regulation not more. Regulations today prevent market forces from fully operating in corporate America.
For instance, the Williams Act restricts stock accumulation, and other regulations place strict constraints on board membership and hostile takeovers, all of which make ousting incompetent management more difficult. Sarbanes-Oxley, that incredible perversion of justice, has cost innocent businessmen billions of dollars in the name of fighting the misdeeds committed by others. This has made running an honest business more precarious and less enjoyable.
Anyone truly concerned about shareholders — and about the health of corporate America — should be campaigning for the repeal of these regulations.
But far from fighting government controls, shareholder “activists” fight to hand control over American corporations to government — or to organizations controlled indirectly by politicians, such as public pension plans. Indeed, this is already beginning, prompting many businesses to flee to the relative safety of private ownership — i.e., being owned and run by professionals — so that they can continue to maximize their wealth.
With this ever-increasing web of regulations, does anyone really believe that the government will stop at non-binding shareholder votes, that the next step won’t be the imposition of binding votes and, longer-term, government limits on CEO pay? Congressman Frank doesn’t. Frank — who has supported outright caps on CEO pay — has threatened that if “say on pay” does not sufficiently reduce CEO compensation relative to that of other employees, “then we will do something more.”
Don’t be fooled by those who say they just want to give shareholders a say. The real issue is who has the right to decide how a business is run: its owners or “activists” who have seized the power of governmental coercion?
The Rise and Fall of Neoconservative Foreign Policy
When asked during the 2000 presidential campaign about his foreign policy convictions, George W. Bush said that a president’s “guiding question” should be: “What’s in the best interests of the United States? What’s in the best interests of our people?”1
A president focused on American interests, he made clear, would not risk troops’ lives in “nation-building” missions overseas:
I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow the dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in [Somalia] it was a nation-building exercise, and same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.2
In denouncing “nation-building” Bush was in line with a long-standing animus of Americans against using our military to try to fix the endless problems of other nations. But at the same time, he was going against a major contingent of conservatives, the neoconservatives, who had long been arguing for more, not less, nation-building.
By 2003, though, George W. Bush had adopted the neoconservatives’ position. He sent the American military to war in Iraq, not simply to “overthrow the dictator,” but to build the primitive, tribal nation of Iraq into a “democratic,” peaceful, and prosperous one. This “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he explained, was only the first step of a larger “forward strategy of freedom” whose ultimate goal was “the end of tyranny in our world”3 — a prescription for worldwide nation-building. All of this, he stressed, was necessary for America’s “national interest.”
President Bush’s profound shift in foreign policy views reflected the profound impact that September 11 had on him and on the American public at large.
Before 9/11, Americans were basically satisfied with the existing foreign policy. They had little desire to make any significant changes, and certainly not in the direction of more nation-building. The status quo seemed to be working; Americans seemed basically safe. The Soviet Union had fallen, and America was the world’s lone superpower. To be sure, we faced occasional aggression, including Islamic terrorist attacks against Americans overseas — but these were not large enough or close enough for most to lose sleep over, let alone demand fundamental changes in foreign policy over.
Everything changed on that Tuesday morning when nineteen members of a terrorist network centered in Afghanistan slaughtered thousands of Americans in the name of an Islamic totalitarian movement supported by states throughout the Arab-Islamic world. What once seemed like a safe world was now obviously fraught with danger. And what once seemed like an appropriate foreign policy toward terrorism and its state supporters was now obviously incapable of protecting America. Prior to 9/11, terrorism was treated primarily as a problem of isolated gangs roaming the earth, to be combated by police investigations of the particular participants in any given attack; our leaders turned a blind eye to the ideology driving the terrorists and to the indispensable role of state support for international terrorist groups. State sponsors of terrorism were treated as respected members of the “international community,” and, to the extent their aggression was acknowledged, it was dealt with via “diplomacy,” a euphemism for inaction and appeasement. Diplomacy had been the dominant response in 1979, when a new Islamist Iranian regime supported a 444-day hostage-taking of fifty Americans — as part of an Islamic totalitarian movement openly committed to achieving Islamic world domination, including the destruction of Israel and America. Diplomacy had been the response when the terrorist agents of Arab-Islamic regimes killed marines in Lebanon in 1983 — and bombed a TWA flight in 1986 — and bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 — and bombed the Khobar towers in 1996 — and bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 — and bombed the USS Cole in 2000. Diplomacy had also been the response when Iran issued a death decree on a British author for “un-Islamic” writings, threatening American bookstores and publishers associated with him, and thus denying Americans their sacred right to free speech. Throughout all of this, Americans had accepted that our leaders knew what they were doing with regard to protecting America from terrorism and other threats. On 9/11, Americans saw with brutal clarity that our actions had been somewhere between shortsighted and blind. The country and its president were ripe for a dramatic departure from the policies that had guided and failed America pre-9/11.
The only prominent group of intellectuals that offered a seemingly compelling alternative claiming to protect America in the modern, dangerous world (a standard by which neither pacifists nor Buchananite xenophobes qualify) were neoconservatives.
Neoconservatives had long been critics of America’s pre-9/11 foreign policy, the technical name for which is “realism.” “Realism” holds that all nations are, in one form or another, “rational” actors that pursue common interests such as money, power, and prestige. Given such common goals among nations, “realists” hold that, no matter what another nation’s statements or actions toward the United States, there is always a chance for a diplomatic deal in which both sides make concessions; any other nation will be “rational” and realize that an all-out military conflict with superpower America is not in its interest. Thus, America pursuing its “national interest” means a constant diplomatic game of toothless resolutions, amorphous “pressure,” and dressed-up bribery to keep the world’s assorted threatening nations in line. The only time “realists” are willing to abandon this game in favor of using genuine military force against threatening regimes is in the face of some catastrophic attack. Otherwise, they regard it as not in our “national interest” to deal with other nations by military means. Why take such a drastic step when a successful deal may be just around the corner?
In the 1980s and 1990s, as “realism” dominated foreign policy, neoconservatives criticized it for having a false view of regimes, and a “narrow,” shortsighted view of the “national interest” in which only tangible, immediate threats to American security warranted military action. They rightly pointed out that “realism” was a shortsighted prescription for long-range disaster — a policy of inaction and appeasement in the face of very real threats, and thus a guarantor that those threats would grow bolder and stronger. A neoconservative essay published in 2000 expresses this viewpoint:
The United States, both at the level of elite opinion and popular sentiment, appears to have become the Alfred E. Newman of superpowers — its national motto: “What, me worry?” . . . [T]here is today a “present danger.” It has no name. It is not to be found in any single strategic adversary. . . . Our present danger is one of declining military strength, flagging will and confusion about our role in the world. It is a danger, to be sure, of our own devising. Yet, if neglected, it is likely to yield very real external dangers, as threatening in their way as the Soviet Union was a quarter century ago.4
In place of “realism,” neoconservatives advocated a policy often called “interventionism,” one component of which calls for America to work assertively to overthrow threatening regimes and to replace them with peaceful “democracies.” Bad regimes, they asserted vaguely, were responsible for threats like terrorism; such threats could never emerge from “democracies.” “Interventionism,” they said, took a “broad” and ultimately more realistic view of America’s “national interest,” by dealing with threats before they metastasized into catastrophes and by actively replacing threatening governments with “democracies” that would become our allies. In place of a series of “realist” responses to the crisis of the moment, they claimed, they were offering a long-range foreign policy to protect America now and in the future.
After 9/11, the neoconservatives felt intellectually vindicated, and they argued for “interventionism” with regard to state sponsors of terrorism. An editorial in the leading neoconservative publication, The Weekly Standard, called for a “war to replace the government of each nation on earth that allows terrorists to live and operate within its borders.”5 The replacement governments would be “democracies” that would allegedly ensure that new threatening regimes would not take the place of old ones.
These ideas exerted a major influence on President Bush immediately after 9/11, an influence that grew in the coming years. On September 20, 2001, influenced by neoconservative colleagues and speechwriters, he proclaimed a desire to end state sponsorship of terrorism: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. . . . From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”6 His neoconservative deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, publicly called for “ending states who sponsor terrorism”7 (though the “realists” in the State Department caused the administration to partially recant).
Soon thereafter, President Bush made clear that he wanted to replace the state sponsors of terrorism with “democracies,” beginning with Afghanistan. When he dropped bombs on that country, he supplemented them with food packages and a tripling of foreign aid; he declared the Afghan people America’s “friend” and said that we would “liberate” them and help them establish a “democracy” to replace the terrorist-sponsoring Taliban.
The full influence of neoconservatism was evident by the time of the Iraq War. Prior to 9/11, the idea of democratic “regime change” in Iraq with the ultimate aim of “spreading democracy” throughout the Arab-Islamic world was unpopular outside neoconservative circles — dismissed as a “nation-building” boondoggle waiting to happen. After 9/11, George W. Bush became convinced — and convinced Americans — that such a quest was utterly necessary in today’s dangerous world, and that it could and would succeed. “Iraqi democracy will succeed,” he said in 2003, “and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran — that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”8
Thus, the neoconservative foreign policy of “regime change” and “spreading democracy” had become the American foreign policy — and the hope of Americans for protecting the nation.
As neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2005:
What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined . . . the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world.9
At first, Operation Iraqi Freedom — and thus our new neoconservative foreign policy — seemed to most observers to be a success. The basic expectation of the war’s architects had been that by ousting a tyrant, “liberating” Iraqis, and allowing them to set up a “democracy” in Iraq, we would at once be deterring future threats from Iran and Syria, setting up a friendly, allied regime in Iraq, and empowering pro-American influences throughout the Middle East. And when the American military easily took Baghdad, when we witnessed Kodak moments of grateful Iraqis hugging American soldiers or razing a statue of Saddam Hussein, when President Bush declared “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,”10 neoconservatives in particular thought that everything was working. Their feeling of triumph was captured on the back cover of The Weekly Standard on April 21, 2003, in which the magazine parodied prominent Iraq war critics by printing a fake apology admitting that their opposition to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” reflected stupidity and ignorance. “We’re Idiots. We Admit It,” the parody read. “We, the Undersigned, Agree that We Got this Whole War in Iraq Business Spectacularly Wrong. We didn’t see that it was a war of liberation, not a war of colonization. . . . We thought the Iraqi people would resent American troops. We thought the war would drag on and on. . . . We wanted to preserve the status quo.”11 Future cover stories of The Weekly Standard featured inspiring titles such as “Victory: The Restoration of American Awe and the Opening of the Arab Mind” and “The Commander: How Tommy Franks Won the Iraq War.”
But the luster of the Iraq War quickly wore off as American troops faced an insurgency that the Bush team had not anticipated; it turned out that many of the lovable, freedom-loving Iraqis we had heard about prewar were in fact recalcitrant, dictatorship-seeking Iraqis. Still, even through 2005, many viewed the Iraq War as a partial success due to the capture of Saddam Hussein and such alleged milestones as a “transfer of power” in 2004, an election and the passage of a constitution in January 2005, and a ratified constitution in December 2005 — events that were heralded even by many of the President’s most dependable critics, such as the New York Times.
Now, however, in mid-2007, the Iraq War is rightly regarded by most as a disaster that utterly failed to live up to its promise. The Bush-neoconservative vision of deterred enemies, a friendly Iraq, and the inspiration of potential allies around the world has not materialized. Instead, for the price of more than 3,200 American soldiers, and counting, we have gotten an Iraq in a state of civil war whose government (to the extent it has one) follows a constitution avowedly ruled by Islamic law and is allied with Iran; more-confident, less-deterred regimes in Iran and Syria; and the increasing power and prestige of Islamic totalitarians around the world: in Egypt, in the Palestinian territories, in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon. And all of this from a policy that was supposed to provide us with a clear-eyed, farsighted view of our “national interest” — as against the blindness and short-range mentality of our former “realist” policies.
How have we managed to fail so spectacularly to secure our interests in the perfect neoconservative war? The state of affairs it has brought about is so bad, so much worse than anticipated, that it cannot be explained by particular personalities (such as Bush or Rumsfeld) or particular strategic decisions (such as insufficient troop levels). Such a failure can be explained only by fundamental flaws in the policy.
On this count, most of the President’s critics and critics of neoconservatism heartily agree; however, their identification of neoconservatism’s fundamental problems has been abysmal. The criticism is dominated by the formerly discredited “realists,” who argue that the Iraq War demonstrates that “war is not the answer” to our problems — that the United States was too “unilateralist,” “arrogant,” “militaristic” — and that we must revert to more “diplomacy” to deal with today’s threats. Thus, in response to Iran’s ongoing support of terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons, to North Korea’s nuclear tests, to Saudi Arabia’s ongoing financing of Islamic Totalitarianism — they counsel more “diplomacy,” “negotiations,” and “multilateralism.” In other words, we should attempt to appease the aggressors who threaten us with bribes that reward their aggression, and we should allow our foreign policy to be dictated by the anti-Americans at the United Nations. These are the exact same policies that did absolutely nothing to prevent 9/11 or to thwart the many threats we face today.
If these are the lessons we draw from the failure of neoconservatism, we will be no better off without that policy than with it. It is imperative, then, that we gain a genuine understanding of neoconservatism’s failure to protect American interests. Providing this understanding is the purpose of this essay. In our view, the basic reason for neoconservatism’s failure to protect America is that neoconservatism, despite its claims, is fundamentally opposed to America’s true national interest.
What Is the “National Interest”?
When most Americans hear the term “national interest” in foreign policy discussions, they think of our government protecting our lives, liberty, and property from foreign aggressors, today and in the future. Thus, when neoconservatives use the term “national interest,” most Americans assume that they mean the protection of American lives and rights. But this assumption is wrong. To neoconservatives, the “national interest” means something entirely different than the protection of American individual rights. To understand what, we must look to the intellectual origins of the neoconservative movement.
The movement of “neoconservatives” (a term initially used by one of its critics) began as a group of disillusioned leftist-socialist intellectuals. Among them were Irving Kristol, the widely-acknowledged “godfather” of neoconservatism and founder of the influential journals The Public Interest and The National Interest; Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of Commentary; Nathan Glazer, a Harvard professor of sociology; and Daniel Bell, another Harvard sociologist.
The cause of the original neoconservatives’ disillusionment was the massive failure of socialism worldwide, which had become undeniable by the 1960s, combined with their leftist brethren’s response to it.
In the early 20th century, American leftists were professed idealists. They were true believers in the philosophy of collectivism: the idea that the group (collective) has supremacy over the individual, both metaphysically and morally — and therefore that the individual must live in service to the collective, sacrificing for “its” sake. Collectivism is the social-political application of the morality of altruism: the idea that individuals have a duty to live a life of selfless service to others. The variety of collectivism that leftists subscribed to was socialism (as against fascism). They sought to convert America into a socialist state in which “scientific” social planners would coercively direct individuals and “redistribute” their property for the “greater good” of the collective. Many leftists believed, in line with socialist theory, that this system would lead to a level of prosperity, harmony, and happiness that the “atomistic,” “unplanned” system of capitalism could never approach.
The Left’s vision of the flourishing socialist Utopia collapsed as socialist experiment after socialist experiment produced the exact opposite results. Enslaving individuals and seizing their production led to destruction wherever and to whatever extent it was implemented, from the Communist socialism of Soviet Russia and Red China, to the National Socialism (Nazism) of Germany, to the disastrous socialist economics of Great Britain. At this point, as pro-capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand has observed, the Left faced a choice: Either renounce socialism and promote capitalism — or maintain allegiance to socialism, knowing full well what type of consequences it must lead to.
Most leftists chose the second. Knowing that they could no longer promise prosperity and happiness, they embraced an anti-wealth, anti-American, nihilist agenda. Whereas the Old Left had at least ostensibly stood for intellectualism, pro-Americanism, and prosperity-seeking, the New Left exhibited mindless hippiedom, anti-industrialization, environmentalism, naked egalitarianism, and unvarnished hatred of America’s military. Despite incontrovertible evidence of the continuous atrocities committed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, American leftists continued to support that regime while denouncing all things American.
The soon-to-be neoconservatives were among the members of the Old Left who opposed the New Left. Irving Kristol and his comrades felt increasingly alienated from their former allies — and from the socialist policies they had once championed. They had come to believe that some variant of a free economy, not a command-and-control socialist state, was necessary for human well-being. And they recognized, by the 1960s, that the Soviet Union was an evil aggressor that threatened civilization and must be fought, at least intellectually if not militarily.
But this “neoconservative” transformation went only so far. Kristol and company’s essential criticism of socialism pertained to its practicality as apolitical program; they came to oppose such socialist fixtures as state economic planning, social engineering of individuals into collectivist drones, and totalitarian government. Crucially, though, they did not renounce socialism’s collectivist moral ideal. They still believed that the individual should be subjugated for the “greater good” of “society” and the state. They just decided that the ideal was best approximated through the American political system rather than by overthrowing it.
One might ask how America’s form of government can be viewed as conducive to the ideals of thoroughgoing collectivists — given that it was founded on the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The answer is that the America neoconservatives embraced was not the individualistic America of the Founding Fathers; it was the collectivist and statist post-New Deal America. This modern American government — which violated individual rights with its social security and welfare programs and its massive regulation of business all in the name of group “rights” and had done so increasingly for decades — was seen by the neoconservatives as a basically good thing that just needed some tweaking in order to achieve the government’s moral purpose: “the national interest” (i.e., the alleged good of the collective at the expense of the individual). The neoconservatives saw in modern, welfare-state America the opportunity to achieve collectivist goals without the obvious and bloody failures of avowedly socialist systems.
There was a time in American history when the individualism upon which America was founded was advocated, albeit highly inconsistently, by American conservatives — many of whom called for something of a return to the original American system. (Individualism is the view that in social issues, including politics, the individual, not the group, is the important unit.) The best representative of individualism in conservatism in the past fifty years was Barry Goldwater, who wrote: “The legitimate functions of government are actually conducive to freedom. Maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods — the exercise of these powers makes it possible for men to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom.”12
The neoconservatives, however, openly regarded an individualistic government as immoral. The “socialist ideal,” writes Irving Kristol, is a “ necessary ideal, offering elements that were wanting in capitalist society — elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity.” Socialism, he says, is properly “community-oriented” instead of “individual-oriented”; it encourages individuals to transcend the “vulgar, materialistic, and divisive acquisitiveness that characterized the capitalist type of individual.”13 Criticizing the original American system, Kristol writes: “A society founded solely on ‘individual rights’ was a society that ultimately deprived men of those virtues which could only exist in a political community which is something other than a ‘society.’” Such a society, he says, lacked “a sense of distributive justice, a fund of shared moral values, and a common vision of the good life sufficiently attractive and powerful to transcend the knowledge that each individual’s life ends only in death.”14
Translation: Individuals’ lives are only truly meaningful if they sacrifice for some collective, “higher” purpose that “transcends” their unimportant, finite selves. That “higher” purpose — not individuals’ lives, liberty, and property — is the “national interest.”
For traditional socialists, that purpose was the material well-being of the proletariat. But as Kristol’s comments demeaning “materialism” indicate, the “higher” purpose of the neoconservatives is more concerned with the alleged moral and spiritual well-being of a nation. (One reason for this difference is that the neoconservatives are strongly influenced by the philosophy of Plato.) In this sense, neoconservatism is more a nationalist or fascist form of collectivism than socialist.
Ayn Rand highlights this difference between fascism and socialism in her essay “The Fascist New Frontier”:
The basic moral-political principle running through [fascism and socialism] is clear: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the collective.
That principle (derived from the ethics of altruism) is the ideological root of all statist systems, in any variation, from welfare statism to a totalitarian dictatorship. . . .
The socialist-communist axis keeps promising to achieve abundance, material comfort and security for its victims, in some indeterminate future. The fascist-Nazi axis scorns material comfort and security, and keeps extolling some undefined sort of spiritual duty, service and conquest. The socialist-communist axis offers its victims an alleged social ideal. The fascist-Nazi axis offers nothing but loose talk about some unspecified form of racial or national “greatness.”15
For neoconservatives, such nationalistic pursuit of “national greatness” is the “national interest” — the interest, not of an individualistic nation whose purpose is to protect the rights of individual citizens, but of an organic nation whose “greatness” is found in the subjugation of the individuals it comprises.
Fittingly, during the late 1990s, “national greatness” became the rallying cry of top neoconservatives. In an influential 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed, neoconservatives William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol) and David Brooks called directly for “national greatness conservatism.” They criticized “the antigovernment, ‘leave us alone’ sentiment that was crucial to the Republican victory of 1994. . . . Wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine.”16 (Actually, it was exactly the “governing doctrine” of the Founding Fathers, who risked their lives, fortunes, and families to be left alone by the British, and to establish a government that would leave its citizens alone.) Brooks and Kristol pined for leaders who would call America “forward to a grand destiny.”17
What kind of “grand destiny”? Brooks explained in an article elaborating on “national greatness.”
It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness. . . . [E]nergetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project.18
Brooks and Kristol bemoaned America’s lack of a task with which to achieve “national greatness.” They got it with 9/11, which necessitated that America go to war.
In an individualistic view of the “national interest,” a war is a negative necessity; it is something that gets in the way of what individuals in a society should be doing: living their lives and pursuing their happiness in freedom. Not so for the neoconservatives.
Consider the following passage from the lead editorial of the neoconservative Weekly Standard the week after 9/11, the deadliest foreign attack ever on American soil. Remember how you felt at that time, and how much you wished you could return to the seemingly peaceful state of 9/10, when you read this:
We have been called out of our trivial concerns. We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live, for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again. . . . [There now exists] the potential of Americans to join in common purpose — the potential that is the definition of a nation. . . . There is a task to which President Bush should call us . . . [a] long, expensive, and arduous war. . . . It will prove long and difficult. American soldiers will lose their lives in the course of it, and American civilians will suffer hardships. But that . . . is what real war looks like.19
Why is the Weekly Standard practically celebrating the slaughter of thousands of Americans? Because the slaughter created “the potential of Americans to join in common purpose — the potential that is the definition of a nation.” Even if a “long, expensive, and arduous war” were necessary to defeat the enemy that struck on 9/11 — and we will argue that it is not — it is profoundly un-American and morally obscene to treat such a war as a positive turn of events because it generates a collective purpose or “horizon.” Observe the scorn with which this editorial treats the normal lives of individuals in a free nation. Pursuing our careers and creative projects, making money, participating in rewarding hobbies, enjoying the company of friends, raising beloved children — these are desecrated as “trivial concerns” and “parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence.” The editorial makes clear that its signers think the exalted thing in life is “the potential of Americans to join in common purpose” — not the potential of individual Americans to lead their own lives and pursue their own happiness. This is the language of those who believe that each American is merely a cog in some grand collective machine, to be directed or discarded as the goal of “national greatness” dictates.
Americans sacrificing for the “higher” good of the nation and its “greatness” is what the neoconservatives mean by the “national interest.” And in foreign policy, this is the sort of “national interest” they strive to achieve.
An Altruistic Nationalism
Today’s neoconservative foreign policy has been formulated and advocated mostly by a younger generation of neoconservatives (though supported by much of the old guard) including the likes of William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Joshua Muravchik, and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz. It holds that America’s “national interest” in foreign policy is for America to establish and maintain a “democratic international order”20 that promotes the long-term security and well-being of all the world’s peoples.
Neoconservatives, in keeping with their altruist-collectivist ideals, believe that America has no right to conduct its foreign policy for its own sake — that is, to focus its military energies on decisively defeating real threats to its security, and otherwise to stay out of the affairs of other nations. Instead, they believe, America has a “duty” to, as leading neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan put it, “advance civilization and improve the world’s condition.”21 Just as neoconservatives hold that the individual should live in service to the American collective, so they hold that America should live in service to the international collective. And because America is the wealthiest and most powerful of all nations, neoconservatives say, it has the greatest “duty” to serve. In doing its duty to the world, Kristol and Kagan say, America will further its “national greatness,” achieving a coveted “place of honor among the world’s great powers.”22
In this view of nationalism and “national greatness,” neoconservatives are more consistently altruistic than other nationalists. Most nationalist nations are altruistic in that they believe their individual citizens are inconsequential, and should be sacrificed for the “higher cause” that is the nation. But they are “selfish” with regard to their own nation; they believe that their nation is an end in itself, that it is right to sacrifice other nations to their nation’s needs; thus, the expansionist, conquering designs of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The neoconservatives’ brand of “nationalism” does not regard America as an end in itself. It believes that America has a duty to better the condition of the rest of the world (i.e., other nations). It is an altruistic nationalism.
Neoconservatives do not put it this way; Kristol and Kagan come out for “a nationalism . . . of a uniquely American variety: not an insular, blood-and-soil nationalism, but one that derived its meaning and coherence from being rooted in universal principles first enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.”23
One might wonder how neoconservatives square their views with the universal principles of the Declaration — which recognize each American’s right to live his own life and pursue his own happiness and which say nothing about a duty to bring the good life to the rest of the world.
Neoconservatives attempt to reconcile the two by holding that freedom is not a right to be enjoyed, but a duty to be given altruistically to those who lack it. They do not mean simply that we must argue for the moral superiority of freedom and tell the Arabs that this is the only proper way for men to live — and mail them a copy of our Constitution for guidance — but that we give up our lives and our freedom to bring them freedom.
Thus, after 9/11, the neoconservatives did not call for doing whatever was necessary to defeat the nations that sponsor terrorism; rather, they championed a welfare war in Iraq to achieve their longtime goal of “Iraqi democracy.” Just a few weeks after 9/11, Max Boot wrote:
This could be the chance . . . to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe. To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim.24
For those familiar with the history of the 20th century, the international collectivist goals of the neoconservative foreign policy should not seem new; they are nearly identical to those of the foreign policy school of which President Woodrow Wilson was the most prominent member, the school known in modern terms as “Liberal Internationalism” or just “Wilsonianism.”
According to Wilsonianism, America must not restrict itself to going to war when direct threats exist; it must not “isolate” itself from the rest of the world’s troubles, but must instead “engage” itself and work with others to create a world of peace and security — one that alleviates suffering, collectively opposes “rogue nations” that threaten the security of the world as a whole, and brings “democracy” and “self-determination” to various oppressed peoples around the world. It was on this premise that both the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, were formed — and on which America entered World War I (“The world,” Wilson said, “must be made safe for democracy”).25
The Wilsonian-neoconservative view of America’s “national interest” is in stark contrast to the traditional, individualistic American view of America’s national interest in foreign policy. Angelo Codevilla, an expert on the intellectual history of American foreign policy, summarizes the difference. Before the 20th century,
Americans, generally speaking, wished the rest of the world well, demanded that it keep its troubles out of our hemisphere, and hoped that it would learn from us.
By the turn of the 20th century, however, this hope led some Americans to begin to think of themselves as the world’s teachers, its chosen instructors. This twist of the founders’ views led to a new and enduring quarrel over American foreign policy — between those who see the forceful safeguarding of our own unique way of life as the purpose of foreign relations, and those who believe that securing the world by improving it is the test of what [Iraqi “democracy” champion] Larry Diamond has called “our purpose and fiber as a nation.”26
As to how to “secure the world by improving it,” Wilsonianism and neoconservatism have substantial differences. Wilsonianism favors American subordination to international institutions and “diplomacy,” whereas neoconservatism favors American leadership and more often advocates force in conjunction with diplomacy. Traditional Wilsonians are not pacifists (Wilson, after all, brought America into World War I), but they tend to believe that almost all problems can be solved by peaceful “cooperation” among members of world bodies to paper over potential conflicts or “isolate” aggressive nations that go against the “international community.” Neoconservatives openly state that their ambitious foreign-policy goals — whether removing a direct threat or stopping a tribal war in a faraway land — require the use of force.
Some neoconservatives, such as Max Boot, embrace the term “Hard Wilsonianism,” not only to capture their intense affinity with Woodrow Wilson’s liberal international collectivism, but also to highlight their differences in tactics:
[A] more accurate term [than “neoconservatism”] might be “hard Wilsonianism.” Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson’s championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. (“Soft Wilsonians,” a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer’s trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.)27
Not only must “power, not paper” (to reverse Krauthammer’s expression) be used more often in achieving the desired “international order” than Wilsonians think, say neoconservatives, but America must lead that order. It must not subordinate its decision-making authority to an organization such as the U.N., nor cede to other countries the “responsibilities” for solving international problems.
America must lead, they say, because it is both militarily and morally the preeminent nation in the world. America, they observe, has on many occasions come to the rescue of other nations, even at its own expense (such as in World War I or Vietnam) — the ultimate proof of altruistic virtue. (According to the neoconservatives, “Americans had nothing to gain from entering Vietnam — not land, not money, not power. . . . [T]he American effort in Vietnam was a product of one of the noblest traits of the American character — altruism in service of principles.”)28 By contrast, they observe, other nations, including many in Europe, have not even shown willingness to defend themselves, let alone others.
The cornerstone policy of the neoconservatives’ American-led, “hard” collectivist foreign policy is the U.S.-led military “intervention”: using the American military or some military coalition to correct some evil; give “humanitarian” aid; provide “peacekeeping”; and, ideally, enact “regime change” and establish a new, beneficial “democracy” for the formerly oppressed.
Given the desired “international order” and America’s “responsibility” to “improve the world’s condition,” the obligation to “intervene” goes far beyond nations that threaten the United States. And when America is “intervening” in a threatening nation, the “intervention” cannot simply defeat the nation and render it non-threatening; it must seek to benefit the nation’s inhabitants, preferably by furnishing them with a new “democracy.”
Throughout the past decade and a half, neoconservatives have called for major “interventions” in remote tribal wars in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Darfur, and Liberia — none of which entailed a direct threat to the United States. And when they have called for responses to real threats, their focus has been on “liberating” the Afghans, Iraqis, and Iranians — not on breaking the hostile inhabitants’ will to keep supporting and sponsoring Islamist, anti-American causes.
Endorsing this broad mandate for “intervention,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan write, in their seminal neoconservative essay “National Interest and Global Responsibility,” that America must be “more rather than less inclined to weigh in when crises erupt, and preferably before they erupt”; it must be willing to go to war “even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed ‘vital interest’ of the United States is at stake.” In other words, to use a common phrase, America must be the “world’s policeman” — and not just any policeman, either: It must be a highly active one. In the words of Kristol and Kagan: “America cannot be a reluctant sheriff.”29
Despite Wilsonianism and “Hard Wilsonianism’s” differences, they agree entirely on a key aspect of the means to their goals: Any mission must involve substantial American sacrifice — the selfless surrender of American life, liberty, and property for the sake of other nations.
When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war to enter World War I, he said:
We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them. . . .
[W]e fight without rancor and without selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples. . . .30
Similarly, President Bush extolled the (alleged) virtue of “sacrifice for the freedom of strangers” in his decision to invade Iraq. Later that year, in a landmark speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush said:
Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?. . . I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free. . . .
Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq. . . .31
Why must America “sacrifice for the freedom of strangers”? By what right do the problems of barbarians overseas exert a claim on the life of an American twenty-year-old, whose life may be extinguished just as it is beginning?
Both neoconservatives and Wilsonians have a dual answer: It is morally right and practically necessary for America to sacrifice for the international collective.
The moral component of this is straightforward. In our culture, it is uncontroversial that a virtuous person is one who lives a life of altruism — a life of selfless service to others, in which he puts their well-being and desires above his own. This is the premise behind our ever-growing welfare state and every socialist and semi-socialist country. Max Boot applies this premise logically to sacrificing for other nations: “Why not use some of the awesome power of the U.S. government to help the downtrodden of the world, just as it is used to help the needy at home?”32
And this help is not just money — it is also blood. For example, several years ago, when President Clinton finally succumbed to pressure from neoconservatives and liberal internationalists to attack Serbia in an attempt to force its surrender of Kosovo, the neoconservatives condemned him morally — because Clinton decided to forgo sending ground troops, which may have minimized Kosovar casualties, in favor of bombing, which would spare American lives. To quote Max Boot: “It is a curious morality that puts greater value on the life of even a single American pilot — a professional who has volunteered for combat — than on hundreds, even thousands, of Kosovar lives.”33
This moral argument is crucial to appeals for sacrifice — but it is not sufficient. Imagine if neoconservatives or Wilsonians openly said: “We believe that Americans should be sent to die for the sake of other nations, even though it will achieve no American interest.” Americans would rebel against the naked self-sacrifice being demanded.
Thus, a crucial component of the neoconservative call for international self-sacrifice is the argument that it is ultimately a practical necessity — that it is ultimately in our self-interest — that the sacrifice is ultimately not really a sacrifice.
Does National Security Require International Sacrifice?
Nearly every moral or political doctrine in history that has called on individuals to sacrifice their well-being to some “higher” cause has claimed that their sacrifices are practical necessities and will lead to some wonderful long-term benefit, either for the sacrificers or for their fellow citizens or descendants.
For example, calls to sacrifice one’s desires for the sake of the supernatural are coupled with the threat of burning in hell and promises of eternal bliss in heaven. (In the militant Muslim form of this, calls to sacrifice one’s life along with as many others as possible are coupled with promises of seventy-two virgins.) Environmentalist calls to sacrifice development and industrial civilization for nature are coupled with promises to stave off some ecological apocalypse (currently “global warming”) and to reach some future ecological paradise. Calls to sacrifice for the Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat were coupled with claims about the inevitable collapse of capitalism and promises that the sacrificers’ children and grandchildren would live in a Utopia where the state had withered away.
The argument always takes the same form. Our well-being depends on “higher cause” X — nature, “God,” “Allah,” the proletariat — and therefore we must sacrifice for its sake if we are to avoid disaster and procure some necessary benefit. The “higher cause” is always viewed as metaphysically superior to the individuals being sacrificed: Religionists view man as helpless in comparison to their supernatural being of choice; environmentalists view man in relation to Mother Nature in much the same way; and collectivists view man as metaphysically inferior to the collective as a whole. If we refuse to subordinate ourselves to this cause, they believe, only disaster can result — and if we do subordinate ourselves, something positive must follow.
Fittingly, both neoconservatism and Wilsonianism promise an ultimate, self-interested payoff to Americans for their acts of international sacrifice: a level of security that is unachievable by any other means. Both promise that when we toil and bleed to “make the world safe for democracy” or to create a “democratic international order,” we will ultimately bring about a world in which we achieve new heights of peace and security — in which the collective will of the various “democracies” will make war or terrorism virtually impossible. World War I was called “the war to end all wars.”
Instead of the dangerous, threatening world we live in today, the argument goes, a world in which aggressors are willing to threaten us without hesitation, the “international order” would feature an array of friendly, peace-loving “democracies” that would not even think of starting wars, that would inspire backward people of the world to set up similar governments, and that would eagerly act collectively, when necessary, to halt any threats to the “international order.” This was the basic argument behind Bush’s sending soldiers to bleed setting up voting booths in tribal Iraq, which sacrifice was ultimately supposed to lead to “the end of tyranny” — including international aggression — “in our world.”
What if, instead, we refuse to sacrifice for foreign peoples and resolve to use our military only to protect our own security? We will fail, the collectivists say, because our security depends on the well-being of other nations and on “international order.” If we let other peoples remain miserable and unfree on the grounds that it is not our problem, they argue, that will give comfort to dictators and breed hatred in populations that will ultimately lead to attacks on the United States.
In their essay “National Interest and Global Responsibility,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan write that America should
act as if instability in important regions of the world, and the flouting of civilized rules of conduct in those regions, are threats that affect us with almost the same immediacy as if they were occurring on our doorstep. To act otherwise would . . . erode both American pre-eminence and the international order . . . on which U.S. security depends. Eventually, the crises would appear at our doorstep.34
After 9/11, neoconservatives argued that the case of Afghanistan proved the necessity of “interventions” to resolve foreign crises and spread “democracy.” Max Boot writes that many thought that after Afghanistan was abandoned as an ally to fight the Soviets, we could
let the Afghans resolve their own affairs . . . if the consequence was the rise of the Taliban — homicidal mullahs driven by a hatred of modernity itself — so what? Who cares who rules this flyspeck in Central Asia? So said the wise elder statesmen. The “so what” question has now been answered definitively; the answer lies in the rubble of the World Trade Center.35
What should we have done in Afghanistan? Boot says that, in the case of Afghanistan, we should have kept troops there throughout the 1980s and 1990s:
It has been said, with the benefit of faulty hindsight, that America erred in providing the [mujahedeen] with weapons and training that some of them now turn against us. But this was amply justified by the exigencies of the Cold War. The real problem is that we pulled out of Afghanistan after 1989. . . .
We had better sense when it came to the Balkans.36
In President Bush’s second inaugural address, he clearly summarized his agreement with the neoconservatives’ position regarding the threat of Islamic terrorism: American security requires us to bring “democracy” to all corners of the earth.
We have seen our vulnerability — and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.37
But does American security really require that we “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers”? Is every poor, miserable, unfree village on earth the potential source of another 9/11, and is it thus incumbent on America to become not only the world’s policeman, but also its legislator?
Absolutely not.
The idea that we depend on the well-being of other nations for our security — or, more specifically, that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” — is given plausibility by the fact that free nations do not start wars and are not a threat to other free nations, including America. But it is false. It evades the fact that innumerable unfree nations are in no way, shape, or form threats to America (e.g., most of the nations of Africa) because their peoples and leaders have no ideological animus against us, or, crucially, because their leaders and peoples fear initiating aggression against us.
America does not require the well-being of the whole world to survive and thrive; it is not a mere appendage or parasite of an international organism that cannot live without its host. America is an independent nation whose well-being requires not that all nations be free, prosperous, and happy, but simply that they be non-threatening. And this can be readily achieved by instilling in them fear of the consequences of any aggression whatsoever against America.
Thomas Sowell, one of America’s most astute and historically-knowledgeable cultural commentators, cites 19th-century England as having such a policy: “There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated. . . .” Sowell elaborates citing the instructive case of the Falkland Islands war:
Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic?
Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. Why didn’t it attack these little islands before? At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them. . . . [but] sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires.38
If a pipsqueak nation’s leader knows that instigating or supporting anti-American aggression will mean his extermination, he will avoid doing so at all costs. If a people know that supporting a movement of America-killing terrorists will lead to their destruction, they will run from that movement like the plague.
Politicians and intellectuals of all stripes continuously express worries that some policy or other, and especially the use of the American military, will engender hatred for America, and that such hatred will “radicalize” populations and leaders who will then become greater threats to us. But America need not fear other people’s hatred of us. For a nation, movement, or individual to pose a threat to America, some form of hatred or animus is always a necessary condition, but it is never a sufficient condition. For hatred to translate into attacks on America, it must be accompanied by hope of success: hope that the would-be attackers’ values, including his movement or cause, will be advanced by anti-American aggression. When all such hope is lost, the respective movements and causes die; their former adherents no longer find glory in dying for them and thus lose interest in doing so. Consequently, the crucial precondition of American security is our declaration, in word and deed, to all nations and movements, that there is no hope for any movement or nation that threatens America.
Let us apply this to the case of Islamic Totalitarianism, the state-supported, ideological movement that terrorizes us. If America had memorably punished the Iranian regime once it took fifty Americans hostage in 1979, then other nations would have feared lifting a trigger finger in America’s direction. We are a target today because hostile nations do not fear us, but rather have contempt for us, since we have shown time and again that we are a paper tiger who will rarely punish — and never fully punish — aggressor nations.
If we had made clear that any association with Islamic Totalitarianism and/or Islamic terrorism would mean a regime’s annihilation, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would ever have risen in Afghanistan. And if it had, a foreign policy of true American self-interest would have taken care of that threat as soon as it became a threat — as soon as it demonstrated the ability and willingness to attack America. Once the Taliban rose in Afghanistan, openly proclaiming its goal of Islamic world domination, and started providing safe harbor to Islamic terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden, it was a threat and should have been immediately defeated. This was especially true once Afghanistan became the launching pad for terrorist attacks against American embassies in Africa and against the USS Cole.
It would have been absurdly sacrificial to do as Boot suggests and plant troops in Afghanistan from 1989 on to prevent something bad from happening or to facilitate the “self-determination” of Afghans. Who knows how many American lives would have been sacrificed and how much American wealth would have been wasted in such a debacle — let alone if Boot’s principle of “intervening” in “flyspeck regions” had been applied consistently.
The proven way of ending present threats and effectively deterring future threats in any era is to respond to real threats with moral righteousness and devastating power.
America’s true national interest in response to 9/11 was to use America’s unequaled firepower not to “democratize” but to defeat the threatening countries — those countries that continue to support the cause of Islamic Totalitarianism — and to make an example of them to deter other countries. We should have made clear to the rest of the world that our government does not care what kind of government they adopt, so long as those governments do not threaten us.
There was and is no practical obstacle to such a policy; America’s military and technological prowess relative to the rest of the world, let alone to the piddling Middle East, has never been greater. Nor is there any obstacle in terms of knowledge: America’s ability to destroy enemy regimes is not some secret of history; everyone knows how we got Japan to surrender and then covet our friendship for sixty-two years and counting.
America could have responded to 9/11 by calling for devastating retaliation against the state sponsors of terrorism, so as to demoralize the Islamists and deter any future threats from thinking they can get away with attacking America. But, under sway of the neoconservatives, it did not. The neoconservatives never even considered it an option — because they believe that going all-out to defeat America’s enemies would be immoral.
Consider this typical neoconservative response to 9/11 in the editorial from The Weekly Standard immediately following the attacks: “There is a task to which President Bush should call us. It is the long, expensive, and arduous war to replace the government of each nation on earth that allows terrorists to live and operate within its borders.”39
There is no practical reason why a war between superpower America and piddling dictatorships need be “long, expensive, and arduous.” It would be easy to make terrorist nations today feel as terrified to threaten us as the Argentineans felt with regard to 19th-century Britain. Potential aggressors against America should be in awe of our power and should fear angering us, but they are not and do not. Why?
Because, per the neoconservatives’ prescriptions, America has placed the full use of its military capabilities off-limits. The neoconservatives have taken all-out war — real war — off the table.
The reason is their basic view of the goal of foreign policy: the altruistic “national interest.” In this view, the justification of America using its military supremacy is ultimately that it will do so to “improve the world’s condition” — not that it has an unqualified right to defend itself for its own sake.
The right to self-defense rests on the idea that individuals have a moral prerogative to act on their own judgment for their own sake; in other words, it rests on the morality of egoism. Egoism holds that a nation against which force is initiated has a right to kill whomever and to destroy whatever in the aggressor nation is necessary to achieve victory.40 The neoconservatives, true to their embrace of altruism, reject all-out war in favor of self-sacrificial means of combat that inhibit, or even render impossible, the defeat of our enemies. They advocate crippling rules of engagement that place the lives of civilians in enemy territory above the lives of American soldiers — and, by rendering victory impossible, above the lives of all Americans.
In Afghanistan, for instance, we refused to bomb the known hideouts of many top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders for fear of civilian casualties; thus these men were left free to continue killing American soldiers. In Iraq, our hamstrung soldiers are not allowed to smash a militarily puny insurgency; instead, they must suffer an endless series of deaths at the hand of an enemy who operates at the discretion of America. Neoconservatives are avid supporters of such restrictions and of the altruistic theory they are based on: “Just War Theory.” To act otherwise would be to contradict the duty of selfless service to others that is allegedly the justification and purpose of America using its military might. (For a thorough explanation of this viewpoint, see our essay “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense” in the Spring 2006 issue of TOS.)
Following the invasion of Iraq — in which American soldiers began the half-measures that eventually enabled pitifully-armed Iraqis to take over cities and kill our soldiers by the thousands, neoconservative Stephen Hayes wrote glowingly of the “Just War” tactics of our military.
A war plan that sought to spare the lives not only of Iraqi civilians, but of Iraqi soldiers. Then, liberation. Scenes of jubilant Iraqis in the streets — praising President Bush as “The Hero of the Peace.” A rush to repair the damage — most of it caused not by American bombs, but by more than three decades of tyranny.41
Such is the behavior, not of a self-assertive nation committed to defending itself by any means necessary, but of a self-effacing nation that believes it has no right to exist and fight for its own sake.
The idea that America must become the world’s democratizer is not the mistaken product of an honest attempt to figure out the most advantageous way to defend America. Neoconservatives have not evaluated our options by the standard of defending America and then concluded that using our overwhelming firepower to defeat our enemies is inferior to timidly coaxing the entire Middle East into a free, pro-American society. Rather, they have chosen policies by the standard of their altruistic conception of the “national interest” and have tried to rationalize this as both consistent with and necessary to America’s security from threats. But sacrifice and self-interest are opposites. To sacrifice is to surrender one’s life-serving values — to willingly take an action that results in a net loss of such values. By definition, this cannot be practical; on the contrary, it is deadly.
Bloodshed was the necessary result of Wilsonianism in the early 20th century, just as it is the result of neoconservatism today. Given the destructive history of Wilsonianism (unfortunately unknown to most Americans), the neoconservatives’ calls for international self-sacrifice for a “higher” cause that would ultimately somehow secure America should have been ominous. Wilsonianism demonstrated the logical consequences of America sacrificing for some “higher” cause that our well-being allegedly depends on. The sacrifice — Americans toiling and dying for the sake of foreign peoples — is never followed by the alleged payoff — American security.
Thomas Sowell illuminated this point in January 2003, before President Bush had officially decided to go to war for “Iraqi Freedom” but while neoconservatives were clamoring for such a war. For neoconservatives to place themselves “in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson,” he wrote, “is truly chilling”:
Many of the countries we are having big trouble with today were created by the Woodrow Wilson policies of nation-building by breaking up empires, under the principle of “self-determination of nations.” Such trouble spots as Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were all parts of the Ottoman Empire that was dismembered after its defeat in the First World War.
The Balkan cauldron of nations was created by dismembering the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. That dismemberment also facilitated Adolph Hitler’s picking off small nations like Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s, without firing a shot, because they were no longer part of a defensible empire.
The track record of nation-building and Wilsonian grandiosity ought to give anyone pause. The very idea that young Americans are once again to be sent out to be shot at and killed, in order to carry out the bright ideas of editorial office heroes, is sickening.42
All of this is true.
But the editorial office heroes disagreed that they were going to bring about new debacles — both in the case of Iraq and in their broader quest to bring about an “international order” of “democracies.” This time, international collectivism would work; this time, the sacrifices would be worth it, and the desired “international order” would materialize. The reason it would work this time is that these editorial office heroes were “Hard Wilsonians.”
Soft and Deluded Wilsonianism in Iraq
Since neoconservatism counsels military action, not merely in response to threats to America, but also in response to threats to the “international order” — with the aim of improving that “order” and the lives of foreign peoples — it imposes an effectively unlimited obligation on Americans to sacrifice for the “international order” until we achieve the neoconservatives’ triumph of “international democracy” or Bush’s “the end of tyranny in our world.” It would seem straightforward that this would involve years upon years of nation-building exercises, and thus years upon years of terrible burdens borne by Americans.
But the neoconservatives claimed that the burdens of their policy would not be all that great. They thought that their desired “international order” could be brought about without too much sacrifice on the part of Americans — sacrifice that would allegedly be paid for many times over by the ultra-secure world we would achieve thereby. “Hard Wilsonianism,” they said, was an eminently practical policy. Why? Because, they said, with the willingness to use force, and American leadership, “democratic regime change” is far easier than the “cynics” claim — and because successful “interventions” and the spread of “democracy” will deter future aggressors and inspire freedom fighters around the world.
In 2000, Kristol and Kagan wrote of their entire foreign policy of Iraq-like missions, that
to create a force that can shape the international environment today, tomorrow, and twenty years from now will probably require spending . . . about three and a half per cent of GDP on defense, still low by the standards of the past fifty years, and far lower than most great powers have spent on their militaries throughout history.43
They conclude this thought by asking, rhetorically: “Is the aim of maintaining American primacy not worth a hike in defense spending from 3 to 3.5 per cent of GDP?” — as if their policies, fully implemented, would not cost many multiples of that — and as if money, and not the irreplaceable lives lost, was the only value being spent.44
Part of the way the neoconservatives and President Bush justify their belief in the ease of “democratic regime change” is to cite the successful American occupation of Japan and Germany. When commentators criticized the viability of Bush’s plan to “democratize” Iraq, the Middle East, and ultimately the whole world, the president pointed to the example of Japan, which previous generations of commentators once said was unfit for proper government. Max Boot uses this same example when he writes that “we need to liberalize the Middle East. . . . And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.”45
But in fact, the examples of Germany and Japan do not vindicate the neoconservative foreign policy; they highlight its crucial vice. Note that these occupations were entirely different than the Iraq “liberation” occupation — the type prescribed by neoconservatism — both in ends and means. Their purpose was to render non-threatening the hostile populations of those countries; their purpose was America’s true “national interest,” not neoconservative “national greatness.” And the most important means to those occupations producing their desired result was the utter destruction and resulting demoralization that the Allies brought upon the Germans and Japanese.46
Contrast this to the altruistic policy of neoconservatism, which seeks to “liberate,” not defeat, hostile regimes. In the Iraq war, we treated hostile Iraqis with kid gloves and made it our mission to let them elect whatever government they chose, no matter how hostile to America or how friendly to Islamic Totalitarians. To try transforming an enemy nation without first defeating and demoralizing its complicit inhabitants is to invite those inhabitants both to rise up and rebel against America and to feel no fear in empowering even more anti-American leaders.
Another reason neoconservatives cite for the practicality of their policies is that each “intervention” will have a deterrent effect on future threats to America and to other evils — as well as an inspiring effect on good people — so “interventions” become progressively less necessary. Our “intervention” in Iraq, for example, was supposed to deter Iran and Syria and to inspire alleged masses of latent freedom-loving Muslims to democratize their whole region.
The alleged deterrent effect of “interventionism” is one reason Kristol and Kagan write that “a foreign policy premised on American hegemony, and on the blending of principle with material interest, may in fact mean fewer, not more, overseas interventions. . . .”47 Now if an “intervention” means decisively defeating a real threat, then that certainly has a deterrent effect on potential threats, just as appeasement has an emboldening effect. But neoconservatives argue for the deterrent effect of altruistic missions fought with pulled punches.
In the 1990s, neoconservatives made this deterrence argument in favor of a policy of “intervention” in the conflicts of Bosnia and Kosovo. Many opponents of the war objected to intervention because these conflicts, involving the slaughter of racial minorities by Serbs, were of no threat to America. But the neoconservatives claimed that in Kosovo
allowing a dictator like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to get away with aggression, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder in Europe would tempt other malign men to do likewise elsewhere, and other avatars of virulent ultra nationalism to ride this ticket to power. Neoconservatives believed that American inaction would make the world a more dangerous place, and that ultimately this danger would assume forms that would land on our own doorstep.48
So, while Milosevic was no direct threat to the United States, the argument goes, it was necessary to deal with him to deter those who are or might become threats to America.
But how was America’s use of its limited military resources to go after a random dictator who poses absolutely no threat to it — treating him as a far greater priority than Iran, North Korea, the Taliban, or the like — supposed to deter Iran or North Korea or the Taliban or Bin Laden or Hussein? No such explanation was given, because none was possible. One does not deter a genuine enemy by picking a weak, irrelevant adversary to beat up on while leaving the genuine enemy be. Such conduct emboldens him, because he concludes that we are not strong enough, or courageous enough, to go after him. If Iran is a real threat, then to attack Serbia suggests to our enemies our lack of focus as well as our lack of moral backbone in going after our real enemies. The way to deter potential threats is to make clear that there is nothing to gain and indeed everything to lose from anti-American aggression (including supporting terrorism or spreading Islamic Totalitarianism).
To say that welfare missions such as our foray into Kosovo deter terrorist nations is like saying that going on a mission to “liberate” South Africa pre-World War II would have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s march across Europe.
No practical benefits for American self-defense can materialize from a policy whose central pursuit is American self-sacrifice. If one understands that the neoconservative foreign policy is a self-sacrificial “nationalism” — the goal of which is for Americans to sacrifice, to take a loss for some “higher purpose” — then it should be no surprise that, by the standard of the interests of individual Americans, a war conceived on this philosophy turned out to be a failure. The key thing to understand, however, is that by the standard of neoconservatism, the war has been a success.
Guided by neoconservative altruist-collectivist values, the Bush administration sought and fought a war of self-sacrifice — a war that necessarily failed to accomplish the only thing that can end threats to America: the thorough defeat of the enemies that threaten us. This war instead devoted us to the “national greatness” of endless “sacrifice for the [alleged] freedom of strangers.”
Given the nature of the Islamic Totalitarian threat, a war in Iraq did not have to be self-sacrificial. Iraq, after all, was no Kosovo. It was run by an avowed enemy of the United States who broke his terms of surrender, sponsored anti-American terrorists, and heavily sponsored suicide bombers against our vital strategic ally in the Middle East, Israel.
A war to defeat that regime could have served a valid purpose as a first step in ousting the terrorist-sponsoring, anti-American regimes of the Middle East and thus rendering the region non-threatening. For example, it could be used to create a strategic base for taking on Iran, our most important enemy to defeat. But such a goal would entail rendering enemy regimes non-threatening, which is not the same as free or “democratic.”
But if one’s standard of value is an altruist-collectivist ideal such as the “international order” — or if one seeks to police the “flouting of civilized rules of conduct,”49 — then it is possible to do what President Bush did, which is to make Iraq a top priority, to evade the major threat that is Iran, and to set goals that were not oriented toward American self-defense.
Bush went to war with neoconservative, thus altruistic, ends and means. He thereby necessitated a disaster.
In the run-up to the war, President Bush stated not one but three goals in invading Iraq: 1) ending the threat to the United States posed by Saddam Hussein’s support of terrorists, his apparent possession of chemical and biological weapons, and his apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons; 2) “restoring” the “integrity of the U.N.”, which Saddam Hussein had allegedly tarnished by violating seventeen U.N. resolutions; and 3) “liberating” Iraq from the evil tyrant Hussein and furnishing the Iraqi people with a peaceful, prosperous new “democracy.”
In the view of President Bush and the neoconservatives, this combination of self-interested and altruistic goals was ideal; it was an act of selfless service to the world that would also supposedly protect America. But in fact, it was disastrous, because it did not focus America on identifying and eliminating the actual threat in Iraq; rather, it tore us between the contradictory goals of ending a threat and empowering Iraqis to do whatever they want. Combined with tactics designed to protect Iraqis at the expense of American lives, this contradictory combination guaranteed the fiasco that we are witnessing today.
Is it any wonder that our sacrificial objectives and sacrificial tactics have neither deterred our enemies nor inspired freedom-seeking allies — but instead have inspired large populations to elect our enemies into political power? We have seen a definite trend in the rise of Islamic Totalitarianism, the ideology that motivates Islamic terrorists and their strongest supporters — for example, the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ahmedinijad in Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Our enemies who were militant before 9/11 are now even more so. Iran and Syria, for instance, continue to support the slaughter of American soldiers in Iraq without fear of consequence, and Iran pursues nuclear weapons to bolster its policy of worldwide Islamic terror.
Given the neoconservative foreign policy’s altruistic ends and means, a war based on them would have to be a disaster. (In the run-up to and early aftermath of the Iraq War, the authors went on record on various occasions predicting this.) No president or secretary of defense or number of troops can make a policy of self-sacrifice yield anything but self-destruction.
But another component of the neoconservative foreign policy has made the Iraq war even more self-destructive — a component that made us pursue the particularly absurd altruistic mission we set ourselves regarding Iraqi governance. It is one thing, on the premise of altruism, to provide a foreign people with “humanitarian” aid or even to kill their reigning dictator in hopes that someone better comes along. It is quite another to try to make a primitive, tribal country into a modern “democracy” — and to expect that mission to protect us by inspiring the other primitive, tribal countries in the region to embrace “democracy” as well.
If one knows anything about those to whom we are bringing about “the end of tyranny in our world,” if one looks at the endless warring tribes and religious factions raised on a philosophy of faith, mindless obedience, and coercion, and if one knows anything about the meaning and preconditions of freedom — one sees that the “Hard Wilsonian” policy is a prescription for endless welfare wars and countless American casualties, not a mere half percentage point hike of GDP.
To the credit of neoconservatives’ opponents, many of them ridiculed the idea of an easily achieved, thriving Iraqi “democracy” that inspired spontaneous “democratic” uprisings in the Middle East. And given the results — the triumph of Islamists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority — they were right.50
To understand how the neoconservatives were so deluded about Iraq, we must grasp the essence of their political philosophy. For neoconservatives (who are influenced by the writings of philosopher Leo Strauss), politics is the central force influencing and guiding a culture. Thus, the regime a country has is the dominant cause of the direction its culture takes. Consistent with their view of individuals as metaphysically inferior to the collective, neoconservatives believe that the individual is necessarily an ineffectual product of the regime he is brought up in.
Bad regimes, they argue, inculcate in a people bad behavior and norms. If you take the same people and place them under a good regime (i.e., a “democracy”), they will become radically better people. The regime changes the culture. Thus, it is the governing elite, not the people, who ultimately determine the regime and the culture in a given country. If we replace the elite through regime change and help to establish a better elite that is pro-“democracy,” a new, better culture will be born.
Ultimately, according to the neoconservatives, the foundations for any good culture, the sort that a regime must strive to foster, lie in a respect for tradition and a strong role for religion. These are the forces that restrain individuals in every society from pursuing their own “passions” and thus from immorality and anarchy.51
By this standard, Iraq was a promising yet troubled country in need of assistance. It was a tradition-based, religion-oriented society that for decades had been ruled by a cruel, inhumane elite — the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein — an elite that had not been chosen by the people. Do away with that elite, cultivate the local traditions and the religious leaders, and Iraq was ripe for “democracy.” Once Iraqis experienced the wonders of electing their own leaders, once they participated in writing their own constitution, the neoconservatives postulated, Iraq would be transformed. The euphoria they expressed after the January 2005 Iraqi elections and the subsequent approval of a new constitution expressed their sincere belief that Iraq had fundamentally changed for the better. The new regime and the new practices in “democracy” would bring out the best in the Iraqis. Not only would this approach lead to political freedom in Iraq; it would also lead to economic prosperity through the adoption of free markets and to the peaceful coexistence of Iraq with its neighbors. And — in the ultimate payoff for America — this new Iraq would become our ally in the Middle East; it would help us reshape the region and destroy the threat of terrorism forever.
The neoconservative view of the relationship between individuals and regimes — which President Bush holds in an even stronger form, believing that freedom is “written on the soul of every human being” — also explains the plausibility of the idea that bringing “democracy” militarily to one country will likely set off a chain of “democracies” in other countries due to overwhelming civilian demand — thus lessening the need for future military “interventions.” As Bush put it, to raucous applause at the National Endowment for Democracy in late 2003: “Iraqi democracy will succeed — and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran — that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”52
But the view of individuals and regimes that all of this is based on is false.
The truth is that the entrenched philosophy of a people is fundamental to what type of government those people can live under, and a government based on tradition and religion is in total opposition to freedom. (Contrary to the claims of conservatives, America was founded in complete opposition to centuries of religious and statist tradition — opposition that included its revolutionary separation of religion and state.) For example, it would be impossible for Americans, especially 18th-century Americans, to accept the rule of Saddam Hussein. Our forefathers did not submit to tyranny; they courageously rebelled against it in the name of individual rights, against far greater odds than Iraqis faced under Hussein. By contrast, today’s Iraqis, with the primacy they place on mystical dogma and tribal allegiances, are utterly incapable of the respect for the individual and individual rights that define a free society. Their religion and traditions do not facilitate respect for freedom; they make such respect impossible.
The Iraqis are essentially similar in this regard to the other peoples of the Middle East who are subjugated under terrorist states. It is no accident that the Islamic Totalitarian movement that terrorizes us enjoys widespread support throughout the Arab-Muslim world. If it did not, hostile governments would not be able to rally their populations with appeals to that cause.
(As for claims about freedom being “written on the soul of every human being,” this is false. There is no inherent belief in either freedom or anti-freedom — though one could make a far stronger case for an innate hostility toward freedom. Freedom is incredibly rare historically — because its root, a rational, individualistic philosophy, has been so rare.)
As a result of the neoconservatives’ false view of regimes, they take lightly the colossal task of replacing a barbaric nation with a civilized one — in fact, they do not even acknowledge it as barbaric. The pitiful peoples of oppressed nations are lionized as mere victims of bad actors — victims who must merely be “liberated” to go from members of terrorist states to good neighbors.
The neoconservatives’ false belief in the fundamentality of regimes, not philosophy, in human action, is made worse by the political system they advocate: “democracy.”
When President Bush and the neoconservatives use the term “democracy,” they act as if the term refers more or less to the type of government we have in the United States. Thus, the term “Iraqi democracy,” at least prior to its implementation, conjured up images of a nation with civilized courts, rule of law, respect for individual rights (including those of racial minorities), a prosperous, free-market economy, separation of church and state, and so on.
But the literal meaning of “democracy” — and the meaning applied in the actual carrying out of “Iraqi democracy” — is unlimited majority rule. “Democracy” refers to the system by which ancient Athenians voted to kill Socrates for voicing unpopular ideas. In 1932, the German people “democratically” elected the Nazi Party, including future chancellor Adolph Hitler. “Democracy” and liberty are not interchangeable terms; they are in fact antithetical. The distinctively American, pro-liberty principle of government is the principle of individual rights — which, to be upheld in a given society, requires a constitution that specifically protects these rights against the tyranny of the majority.53
Neoconservatives are unabashed promoters of “democracy,” while knowing that it is not America’s system of government and that it was opposed by the Founding Fathers of this country. As Joshua Muravchik writes, “This is the enthusiasm for democracy. Traditional conservatives are more likely to display an ambivalence towards this form of government, an ambivalence expressed centuries ago by the American founders. Neoconservatives tend to harbor no such doubts.”54
The practical justification for “spreading democracy” is that “democracies don’t start wars,” and thus to promote “democracy” is to promote our long-term security. But that idea is a dangerous half-truth. “Democracies,” in the literal sense, do attack other countries. To take a modern example, observe the elected Hamas government whose fundamental goal is to exterminate Israel. Or observe the triumph of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Moqtada al Sadr in Iraq’s “democratic” political process.
What gives plausibility to the notion that “democracies don’t start wars” is the fact that free nations do not start wars. This truth was elaborated by Ayn Rand in her landmark essay, “The Roots of War,” reprinted in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.55 But a free society is not simply one that holds elections — it is one that holds elections as a delimited function to select officials who must carry out, and cannot contradict, a constitution protecting individual rights.
To the extent that it is necessary for America’s national security to occupy a given country, an understanding about the relationship between voting, freedom, and aggression is imperative. Because the neoconservatives and President Bush lack such an understanding, we have been treated to the spectacle of an Iraqi “democracy” in which “Islam is a basic source of legislation” and “No law may contradict the undisputed principles of Islam.”56 We have a “democracy” that is dangerously close to being a puppet or clone of the theocracy of Iran — an enemy we will have created on the grounds that “democracies don’t start wars.”
Holding the false view that freedom equals “democracy,” and clinging to the fiction of the noble Mideast Muslims, we have abetted and applauded these freedom haters as they have voted themselves toward terrorist theocracy. And we have promoted elections around the Middle East as the solution to the threats these nations pose, as if the people are civilized and friendly toward America but just “happen” to be under despotic rule. The results of these elections, which have empowered Islamic Totalitarians or their close allies in the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Lebanon, is testament to how deluded the neoconservative advocacy of “spreading democracy” is.
To add offense to this destruction, in responding to criticisms of Mideast “democracy,” Bush administration members and neoconservative intellectuals have the gall to counter that American “democracy” has had problems, too. “Working democracies always need time to develop, as did our own,” says Bush, who calls on us to be “patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.” Thus, the American “stage” of the Jefferson-Hamilton debates and the Iraqi “stage” of Sadr vigilante executions are rendered equivalent: two peas in a “democratic” pod.
The Realistic Moral Alternative: A Morality of Self-Interest
The basic reason for the failure of the neoconservative foreign policy is that it is a thoroughly altruistic, self-sacrificial foreign policy, and American self-defense is incompatible with self-sacrifice. Importantly, however, this analysis is not limited to the policy of the neoconservatives; it applies equally to the allegedly opposite policy of “realism.”
In our earlier discussion of “realism,” we focused on that doctrine’s view of nations as “rational” actors and its view of “diplomacy” as the foreign policy cure-all. Part of this policy’s failure derives from its short-range mentality that views America’s “national interest” in the time frame of political terms, a mentality that is always willing to kick the can down the road. But equally important is the policy’s thoroughly altruistic moral base. This may seem strange to those familiar with “realism,” because one tenet of that doctrine is that a nation should reject moral considerations in foreign policy and instead concern itself solely with its “vital interests.” In the “realist” view, moral considerations — moral ideals, moral restrictions, moral judgments of good and evil — get in the way of dealing with “practical reality.”
For the “realist,” in any given situation, everything is theoretically on the table, to be accepted or rejected depending on whether it will “work” to achieve the “national interest.” Moral principles cannot be permitted to get in the way; one must be “pragmatic,” not an “ideologue.”
But this is nonsense. To pursue “practicality” divorced from morality is impossible. Any claim that a course of action is “practical” presupposes some basic end that the course of action aims to achieve. For example, any claim that “diplomacy” with Iran is practical, or that democratic “regime change” is practical, presupposes some basic goal — whether achieving the approval of others, or establishing “stability” in the Middle East, or winning “hearts and minds,” or fulfilling our duty to “improve the world’s condition,” or maintaining the status quo, or eliminating the Iranian threat. The question of what basic ends one should pursue in foreign policy is inescapable to the issue of practicality — and it is a moral question.
Because “realism” rejects the need for moral evaluation, and because the need for moral evaluation cannot be escaped, its advocates necessarily take certain goals for granted as “obviously” practical — and reject others as “obviously” impractical. Which goals are good? Goals consistent with altruism and collectivism — like winning over positive “world opinion,” or coalition-building as an end in itself.
They will not consider any truly self-interested goals or means of achieving them — for example, ending state sponsorship of terrorism through devastating military action. To propose such an alternative to them would bring a flood of practical rationalizations — “We can’t go to war with the whole world”; “What about the allies?”; “That will just ‘radicalize’ more potential terrorists.” But all such objections evade the fact that such wars historically have ended the threats. This fact is ignored by the so-called “realists” because their opposition to such wars is rooted in their acceptance of altruism.
Take the example of former secretary of state Colin Powell, a prominent “realist” about whom we wrote in “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense”:
Does he call for America’s unequivocal, uncompromising self-defense using its full military might, since that would be eminently practical in achieving America’s self-interest? No. Instead, when he ran the State Department, he sought to avoid war, to appease any and every enemy, to court “world opinion,” to build coalitions, to avoid civilian casualties — while at the same time somehow to protect America. In other words, he did everything that pacifism and Just War Theory would have him do. While Powell and his ilk may say that they eschew moral analysis in matters of foreign policy and war, altruism nevertheless shapes what they think and seek to do.57
Since “realists” cannot conceive of doing what is truly practical in regard to threats, and since they reject explicitly altruistic missions of the neoconservative variety, they are left with only the option of ignoring or appeasing threats. This dereliction of responsibility makes more plausible the neoconservative idea that we need to be the world’s policeman — since the most prominent alternative is to be a negligent, passive, doughnut-munching American policeman.
But this is a false alternative.
The antidote to both of these disastrous options is to truly embrace the virtues that the neoconservatives claim to embrace — such as thinking long range, wide range, and morally about America’s interests — but to make our moral standard American self-interest — that is, the individual rights of Americans. If America is to have a future of freedom and security, this must be the supreme and ruling goal of American defense. (What such a standard means and why it is morally correct was a major theme of our essay “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense.”) This is the moral perspective needed to defeat Islamic Totalitarianism — a moral perspective that truly values American lives and liberty.
So long as we evaluate the question of where to go in foreign policy by the standards of the two leading altruist foreign policies — in terms of how many more troops, or whom to hold talks with, or how many U.N. Resolutions to pass — we will continue to lose. We need to jettison the corrupt moral framework of “realism” and neoconservatism, and adopt one in which American self-defense is the sole concern and standard of value — in which we take a long-range, principled, selfish approach to our self-defense.
In the wake of neoconservatism’s fall from grace, we must make clear that there is another alternative. Our true national interest, our lives and our freedom, depend on it.
Acknowledgment: The authors would like to thank Onkar Ghate, senior fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, for his invaluable editorial assistance with this project.
1 George W. Bush, Second Presidential Debate, October 11, 2000, http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000b.html.
3 Office of the Press Secretary, “State of the Union: A Strong America Leading the World,” January 31, 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060131-8.html.
4 William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 4.
5 J. Bottum, “A Nation Mobilized,” Weekly Standard, September 24, 2001. (Weekly Standard pdf, p. 8. J. Bottum, for the Editors.)
6 George W. Bush, Address to a joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
8 George W. Bush, Forward Strategy of Freedom speech—President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, November 6, 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
9 Charles Krauthammer, “The Neoconservative Convergence,” Commentary, July/August 2005.
10 “Bush calls end to ‘major combat’” CNN.com May 2, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/01/sprj.irq.main/.
12 Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing Co., 1960; reprint, Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1990), p. 11 (page reference is to reprint edition).
13 Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 116; Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 119.
14 Irving Kristol, “Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea,” Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 116–17.
15 Ayn Rand, “The Fascist New Frontier,” The Ayn Rand Column. Reprinted in The Ayn Rand Column, p. 99. Speech given at Ford Hall Forum in 1962.
16 William Kristol and David Brooks, “What Ails Conservatism,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1997.
24 Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001, p. 30.
25 Woodrow Wilson speech to Congress, April 2, 1917, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/.
26 Angelo M. Codevilla, “Some Call it Empire,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2005, http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.842/article_detail.asp.
27 Max Boot, “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2002.
28 Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Linham: Madison Books, 1997), p. 181.
31 Speech delivered by President Bush at the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
32 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace (New York: Basic Books, reprint ed., 2003), p. 350.
37 George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, February 2, 2005 .
38 Thomas Sowell, “Pacifists vs. Peace,” Falkland Islands, July 21, 2006, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/07/pacifists_versus_peace.html.
39 J. Bottum, “A Nation Mobilized,” Weekly Standard, September 24, 2001. (Weekly Standard pdf, p. 8. J. Bottum, for the Editors.)
40 For further elaboration and explanation on this point, see Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense,” The Objective Standard, Spring 2006, p. 44.
41 Stephen Hayes, “Beyond Baghdad,” The Weekly Standard, April 21, 2003, p. 14.
42 Thomas Sowell, “Dangers ahead—from the Right,” editorial, Jewish World Review, January 6, 2003, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell010603.asp.
46 For an excellent elaboration on this point, see John Lewis, “No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism,” The Objective Standard, Winter 2006.
50 For a detailed discussion of Bush’s failed “Forward Strategy for Freedom,” see Yaron Brook and Elan Journo, “The Forward Strategy for Failure,” The Objective Standard, Spring 2007.
51 For a discussion of this point, see “An Autobiographical Memoir,” by Irving Kristol, in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography on an Idea (Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1999), pp. 8.
55 Ayn Rand, “The Roots of War,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967) pp. 35–44.
56 Full Text of Iraqi Constitution, courtesy of the Associated Press, October 12, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/12/AR2005101201450.html.
57 Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense,” The Objective Standard, Spring 2006, p. 44.
Authors’ note: This essay is partially based on the lecture “Democracy vs. Freedom” that Yaron Brook delivered on September 12, 2006, in Irvine, CA, and on October 22, 2006, at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, MA.
A Strategy for Security?
The attacks of 9/11 exposed the magnitude of the threats we face, and, ever since then, one question has become a depressing fixture of our lives: Are we safe? Scarcely two years ago, many Americans believed that our salvation was imminent, for the means of achieving our security was at hand; no longer would we have to live in dread of further catastrophic attacks. These people were swept up in euphoric hope inspired by the Bush administration’s new strategy in the Middle East. The strategy promised to deliver permanent security for our nation. It promised to eradicate the fundamental source of Islamic terrorism. It promised to make us safe.
The strategy’s premise was simple: “[T]he security of our nation,” President Bush explained, “depends on the advance of liberty in other nations”;1 we bring democracy to the Middle East, and thereby make ourselves safer. To many Americans, this sounded plausible: Western nations, such as ours, are peaceful, since they have no interest in waging war except in self-defense: Their prosperity depends on trade, not on conquest or plunder; the more such nations in the world, the better off we would be. Informally, Bush called this idea the “forward strategy for freedom.”2
By January 2005, an early milestone of this strategy was manifest to all. Seemingly every news outlet showed us the images of smiling Iraqis displaying their ink-stained fingers. They had just voted in the first elections in liberated Iraq. Those images, according to breathless pundits, symbolized a momentous development.
Commentators saw reason to believe Bush’s grandiose prediction of 2003, when he declared: “Iraqi democracy will succeed — and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran — that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”3 At the summit of the Arab League in 2004, according to Reuters, Arab heads of state had “promised to promote democracy, expand popular participation in politics, and reinforce women’s rights and civil society.”4 By the spring of 2005, several Arab regimes had announced plans to hold popular elections.
Even confirmed opponents of Bush applauded the strategy. An editorial in the New York Times in March 2005, for example, declared that the “long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East.” The year so far had been full of “heartening surprises — each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing [chief among them being Iraq’s elections and the prospect of Egyptian parliamentary elections]. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances.”5 Senator Edward Kennedy (of all people) felt obliged to concede, albeit grudgingly, that “What’s taken place in a number of those [Middle Eastern] countries is enormously constructive,” adding that “It’s a reflection the president has been involved.”6
Washington pursued the forward strategy with messianic zeal. Iraq has had not just one, but several popular elections, as well as a referendum on a new constitution written by Iraqi leaders; with U.S. endorsement and prompting, the Palestinians held what international monitors declared were fair elections; and Egypt’s authoritarian regime, under pressure from Washington, allowed the first contested parliamentary elections in more than a decade. Elections were held as well in Lebanon (parliamentary) and Saudi Arabia (municipal). In sum, these developments seemed to indicate a salutary political awakening. The forward march toward “liberty in other nations” seemed irresistible and “the security of our nation,” inevitable.
But has the democracy crusade moved us toward peace and freedom in the Middle East — and greater security at home?
Consider three elections and their implications for the region.
The elections in Iraq were touted as an outstanding success for America, but the new Iraqi government is far from friendly. It is dominated by a Shiite alliance led by the Islamic Daawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The alliance has intimate ties with the first nation to undergo an Islamic revolution, Iran. Both Daawa and SCIRI were previously based in Iran, and SCIRI’s leader has endorsed Lebanese Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy for Iran.7 Teheran is thought to have a firm grip on the levers of power within Iraq’s government, and it actively arms and funds anti-American insurgents. The fundamental principle of Iraq’s new constitution — as of Iran’s totalitarian regime — is that Islam is inviolable.
Instead of embracing pro-Western leaders, Iraqis have made a vicious Islamic warlord, Moqtada al-Sadr, one of the most powerful men in Iraqi politics. Although Sadr has not run for office, his bloc holds thirty seats in Iraq’s assembly, controls two ministries, and wields a decisive swing vote: Iraq’s current prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and his predecessor, Ibrahim Jaafari, both owe their jobs to Sadr’s support. Sadr (who is wanted by Iraqi authorities for murder) is vociferously anti-American, favors Iranian-style theocratic rule, and has vowed to fight in defense of Iran.
Sadr has a private militia, the Mahdi Army, through which he has repeatedly attacked American forces. One of the fiercest encounters was in 2004 in Najaf. Confronted by U.S. forces, Sadr’s militiamen entrenched themselves in a holy shrine. But the standoff ended when Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, interceded on Sadr’s behalf. Washington capitulated for fear of upsetting Shiites and let the militia go (officials no longer talk of arresting Sadr for murder). Since that standoff, the Mahdi Army has swollen nearly threefold to an estimated fifteen thousand men and, according to a Pentagon report, it has surpassed Al Qaeda in Iraq as “the most dangerous accelerant” of the sectarian violence.8
Emancipated from Hussein’s tyranny, a large number of Iraqis embraced the opportunity to tyrannize each other by reprising sadistic feuds (both sectarian and ethnic) — and to lash out at their emancipators, the American forces. The insurgency, which has attracted warriors from outside Iraq, is serving as a kind of proving ground where jihadists can hone their skills. According to news reports, Lebanese Hezbollah has been training members of the Mahdi Army in Lebanon, while some Hezbollah operatives have helped with training on the ground in Iraq.9 The new Iraq has become what the old one never was: a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. It is a worse threat to American interests than Saddam Hussein’s regime ever was.
Consider the election results in the Palestinian territories. For years, Bush had asked Palestinians “to elect new leaders, . . . not compromised by terror.”10And, finally, in the U.S.-endorsed elections of January 2006, the Palestinians did turn their backs on the cronies of Yasser Arafat; they rejected the incumbent leadership of Fatah — and elected the even more militant killers of Hamas: an Islamist group notorious for suicide bombings. Hamas won by a landslide and now rules the Palestinian territories.
Refusing to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, Hamas is committed to annihilating that state and establishing a totalitarian Islamic regime. In the previous year, Hezbollah took part in the U.S.-endorsed elections in Lebanon, formed part of that country’s cabinet for the first time, and won control of two ministries.11 In the summer of 2006, the Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers — and precipitated a month-long war in the region. Since the ceasefire that ended the war, Hezbollah has continued to amass weapons and foment terrorism, emboldened by its popular electoral support.
Consider, as a final example of the trend, the 2005 parliamentary elections in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country. The group that scored the most impressive gains was the Muslim Brotherhood — the intellectual origin of the Islamist movement, whose offshoots include Hamas and parts of Al Qaeda. The Brotherhood’s founding credo is “Allah is our goal; the Koran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration.”12
The Brotherhood’s electoral success was staggering. Although the group is officially banned in Egypt, its candidates won eighty-eight seats — about 20 percent — in Egypt’s assembly, and became the largest opposition bloc the body has ever had.13 This was all the more significant considering the regime’s brutal attempts to protect its grip on power. During one round of voting, the New York Times reports, “police officers in riot gear and others in plainclothes and armed civilians working for the police began blocking polling stations, preventing supporters of the Brotherhood from casting their votes.” Dozens were injured, and several people died from gunshots to the head.14 Some observers reckon that the Brotherhood could have won even more power if it had not limited itself to running 125 candidates (it did so, presumably, to avoid an even tougher government crackdown).
The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Islamist regime in Iran, the Mahdi Army, Al Qaeda — these are all part of an ideological movement: Islamic Totalitarianism. Although differing on some details and in tactics, all of these groups share the movement’s basic goal of enslaving the entire Middle East, and then the rest of the world, under a totalitarian regime ruled by Islamic law. The totalitarians will use any means to achieve their goal — terrorism, if it proves effective; all-out war, if they can win; and politics, if it can bring them power over whole countries.
Bush’s forward strategy has helped usher in a new era in the Middle East: By its promotion of elections, it has paved the road for Islamists to grab political power and to ease into office with the air of legitimacy and without the cost of bombs or bullets. Naturally, totalitarians across the region are encouraged. They exhibit a renewed sense of confidence. The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah war against Israel last summer is one major symptom of that confidence; another is Iran’s naked belligerence through insurgent proxies in Iraq, and its righteously defiant pursuit of nuclear technology.
The situation in the Middle East is worse for America today than it was in the wake of 9/11. Iraq is a bloody fiasco. The chaos in Iraq makes it a haven for anti-American terrorists. Iran’s influence in Iraq and in the region is growing. Saudi Arabia, along with five other Arab states, announced its intention to pursue nuclear technology. In Lebanon, thousands of people have taken part in massive street demonstrations demanding greater power for Hezbollah in the government. The Hamas regime, though starved of Western aid, remains in power, and Palestinians continue to fire rockets at Israeli towns.
A further effect of the elections in the region has been the invigoration of Islamists in Afghanistan. Legions of undefeated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors in that country have regrouped and renewed their jihad. Flush with money, amassing recruits, and armed with guns, rockets, and explosives, they are fighting to regain power. They have mounted a string of massive suicide bombings and rocket attacks against American and NATO forces; more U.S. troops died in Afghanistan during 2005 and 2006 than during the peak of the war.15 With astounding boldness, the Taliban have assassinated clerics and judges deemed friendly to the new government, and fired rockets at schools for using “un-Islamic” books. The Taliban have effectively taken over certain regions of the country.16
Jihadists continue to carry out and plot mass-casualty atrocities against the West. In 2004 they bombed commuter trains during rush hour in Madrid. The next summer, suicide bombers blew themselves up on London’s underground. In August 2006, British police foiled a plot to set off a wave of bombings on trans-Atlantic airliners. British authorities recently disclosed that they were tracking two hundred cells involving more than sixteen hundred individuals who were “actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas.”17 The question now is not if there will be another catastrophic attack, but only when.
By any objective assessment, the forward strategy is a dismal failure. What went wrong?
Some commentators, particularly so-called “realists” in foreign policy, have condemned the strategy as intrinsically unworkable. In January 2007, Dimitri Simes, publisher of The National Interest, argued: “The debacle that is Iraq reaffirms the lesson that there is no such thing as a good crusade. This was true a thousand years ago when European Christian knights tried to impose their faith and way of life on the Holy Land, . . . and it is equally true today. Divine missions and sensible foreign policy just don’t mix.” Inspiring the Bush administration’s crusade is the (purported) “true calling of spreading liberty throughout the world, even at the barrel of a gun.”18 Bush’s strategy was driven by an ideal — spreading democracy — and that idealism is what made it impractical. This complaint was also voiced early on in the war. About six months before Iraq’s first elections were held, amid continuing insurgent attacks, Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst writing in the New York Times, bluntly summed up this line of thinking: “What we need now is pragmatism, not ideology.”19
The “realist” critique flows from a rejection of “the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment” (as diplomat George Kennan once noted of this outlook).20 The ideology and character of a regime are irrelevant to how we should act toward it; distinguishing between friends and foes is pointless. Practicality (i.e., achieving U.S. security) requires amoral diplomatic deals. That implies that we should talk and make deals with any regime, however monstrous or hostile.
“Realists” urge action divorced from moral principles, but history demonstrates that such a policy is suicidal. Recall that, in compliance with “realism,” Washington backed jihadist forces, despite their perverse ideals, in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan — jihadists who, in keeping with their ideology, later turned their sights on the United States. The same amoralism animated the British in the 1930s. Britain disregarded Hitler’s stated ambition and his vicious ideology (set out in Mein Kampf and broadcast at mass rallies throughout Germany), and agreed to a “land for peace” deal. Given Hitler’s goals, the deal predictably encouraged his belligerence, and so the Nazi war machine proceeded to enslave and exterminate millions of human beings.
The disasters of “Realism” underscore the need for moral ideals in foreign policy, and the “Realist” explanation for the failure of Bush’s strategy is false.
Consider another, increasingly prevalent, explanation for what went wrong — the idea that Bush’s strategy is a good idea that was poorly implemented. Proponents of this view believe that the problem is not Bush’s goal of spreading democracy, which they regard as a noble ideal worth pursuing, but rather the administration’s failure to pursue this goal properly. For example, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute laments that “Instead of securing Iraq’s borders, the Bush administration accepted Syrian and Iranian pledges of non-interference.”21 Max Boot, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a supporter of Bush’s strategy, but acknowledges numerous ways in which the mission was botched, including: “the lack of pre-invasion diplomacy, the lack of post-invasion planning, the lack of ground troops, the lack of intelligence, the lack of coordination and oversight, the lack of armor, the lack of electricity. . . .”22
The concrete means were supposedly inadequate or badly implemented. The strategy could be made to work, if we could shrewdly tinker with troop levels, border security, the training of Iraqi police, and so on, and if we could install a competent secretary of Defense to see to it that the strategy is implemented properly.
But none of these adjustments, nor any others, would have averted the disaster wrought by the forward strategy. The problem does not lie with a shortage of resources or blunders in executing the strategy. The problem lies with the strategy’s basic goal, whose legitimacy critics fail to challenge.
The strategy has failed to make us safer, because making us safer was never its real goal. That goal is mandated by the corrupt moral ideal driving the strategy.
What, then, is the actual goal of the strategy?
A Forward Strategy for . . . What End?
Let us begin by considering what the strategy’s putative goal would have required.
Suppose that on September 12, 2001, Bush’s strategists had asked themselves the following: What steps are necessary to make American lives safe, given the lethal threat of Islamic terrorism?
The rational answer: We must defeat the enemy.
When foreign aggressors are diligently working to slaughter Americans, our government is obligated to use retaliatory force to eliminate the threat permanently. This is what it must do to completely restore the protection of the individual rights of Americans. Defeating the enemy is necessary to bring about a return to normal life — life in which Americans are free to produce and thrive without the perpetual dread of terrorist atrocities.
Making the enemy permanently non-threatening is the objective measure of success in war. Recall, for example, our last indisputably successful war — World War II. By 1945, the air attacks ended, ground combat ended, naval battles ended; the war was over — because the Allied powers defeated Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. The threat was over. People in the West rejoiced and began returning to their normal lives.
The Allied powers achieved victory because they committed themselves to crushing the enemy. They understood that the enemy was Nazism and Japanese imperialism and that the political manifestations of these ideologies had to be stopped. They also understood, in some terms, that merely assassinating Hitler or Japan’s emperor Hirohito would not be enough, because the people of Germany and Japan supported the goals of their regime (after all, Hitler was democratically elected and Hirohito was a venerated ruler). Victory required a punishing military onslaught not only to stop the enemy’s war machine, but also to demoralize its supporters.
The Allies inflicted the pain of war so intensely that the enemy laid down its arms and abandoned its cause — permanently. They flattened German cities, pulverized factories and railroads, devastated the country’s infrastructure. The campaign against Japan likewise sought to break the enemy’s will to fight. On one day of extremely fierce combat, for example, U.S. bombers dropped five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters every fifty feet. “Within thirty minutes,” one historian writes,
a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. . . . [General Curtis LeMay] wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack. Advocacy for a savage militarism from the rear, he thought, might dissipate when one’s house was in flames. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. . . . The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews. Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 40,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless.
The fire in Tokyo, the empire’s center, burned for four days; the glow of the inferno could be seen from one hundred and fifty miles away.23
To defeat Japan thoroughly, however, required even more: To cut short the war and save untold thousands of American lives, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs laid waste to vast tracts of land, killed thousands of Japanese — and demonstrated that if Japan continued to threaten America, thousands more Japanese would suffer and die.
That overwhelming and ruthless use of force achieved its intended purpose. It ended the threat to the lives of Americans and returned them to safety — by demonstrating to the Germans and the Japanese that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction. Defeated materially and broken in spirit, these enemies gave up. Since then Nazism and Japanese imperialism have withered as ideological forces.
Today, American self-defense requires the same kind of military action.
We are not in some “new kind of conflict” that must drag on for generations. As in World War II, the enemy we must defeat is an ideological movement: Islamic Totalitarianism. Just as the Nazis sought to dominate Europe and then the world, so the Islamists dream of imposing a global caliphate. To them, Western secularism — and America in particular — constitutes an obstacle to the expansion of Islam’s dominion and must be extirpated by force. The attacks of 9/11 were the culmination, so far, of a long succession of deadly strikes against us. The supposedly “faceless, stateless” terrorists are part of the totalitarian movement. They are motivated to fight and able to kill, because they are inspired and armed by regimes that back the movement and embody its ideal of Islamic domination. Chief among them are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Without Iran’s support, for example, legions of Hamas and Hezbollah jihadists would be untrained, unarmed, unmotivated, impotent.24
Victory today requires destroying regimes that provide logistical and moral support for Islamic Totalitarianism. An overwhelming show of force against Iran — and the promise to repeat it against other hostile regimes — would do much to end support for the Islamist movement, for it would snuff out the movement’s beacon of inspiration. Nearly thirty years after its Islamic revolution, Iran is brazenly chasing nuclear weapons and threatening the world’s most powerful nation. To many Muslims, Iran symbolizes the power of totalitarian Islam to overcome irreligious regimes (such as that of the Shah) and to reshape the geopolitical landscape.
A war against Islamic totalitarians would target not just the leadership of a hostile regime; it must demoralize the movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile. The holy warriors are able to train, buy arms, hide their explosives, plan and carry out their attacks, only because vast numbers of Muslims agree with their goals. These supporters of jihad against the West who cheer when Americans die; who protect, support, and encourage the terrorists lusting to kill us; who are accomplices to mass murder; who urge their children to become “martyrs” in the path of Allah — they must experience a surfeit of the pain that their jihad has visited upon us. We must demonstrate to them that any attempt to perpetuate their cause will bring them personal destruction; they must be made to see that their cause is manifestly unachievable, hopelessly lost.25
This is how the Japanese were forced to renounce their cause. Having been abjectly humiliated, they did not rampage in the streets nor launch an insurgency; by crushing them, we did not create new enemies. An observation by General Douglas MacArthur, the commander in charge of occupied Japan, points to the reason why. At the end of the war, the Japanese
suddenly felt the concentrated shock of total defeat; their whole world crumbled. It was not merely the overthrow of their military might — it was the collapse of a faith, it was the disintegration of everything they had believed in and lived by and fought for. It left a complete vacuum, morally, mentally, and physically.
That collapse, disintegration, and vacuum is what we need to effect among the myriad supporters of Islamic Totalitarianism in the Middle East. (Notice that the vacuum left by Japan’s defeat cleared the way for the country to embrace rational values and build a new, peaceful regime. The Japanese, observes one writer, were “in a mood to question everything to which they had been loyal,” while “everything the Americans did was food for thought.”)26
There are many tactical options in prosecuting such a war, but, whatever the specifics, such a war is necessary to defeat Islamic Totalitarianism and end the threat it presents to American lives.
The forward strategy of freedom, however, called for something completely different. At no point — not even in the wake of 9/11 — did Bush declare his willingness to inflict serious damage on our enemies in the Middle East (whom Washington evasively calls “terrorists”). At every opportunity he took pains to assuage the grumbling of the “Arab Street” and the international community by affirming that our quarrel is only with the (allegedly) tiny minority of “radicals,” not with the vast majority of Muslims who (supposedly) reject the jihadists. Instead of aiming to defeat our enemies, the strategy’s fanciful goal was to replace the Taliban and Saddam Hussein with democratic regimes. Explaining his strategy, President Bush stated:
[W]e’re advancing our security at home by advancing the cause of freedom across the world, because, in the long run, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of human freedom. . . . [T]he security of our nation depends on the advance of liberty in other nations.27
Pared to its essentials, the strategy’s rationale comes to this. We have just two options: Either we bring elections to them (and somehow become safer) — or they annihilate us.
Imagine that this strategy had guided America in World War II. Suppose that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans were told that security would come, not by fighting the enemy until its unconditional surrender, but by deposing Hitler and Hirohito, and then setting up elections for their formerly enslaved people. What do you think would have happened? Would there have been any reason to believe that the Germans would not have elected another Nazi, or the Japanese another imperialist?
Precisely because this approach was not taken, and precisely because the Allied forces waged a vigorously assertive war to destroy the enemy, World War II was won decisively within four years of Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die every day in Iraq. And now the Islamists confidently believe that their ideal is more viable than ever, partly because we have helped them gain political power.
Of course, Bush’s hope was that elections would bring to power pro-democracy, pro-American leaders; that establishing a democracy in Iraq would set off a chain reaction in which the entire Middle East would be transformed politically. Elected new regimes would allegedly have the effect of drying out the metaphorical swamps wherein a “dark vision of hatred and fear” apparently infects Muslims and impels them to slaughter Westerners. The desire for liberty, Bush assured us, was universal (“I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom”28); therefore, if only we could break the chains that oppress the peoples of the Middle East, they would gratefully befriend and emulate the West, rather than loathe and war against it. If we were to topple Saddam Hussein and deliver ballot boxes, Iraqis would be exposed to liberty and (just like any freedom-loving people) seek to realize this innate, though long suppressed, ideal. By implication, an all-out war to defeat the enemy was unnecessary, because U.S.-engineered elections would bring us long-term security.
Was Bush’s hope about who would win, shared by commentators and other politicians, honestly mistaken? Could genuinely pro-Western leaders be elected in the culture of the Middle East? Any objective assessment of the region would dispel that hope.
The region’s culture is and has been dominated by primitive tribalism, by mysticism, by resentment toward any ideas that challenge Islam. Popular reactions to real or imagined slights to the religion express widespread hostility to freedom. In 1989, TheSatanic Verses, a novel by Salman Rushdie that allegedly insults Islam, was met with a brutal response. Few if any Muslims bothered to read the book, judge it firsthand, and reach an independent assessment of it — but they fervidly demanded that Rushdie be executed. Muslim reaction to the publication of Danish cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 again underscored, in blood, the animus to freedom of speech. Muslim rioters, who attacked Western embassies in the Middle East, demanded the beheading of the cartoonists whose drawings were deemed unholy. And observe that censorship is routine not only in highly religious regimes such as Saudi Arabia, but also in ostensibly “moderate” ones such as Egypt, where the public sometimes clamors for it.
This opposition to freedom is not an accidental feature of particular regimes. Its source is a cultural antipathy to the values on which freedom depends. Political freedom in America is the product of the 18th-century Enlightenment, an epoch that venerated the individual and the sovereignty of his rational mind. And freedom can arise only in a culture that recognizes the irreplaceable value of a man’s life and that grasps the life-sustaining value of worldly, scientific learning. But the Arab-Islamic world today rejects the values necessary for freedom to take root (let alone flourish).
The endemic contempt for the individual is apparent in the deep-seated worship of family and clan. The individual is seen as possessing neither sovereignty over his own life nor independent value; he is regarded as merely a subordinate cell in a larger organism, which can and does demand his sacrifice. The group’s members kill to preserve family “honor”; brothers butcher sisters merely suspected of “disgracing” the family name. Yoked to the unchosen bonds of whatever tribe claims him, man must bow to its authority over his life regardless of what he believes to be true or good. Hence the custom of arranged marriages and the shunning of those who dare find a mate outside the tribe.
Whereas a Muslim who renounces material goods and memorizes the Koran is esteemed for his devotion, an individual who values progress and pursues secular knowledge is resented as disloyal to religious tradition. Accordingly, the modern Islamic world has given rise to only a miniscule number of scientists or innovators, who have produced nothing of significance. Intellectual giants (such as Newton and Einstein), innovators (such as Thomas Edison), and entrepreneurs (such as Bill Gates) are non-existent in the Middle East. Such men cannot develop in a culture that denigrates worldly knowledge, isolates itself from the books of the West, and wallows in self-righteous irrationality. A culture that deems self-assertion — whether in pursuit of scientific enlightenment, untraditional values, or individual happiness — an offense against tradition and the tribe, has no reason to embrace the rights of the individual. Individual rights are precisely the principles defining and protecting man’s freedom to act on his own goals according to his own judgment.
Most Muslims in the Middle East are not the people that Bush would like us to believe they are: They do not have a repressed love of freedom; they are not lovers of prosperity and individual fulfillment; they are not our friends. Vast numbers of them are rabidly anti-American. To believe otherwise is to evade the jubilant Palestinians, Egyptians, and Iraqis celebrating the attacks of 9/11; the street demonstrations across the Islamic world lionizing Osama Bin Laden; the popular glorification of “martyrs” on posters and in videos; the dedicated support for totalitarian organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Lebanese Hezbollah. What so many Muslims harbor is not hopeful aspiration for, but savage hostility toward, rational ideals.
The relevant facts about the region are universally available and incontestable. Given an opportunity to choose their leaders, it is clear whom Muslims in the region would bring to power. Yet the Bush administration wishes to believe that Iraqis crave freedom and prosperity, that they are just like Americans (except for the misfortune of living under a dictator); it wishes to believe in this notion so much that the administration embraces it in flagrant defiance of reality.
Through various elections, however, the voices of the people in the region have been heard. The people have demanded rule by Hamas in the Palestinian territories, rule by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, rule by Hezbollah in Lebanon, rule by SCIRI and Daawa in Iraq. (We are likely to see the pattern continue as well in Jordan, when that country holds elections at Washington’s urging.) Such results have exposed the forward strategy for the sheer fantasy it is and always was.
Bush’s strategy was concocted and advocated dishonestly: It is a product of evasion. The facts are plain, but Bush has refused to accept them. Bush’s plan is not some sophisticated alternative means of achieving victory — a means that somehow sidesteps a self-assertive war; victory was never its purpose. Rather, his plan is a rejection of the very goal of defeating the enemy. If not victory, what is the ultimate goal of the forward strategy?
The Crusade for Democracy
Although Bush’s strategy is called the “forward strategy for freedom,” this designation is a vicious fraud. The strategy has nothing to do with political freedom. An accurate title would have been the “forward strategy for democracy” — for unlimited majority rule — which is what it actually endorsed. There is a profound — and revealing — difference between advocating for freedom and advocating for democracy.
In today’s intellectual chaos, these two terms are regarded as equivalents; in fact, however, they are antithetical. Freedom is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Political freedom means the absence of physical coercion. Freedom is premised on the idea of individualism: the principle that every man is an independent, sovereign being; that he is not an interchangeable fragment of the tribe; that his life, liberty, and possessions are his by moral right, not by the permission of any group. It is a profound value, because in order to produce food, cultivate land, earn a living, build cars, perform surgery — in order to live — man must think and act on the judgment of his own rational mind. To do that, man must be left alone, left free from the initiation of physical force by the government and by other men.
Since freedom is necessary for man to live, a proper government is one that protects the freedom of individuals. It does that by recognizing and protecting their rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. It must seek out and punish those — whether domestic criminals or foreign aggressors — who violate the rights of its citizens. Above all, the government’s own power must be strictly and precisely delimited, so that neither the government nor any mob seeking to wield the state’s power can abrogate the freedom of citizens. This kind of government renders the individual’s freedom untouchable, by putting it off-limits to the mob or would-be power lusters. A man’s life remains his own, and he is left free to pursue it (while reciprocally respecting the freedom of others to do the same). This is the system that the Founding Fathers created in America: It is a republic delimited by the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. It is not a democracy.
The Founders recognized that a democracy — a system that confers unlimited power on the majority — is antithetical to freedom. Democracy rests on the primacy of the group. The system’s supreme principle is that the will — the desire — of the collective is the proper standard regarding political matters; thus, the majority can arrogate to itself the power to exploit and tyrannize others. If your gang is large enough, you can get away with whatever you want. James Madison observed that in a system of unlimited majority rule
there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.29
Democracy is tyranny by the mob.
Accordingly, the constitutional framework of the United States prohibits the majority from voting away the rights of anyone. It is intended to prevent the mob from voting to execute a Socrates, who taught unconventional ideas. It is intended to prevent the majority from democratically electing a dictator such as Hitler or Robert Mugabe, who expropriates and oppresses a minority (e.g., Jews in Germany, white farmers in Zimbabwe) and devastates the lives of all. By delimiting the power that government is permitted to exercise, even if a majority demands that it exercise that power, the U.S. Constitution serves to safeguard the freedom of individuals.
The original American system is the system of political freedom — and it is incompatible with democracy. What Bush’s strategy advocates globally, however, is democracy.
Granted, the political system that Washington wishes to spread in the Middle East differs from the original direct democracy of ancient Athens in form, and it has some of the trappings of American political institutions; but it nevertheless enshrines the will of the majority. In Iraq, it puts the whims of Iraqi mobs first. Iraqis drafting the country’s new constitution were unconcerned with safeguarding the rights of the individual; instead, we bore witness to the ugly spectacle of rival pressure groups, representing ethnic and sectarian factions, wrangling to assert themselves as the voice of the collective will. Recall the protracted and histrionic clashes among those factions while they divvied up ministries in Iraq’s government and selected a prime minister. And Washington’s commitment to this perverse system is unambiguous.
Given the invasion of Iraq, if self-defense were part of the goal of the forward strategy, then one would logically expect that, for the sake of protecting American lives, Washington would at least insist on ensuring that the new regime be non-threatening, so that we do not have to face a resurgent threat. But Bush proclaimed all along that America would never determine the precise character of Iraq’s (or Afghanistan’s) new regime. The Iraqis were left to contrive their own constitution. Whatever the Iraqis chose, whomever they elected — Washington promised to endorse. The decision was entirely theirs. When asked whether the United States would acquiesce to an Iranian-style militant regime in the new Iraq, Bush said yes. Why should America help create a new hostile regime, a worse threat to our security than Saddam Hussein was? Because, Bush explained, “democracy is democracy. . . . If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose.”30
To appreciate just how serious Washington is about putting the will of Iraqi mobs above the rights of Americans, consider how it conducted the war.
From the outset, Washington committed us to a war of liberation. Just as we toppled the Taliban, to liberate the Afghans, so we toppled Saddam Hussein, to liberate the Iraqis. The campaign in Iraq, after all, was called Operation Iraqi Freedom, not Operation American Defense. “Shock and awe” — the supposedly merciless bombing of Baghdad — never materialized. The reason is that Washington’s goal precluded devastating Iraq’s infrastructure and crushing whatever threat the Hussein regime posed to us; its goal was to provide welfare services and hasten the arrival of elections.
Bush had promised that America will “stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq. We will deliver medicine to the sick, and we are now moving into place nearly three million emergency rations to feed the hungry.”31 And, indeed, the fighting had hardly begun when Washington launched the so-called reconstruction. Our military was ordered to commit troops and resources (which were needed to defend our personnel) to the tasks of reopening schools, printing textbooks, renovating hospitals, repairing dams. This was a Peace Corps, not an Army corps, mission. Washington doled out food and medicine and aid to Iraqis, but it tied the hands of our military.
The U.S. military was ordered to tiptoe around Iraq. “We have a very, very deliberate process for targeting,” explained Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for the United States Central Command, at a briefing in 2003. ‘‘It’s unlike any other targeting process in the world. . . . [W]e do everything physically and scientifically possible to be precise in our targeting and also to minimize secondary effects, whether it’s on people or on structures.”32 So our forces refrained from bombing high-priority targets such as power plants, or in some cases even military targets located in historic sites. Troops were coached in all manner of cultural-sensitivity training, lest they offend Muslim sensibilities, and ordered to avoid treading in holy shrines or firing at mosques (where insurgents hide). The welfare of Iraqis was placed above the lives of our soldiers, who were thrust into the line of fire but prevented from using all necessary force to win the war or, tragically, even to defend themselves. (No wonder an insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington’s self-crippling policies.) Treating the lives of our military personnel as expendable, Washington wantonly spills their blood for the sake of democracy-building.33
In the run-up to the war, Bush promised that
The first to benefit from a free Iraq would be the Iraqi people themselves. . . . [T]hey live in scarcity and fear, under a dictator who has brought them nothing but war, and misery, and torture. Their lives and their freedom matter little to Saddam Hussein — but Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us.34
Their lives did matter greatly to Washington — regardless of the cost to the lives or security of Americans.
The forward strategy dictates that we shower Iraqis with food, medicine, textbooks, billions in aid, a vast reconstruction, so that they can hold elections. We must do this even if it means the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops and a new Iraqi regime that is more hostile than the one it replaced.
This policy, and the calamity it has produced, are too much for (most) Americans to stomach. But such is the zealous commitment of Bush and others to the spread of democracy, that they conceive of Iraq as merely the beginning. Leaving aside whether they now think it is politically feasible, their goal was a far larger campaign.
In his State of the Union address in 2006, Bush proclaimed that America is “committed to an historic long-term goal: To secure the peace of the world, we seek the end of tyranny in our world.”35 To carry out this global crusade for democracy is supposedly to fulfill our nation’s “destiny,” our moral duty as a noble people. On another occasion, Bush asserted that “the advance of freedom is the calling of our time.”36 This mission, he claimed in another speech, was conferred upon us by God: “[H]istory has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose. . . . We did not ask for this mission, yet there is honor in history’s call.”37
Picture what such an undertaking would entail, in practical terms, given the nightmare that Iraq has become. About 140,000 troops are stuck in the quagmire there today. At the peak of the fighting, as many as 300,000 of our military were involved. According to one estimate, Operation Iraqi Freedom has cost about $318 billion.38 So far in Iraq more than 3,000 Americans have died. About 22,000 have come home missing arms, limping, burned, blinded, deafened, psychologically scarred, brain damaged. Although the casualties of the war may be largely unseen, the carnage is all too real. What the advocates of a wider democracy crusade are calling for is morally obscene: not just one hellish ordeal like Iraq (which is horrendous in itself), but dozens of new campaigns that grind up American troops and flush away our nation’s lifeblood, campaigns that drag on indefinitely as we fulfill the open-ended “calling of our time.”
There is no conceivable reason to believe that a strategy so contemptuous of American lives is at all concerned with our self-defense. When its deceptions and lies are peeled away, what remains is a pernicious strategy that puts nothing above the goal of spreading democracy. Such dedication is mandated by the fundamental premise that serves as the strategy’s justification.
Observe what the dogged advocates of the strategy reject as illegitimate: a self-assertive war to defend America. It is unimaginable to them that America should fight a war against Islamic Totalitarianism with the intensity and righteousness that we did in World War II; that the United States should seek to demoralize the enemy; that we should, as Winston Churchill put it, “create conditions intolerable to the mass of the [enemy] population”;39 that the United States should seek victory, for its own self-defense. All of this is off the table. But sending young American men to die in order to bring Iraqis the vote is deemed virtuous, a noble imperative.
Advocates of the forward strategy are fervently committed to spreading democracy, because they are guided by a moral ideal. The principle shaping their thinking is the idea that pursuing values for your own benefit is evil, but selfless service to others is good. Virtue, on this morality, is self-sacrifice.
This ethical ideal dominates our culture. We are told by secular and religious authorities, left and right, that to be moral is to give up our values selflessly. We are bombarded with a seemingly endless variety of slogans that inculcate this same droning message: Put other people first; renounce your goals for the sake of others; don’t be selfish. As Bush puts it: “Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself”; “our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.”40
In the religious variant of this moral code, the ideal is personified in Jesus. He suffered the agonies of crucifixion and perished on the cross — for the sake of all mankind. It is the self-abnegation of Jesus that Christian moralists enjoin their followers to emulate, and accordingly, over the centuries, Christian saints have been extolled for their asceticism and self-effacement. Though religion is the main propagator of this moral standard, it has also been propounded in various secularized forms.
The morality of self-sacrifice is today almost universally equated with morality per se. It is the standard of right and wrong that people accept unquestioningly, as if it were a fact of nature. Observe that even non-religious people regard Mother Theresa as a moral hero, because she devoted her life to ministering to the sick and hungry. Conversely, the achievements of a productive businessman like Bill Gates are deemed to have (at best) no moral significance. On this view, whoever pursues profits is plainly looking out for himself; he is being “selfish.” This creed teaches men to damn profit-seeking and, more widely, to suspect any self-assertion toward one’s goals. It teaches that only acting for the sake of others is virtuous.
The injunction to selfless service is addressed to the “haves” — those who have earned a value and have something to give up — because on this moral code they have no right to keep their wealth, to enjoy their freedom, to pursue justice, to protect themselves. Whom must they serve? Whoever has failed or never bothered to achieve a value: the “have-nots.” Their lack of a value, regardless of its cause, is taken as a moral claim on the productive and able. Because America is a “have” — strong, wealthy, prosperous — it has no right to prosecute a war to destroy Islamic Totalitarianism. It must instead renounce the pursuit of justice — which is what the Christian version of this morality counsels the innocent victim to do: “[R]esist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”41
But the oppressed, impoverished, primitive Iraqis are definitely “have-nots.” They have no food, no electricity, no freedom. It is they, not we, who have a moral claim to our time and money and lives, because they have not earned those values. Deep-pocketed America must therefore jettison the goal of its security and engage in selfless missions to bring succor to these destitute people. This comports perfectly both with Christian precepts and with the dogmas of secular moralists on the left (and the right) who demand that America embark on global “humanitarian” adventures rather than unleash its powerful military and defend itself.
The principle of self-sacrifice implies that the desires of Iraqis, however irrational and destructive, must be accorded moral legitimacy. Instead of prevailing upon them to adopt a new, secular regime that will be non-threatening to America, we must efface that goal and respect the whims of tribal hordes. It is their moral right to pen a constitution enshrining Islam as the supreme law of the land and to elect Islamists to lead their nation. They are the suffering and “needy,” we the prosperous and wealthy; on the ethics of self-sacrifice, the productive must be sacrificed to the unproductive.
But, as we have seen, carrying out the injunctions of this ideal contradicts the needs of U.S. security. It is self-destructive — and that is why it is regarded as noble. As Bush has stated approvingly, we Americans know how to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.”42
A sacrifice is the surrender of a value for the sake of a lesser value or a non-value; it entails a net loss. Giving up something trivial for the sake of a big reward at the end, for instance, scrimping and saving today in order to buy a car next year, is not a sacrifice. But giving up your savings to a random stranger is. It is no sacrifice to enlist in the military and risk your life in order to defend your cherished freedom. It is a sacrifice to send American soldiers to Iraq not to defend their own liberty and ours, but to ensure that Iraqis have functioning sewers. The ideal of self-sacrifice constitutes a fundamental rejection of man’s right to exist for his own sake.
The forward strategy is a faithful application of this moral code. America is the innocent victim of Islamist aggression, but on this code such victims have no right to exist or to defend their freedom. To mount a military campaign against the enemy in defense of our lives would be self-interested. Our duty, on this morality, is to renounce our self-interest. Ultimately, the goal of the crusade for democracy is not to destroy the threats arrayed against us; the goal is for America to sacrifice itself.
What, then, are we to make of the Bush administration’s contradictory rhetoric? It claims, seemingly in earnest, to be seeking America’s security. We were told for instance that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime”;43 and that “We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail” in the face of the enemy.44 At the same time, we were deluged with maudlin, though sincere, talk about sacrificing in order to lift the Middle East out of misery, poverty, and suffering. And what are we to make of the claims about the strategy’s chances of making us safer — in defiance of all facts to the contrary?
The rhetoric is not solely or primarily aimed at winning over the American public. The rhetoric serves as rationalization for a profoundly irrational moral ideal.
Our leaders recognize that we face a mortal threat, but they shrink from the kind of action necessary for our self-defense. We can see that in the initial reaction to 9/11. For a brief period after the attacks, the American public and its leaders did feel a genuine and profound outrage — and their (healthy) response was to demand retaliation. The nation was primed to unleash its full military might to annihilate the threat. Symbolizing that righteous indignation was the name chosen for the military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan: Operation Infinite Justice. The prevailing mood conveyed a clear message: America was entitled to defend itself. But this reaction was evanescent.
Even before the reality of the attacks faded, the flush of indignation subsided — as did the willingness to fight for our self-defense. In deference to the feelings of Muslims, Operation Infinite Justice was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom. After drawing a line in the sand separating regimes that are with us from those that are with our enemies, Washington hastened to erase that line by inviting various sponsors of terrorism, including Iran and Syria, to join a coalition against terrorism. The initial confidence that our leaders felt, the sense that they had right on their side, petered out.
They recoiled from that goal of self-defense when they considered it in the light of their deeply held moral premises. Their moral ideal told them that acting to defend America would be “selfish” and thus immoral. They could not endorse or pursue such a course of action. But their ideal further told them that to act selflessly is virtuous: the forward strategy, therefore, is obviously a moral and noble strategy, because its aim is self-sacrificial ministration to the needs of the meek and destitute. This was a policy that the Bush administration could endorse and act on.
The claims about ensuring the well-being of Iraqis reflect the strategy’s fundamental moral impetus. The claims about defending America are necessary for the advocates of the strategy to delude themselves and the American public. They need to make themselves believe that they can pursue a self-sacrificial policy and America’s security — that they can pursue both and need not choose between the two.
In essence, what our leaders want to believe is that their self-destructive policy is actually in our self-interest, that somehow it is a self-sacrifice (hence noble and moral) and yet not a self-sacrifice (hence achieves American security). This is why the administration insists that “Helping the people of Iraq is the morally right thing to do — America does not abandon its friends in the face of adversity. Helping the people of Iraq, however, is also in our own national interest.”45 This delusion involves two intertwined self-deceptions: that the forward strategy will occasion benefits in practice (i.e., security to America); and that a self-assertive war on the model of World War II, though apparently a practical way to make us safe, is ultimately suicidal.
Portraying Iraqis, and others in the Muslim Middle East, as our “friends in the face of adversity” was key to this delusion. They were characterized as latent friends who, when unshackled, would freely express their goodwill and form regimes that would become our allies. Proponents of the strategy had to tell themselves, and the public, that the vast majority of Muslims just want a better life, “moderate” leaders, and peace — not totalitarian rule by Islamists (as in fact so many do). If one pretends that the Iraqis are pining for liberty, it seems that they would welcome our troops with flowers and candy, and that the mission would be a cakewalk. If one evades the truth and insists on the self-deception that we would effectively be lending a hand to allies who share our values, then it seems vaguely plausible that the loss of American lives on this mission is not actually a loss, because major benefits redound back to America: By selflessly liberating Iraqis (and Afghans) we would, incidentally, be attaining the eventual security of our nation.
Bound up with that self-deception was another one. Its purpose is to discredit assertive war (such as we waged in World War II) as counterproductive and therefore impractical. Evading logic and the lessons of history, advocates of the forward strategy wished to believe that a war driven by self-interest (hence ignoble and immoral) would, after all, undermine our self-interest (by making us more, not less, vulnerable). This kind of war, the rhetoric would have us believe, is not an option worth entertaining. The delusion relied, again, on the rosy portrayal of the lovable peoples of the Middle East. The killers are said to be a scattered group lurking in shadows and operating across borders. For targeting the dispersed jihadists, the methods of past wars, such as carpet bombing, are far too coarse and would fail to kill off the scattered enemy. Further, if we were to use such means to flatten the Iraqi city of Fallujah to quell the insurgency, for instance, or to topple Iran’s totalitarian regime, we would thereby ignite the fury of Muslims caught up in the bombing. And that would turn the entire region against us.
Part of the alleged impracticality of a self-assertive war is that it would profoundly and adversely alter the ideological landscape in the region. Bush and other advocates of the forward strategy claim (preposterously) that all human beings are endowed with an “innate” love of liberty, that the multitude of Muslims in the region are “moderates” who passionately long for political freedom, and that if we nourish their longing for freedom, they will cease to hate or threaten us. But, we are told, if America were to deploy overwhelming military force against their hostile regimes and demoralize large numbers of Muslims, we would thereby deliver the masses to the hands of Bin Laden and other Islamic totalitarians. Demoralizing them would somehow overturn their purportedly “innate” desire for freedom and make them long to be enslaved under a sharia regime. By acting on our self-interest, so the rationalization goes, we will create new enemies and undermine our self-interest.
But there is no reason to believe that a devastating war — such as the one we waged against Japan — could fail to achieve its purpose: to destroy the enemy. We need to inflict widespread suffering and death, because the enemy’s supporters and facilitators are many and widespread. We need to demoralize them, because (as noted earlier) people demoralized in this fashion are motivated to doubt the beliefs and leaders that inspired their belligerence, promised them triumph, yet brought them a shattering defeat. Demoralizing Muslims who endorse and perpetuate the jihad would indeed overturn their ideas — their chosen allegiance to the vicious ideology of totalitarian Islam. Seeing that their cause is hopeless, they would be driven to abandon, not to intensify or renew, their fight. Scenarios predicting our doom if we dare assert ourselves are factually groundless and incoherent.
The rhetoric emanating from the Bush administration and its supporters is unavoidably contradictory. Our leaders need to make themselves, and us, believe that the inherently self-destructive forward strategy is the only way to proceed. It is (on their terms) the only moral path, but it must also be made to seem practical, that is, to our advantage.
The forward strategy is like umpteen other policies and doctrines that, in various ways, portray self-sacrifice as beneficial to the victim. The moral injunction to selflessness would hardly have the power that it does, were it not for the (empty) promise of some kind of eventual reward. For example, during certain periods Christianity (and Islam) stressed the everlasting rewards that a believer can hope to attain in Heaven, if he dutifully serves God’s will, effaces his desire for wealth and sexual pleasure, and selflessly ministers to the suffering. Heaven on earth — a workers’ paradise of limitless leisure and fulfillment — was Communism’s promise to the proletariat who renounced personal gain and labored selflessly for the sake of the collective (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”).
The forward strategy belongs in the same category as another contemporary scheme, which commands near-universal support: foreign aid. Both liberal and conservative advocates of foreign aid claim that by (selflessly) doling out billions of dollars in aid, America will somehow find itself better off. When no such gains ever materialize, we are rebuked for having been too stingy — and commanded to give more, much more, to give until it hurts, since doing so is allegedly in our interest. For example, in the wake of the suicide bombings in London two years ago, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that we must give away $50 billion to feed Africans impoverished by their tribal wars and anti-capitalist ideas and to prop up the anti-Western terrorist regime in the Palestinian Territories. Why? Presumably, the suicide bombings were proof that we simply had not given enough, and, as Blair claimed (speaking for Bush and other supporters of aid) more aid would help us triumph over terrorism, someday.46 The forward strategy can be viewed as a perverse continuation of foreign aid: Since money alone was insufficient, we should selflessly bring elections to the world’s oppressed and sink billions in vast reconstruction projects for their sake.
Just as bribes in the form of foreign aid will supposedly make us safer but have not and cannot — so, too, sacrificing U.S. lives to spread democracy in the Middle East, and ultimately across the globe, will supposedly make us safer but has not and cannot. The actual effects are unmistakable.
The forward strategy is an immoral policy, and so its consequences are necessarily self-destructive. You cannot sacrifice your military strength and defend yourself in the face of threats.
The contradiction becomes harder to evade as more Americans die in Iraq and as more Islamist terror plots are uncovered. While the evidence mounts, however, the Bush administration remains undeterred, responding only with further evasions. Despite the unequivocal results of elections in the region that empowered Islamists; despite the overwhelming Muslim celebration of the war initiated by the Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis against Israel; despite the violent return of the Taliban in Afghanistan; despite the raging civil war in Iraq; despite the wholesale refutation of Bush’s predictions and hopes to date, he claimed in January 2007: “From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence, and want a future of peace and opportunity for their children.” Despite the reality that no Iraqis to speak of have made a choice for freedom, and although an overwhelming number of them remain openly hostile both to America and to freedom, Bush promises to stand with “the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom.” Iraq’s fledgling democracy has yet to flower, he claimed, because it was being impeded by a lack of security. “So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad.” (Emphasis added.) Bush vowed to deploy a “surge” of some twenty thousand additional U.S. troops in Iraq.47
Although characterized as a change in strategy, this is just a change in means, not ends. Spreading democracy remains the unquestioned, self-delusional end, for which more troops and a push for security are the means. Before the war, Saddam Hussein’s regime was the obstacle that had to be removed so that Iraqis could have democracy. Now, it is the utter chaos of insurgency and civil war that obstructs the realization of an Iraqi democracy. In both cases, American men and women in uniform lay down their own lives for the sake of Iraqis. Amid the inevitable results of a democracy’s mob rule and the predictable sectarian war, the Bush administration looks on with purposefully unseeing eyes and rededicates America to a “surge” of senseless sacrifices. The multiplying evasions enable Bush and other advocates of the strategy to fool themselves, and any remaining Americans who still believe in the strategy.
But no amount of self-delusion can erase the facts.
After five years of war, America now faces a threat that we helped to make stronger. This is precisely the result to which the forward strategy had to lead, given its moral premises and the evasions of its proponents. The strategy entails sacrificing American lives, not merely for the sake of indifferent strangers, but for the sake of our enemy.
We have galvanized the undefeated enemy. The forward strategy has taught jihadists everywhere a profoundly heartening lesson: that America fights so that Muslims can assert their desire for Islamist leadership; that America does not destroy those who threaten the lives of its citizens; that America renounces its self-interest on principle, because we do not believe we have a right to defend ourselves. A “paper tiger” is how Osama Bin Laden characterized America prior to 9/11, and he thereby inspired many Muslims to join the jihad. Nothing that we have done since 9/11 has contradicted the jihadists’ view; the forward strategy and America’s other policies have confirmed it. Note Teheran’s glee at the grotesque spectacle of America’s suicidal policy. To say that Iran in particular feels invulnerable or that jihadists in general are encouraged is to understate matters.
Meanwhile, Bush’s strategy has drained not only the material strength of the United States, but also our will to fight. The nation is in retreat. Sickened and demoralized by the debacle in Iraq, many Americans dismiss the possibility of success. This ethos is typified by the Iraq Study Group, whose purpose was to offer forward-looking remedies for the deteriorating situation in Iraq and the region. In December, the group issued a report specifying seventy-nine recommendations, but these options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: Stick with the failed idealistic strategy (i.e., send more troops to engage in democracy-building); or abandon it (pull out the troops); and, either way, concede the “realist” claim that moral principles are a hindrance to foreign policy (and, of course, appease the hostile regimes in Syria and Iran). Ruled out from consideration is a self-assertive war to defeat the enemy, because tragically many misconstrue the forward strategy as epitomizing, and thus discrediting, that option.
Consequently, the amoralists, seemingly vindicated by the Iraq Study Group, are winning a larger audience. They advise us to check our principles at the door, pull up a seat at the negotiating table, and hash out a deal: “It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies,” James Baker reassures us, referring to the prospect of diplomatic talks with North Korea (Baker is cochairman of the Iraq Study Group). Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, joins the chorus: “We sometimes do better talking to monsters than trying to slay them. . . .”48
But the correct lesson to draw is that we must reject neither idealism nor war, but the particular moral ideal driving the forward strategy. A campaign guided by the ideal of self-sacrifice and renunciation cannot bring us victory. We need a different ideal.
An Unknown Ideal
Our leaders insist that the forward strategy is indispensable to victory. They claim that only this strategy is noble, because it is self-sacrificial, and that only it is practical, because it will somehow protect our lives. We are asked to believe that in slitting our own throats, we will do ourselves no real harm, that this is actually the cure for our affliction. What the strategy’s advocates would like us to believe is that there is no alternative to the ideal of selflessness.
But we are confronted by a choice — and the alternatives are mutually exclusive. The choice is between self-sacrifice — and self-interest. There is no middle ground. There is no way to unite these alternatives. We must choose one or the other. If we are to make our lives safe, we must embrace the ideal of America’s self-interest.
Though largely unknown and misconceived, this moral principle is necessary to the achievement of America’s national security. Let us briefly consider what it stands for and what it would mean in practice.49
If we are to pursue America’s self-interest, we must above all be passionate advocates for rational moral ideals. We need to recognize that embracing the right ideals is indispensable to achieving our long-term, practical goal of national security. Key to upholding our national self-interest is championing the ideal of political freedom — not crusading for democracy.
Freedom, as noted earlier, is a product of certain values and moral premises. Fundamentally, it depends on the moral code of rational egoism. Whereas the morality of self-sacrifice punishes the able and innocent by commanding them to renounce their values, egoism, as defined in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, holds that the highest moral purpose of man’s life is achieving his own happiness. Egoism holds that each individual has an unconditional moral right to his own life, that no man should sacrifice himself, that each must be left free from physical coercion by other men and the government. Politically, this entails a government that recognizes the individual as a sovereign being and upholds his inviolable right to his life and possessions. This is the implicit moral basis of the Founders’ original system of government as the protector of the rights of individuals.
If we take the ideal of freedom seriously, then we must staunchly defend ourselves from foreign aggression. The liberty of Americans cannot endure unless our government takes the military steps necessary to protect our right to live in freedom. As a necessary first step, we should proclaim our commitment to this ideal, and promote it as a universal value for mankind. By demonstrating that we hold our own ideals as objectively right, as standards for all to live up to, we evince confidence in our values. The knowledge that America upholds its own ideals and will defend them to the death is a powerful deterrent in the minds of actual and would-be enemies.
A derivative benefit is that we can encourage the best among men, wherever they may be, to embrace the ideal of political freedom. To free nations, to nations moving toward freedom, and to genuine freedom fighters, we should give our moral endorsement, which is a considerable, if often underappreciated, value. For example, we should endorse the Taiwanese who are resisting the claims of authoritarian China to rule the island state. We should declare that a rights-respecting system of government is morally right and that an authoritarian one is morally wrong.
Although America should be an intellectual advocate for freedom, this precludes devoting material resources to “spread freedom.” It is only proper for our government to provide such resources to help a true ally, and only when doing so is necessary for the protection of the rights of Americans. It is never moral for America to send its troops for the sole purpose of liberating a people and then pile sacrifice upon sacrifice for the sake of nation building. It is never moral to send our troops on selfless missions or to fight wars in which America’s security is not directly at stake. Such wars — and the forward strategy itself — violate the rights of our troops and of all other American citizens by imperiling their freedom and security.
In order to protect the freedom of Americans, we must be able to distinguish friends from foes; we must, in other words, judge other regimes and treat them accordingly. The criterion for evaluating other regimes is the principle that government is properly established to uphold: freedom. A country that does respect the individual rights of its citizens has a valid claim to sovereignty. By befriending such a country, we stand to gain a potential trading partner and ally. Because tyrannies violate, instead of protect, the rights of their citizens, such regimes are illegitimate and have no right to exist whatsoever. Tyrannies are by their nature potential threats to America (and any free nation). History has repeatedly shown that a regime that enslaves its own citizens will not hesitate to plunder and murder beyond its borders. Rather than treating tyrannies as peace partners whom we can tame with the right mix of bribes, we should shun and denounce them loudly — and, when necessary, defend ourselves militarily against their aggression.
Determining which course of action, strategy, or foreign policy actually serves America’s self-interest requires rational deliberation and reference to valid principles. It cannot be achieved by wishful thinking (e.g., by pretending that our self-immolation can lead to our future benefit), nor by whatever our leaders pray will be expedient for the range of the moment (e.g., by “talking with monsters” and appeasing enemies). Instead, the goal of securing the enduring freedom of Americans, which includes security from foreign threats, requires figuring out rationally what constitutes a present threat; what is the most efficient means of permanently eliminating a given threat; which regimes are our allies and which our enemies (among other issues). What is required, in short, is a commitment to the full awareness of the relevant facts. That necessitates following the facts wherever they lead — and not being led by the corrupt delusions that the morality of self-sacrifice entails.
Today, the facts tell us that Islamic Totalitarianism is waging war on America. This movement commands wide support and is nourished principally by Iran and Saudi Arabia. The moral ideal of rational egoism counsels an unequivocal response: Defend the lives of Americans. That goal requires, as argued earlier, an overwhelming military campaign to destroy the enemy, leaving it permanently non-threatening. We need to wage as ruthless, unrelenting, and righteous a war as we waged sixty years ago against Germany and Japan. Only that kind of war can make us safe and enshrine our freedom. It is the only moral response, and therefore the only practical one.50
As to what America should do once it has defeated this enemy, again, the guiding moral principle should be that of our national self-interest.
It might be in our interest to install a free political system in a Middle Eastern country that we have defeated — if we have good reason to believe that we can create a permanently non-threatening regime and do so without sacrificing U.S. wealth or lives. And if we were to choose such a course, the precise character of the new regime would have to be decided by America. For instance, in contrast to Bush’s selfless approach to the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan, in post-war Japan the United States did not give the Japanese people a free hand to draw up whatever constitution they wished, nor to bring to power whomever they liked. We set the terms and guided the creation of the new state, and in part because this is how Japan was reborn, it became an important friend to America. (Observe that the Japanese were receptive to new political ideals only after they were thoroughly defeated in war; Iraqis were never defeated and, on the contrary, were encouraged to believe that their tribalism and devotion to Islam were legitimate foundations for a new government.)
But we have no moral duty to embroil ourselves in selfless nation-building. In a war of retaliation against a present threat, we are morally entitled to crush an enemy regime because we are innocent victims defending our unconditional right to be free. Our government’s obligation is to protect the lives of Americans, not the welfare of people in the Middle East. The responsibility for the suffering or death of people in a defeated regime belongs to those who initiated force against us. If it proves to be in our national self-interest to withdraw immediately after victory, leaving the defeated inhabitants to sift through the rubble and rebuild on their own, then we should do exactly that. In doing so, we must instill in them the definite knowledge that, whatever new regime they adopt, it too will face devastation if it threatens America.
If Islamic totalitarians and their many followers know without a doubt that the consequence of threatening us is their own demise, the world will be a peaceful place for Americans. And that, ultimately, is the end for which our government and its policies are the means: to defend our freedom so that we can live and prosper.
The struggle to defend our freedom depends fundamentally on an ideological battle. The clash is one that our leaders persist in evading and obscuring, but which cannot be escaped. At issue is the moral principle that shapes America’s foreign policy. The conflict comes down to this: Do Americans have a duty to sacrifice themselves for strangers — or do we have a moral right to exist and pursue our individual happiness? This is the battle that we must fight and win in America if we are to triumph over Islamic Totalitarianism.
Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products, Ayn Rand Institute
Endnotes
Acknowledgment: The authors would like to thank Dr. Onkar Ghate, senior fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, for his invaluable editorial assistance with this project.
1 President Addresses American Legion, Discusses Global War on Terror, February 24, 2006, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060831-1.html.
2 The administration has referred to it both as a “forward strategy of freedom” and as a “forward strategy for freedom.” For instance, President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004; and, President Addresses American Legion, February 24, 2006.
3 President Bush Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East, November 6, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
4 Reuters, “Most Arab Leaders Survive to See Another Summit,” New York Times, March 27, 2006.
5 “Mideast Climate Change,” New York Times, March 1, 2005.
6 Tyler Marshall, “Changes in Mideast Blunt Bush’s Critics,” Los Angeles Times (published in Boston Globe), March 7, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2005/03/07/changes_in_mideast_blunt_bushs_critics/.
7 Ari Z. Weisbard, “Militants at the Crossroads,” The Nation (web edition), April 24, 2003, http://www.thenation.com/article/militants-crossroads.
8 Jeffrey Bartholet, “How Al-Sadr May Control U.S. Fate in Iraq,” Newsweek, December 4, 2006; “Pentagon: Militia More Dangerous Than al Qaeda in Iraq,” CNN, December 19, 2006.
9 Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins, “Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq,” New York Times, November 28, 2006.
10 President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership, June 24, 2002, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html.
11 Ramsay Short, “Key Job for ‘Terrorist’ Hizbollah in Lebanon’s New Cabinet,” Daily Telegraph, July 20, 2005.
12 Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 209.
13 Joshua Muravchik, “Jihad or Ballot-Box?” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2005.
14 Michael Slackman, “Egyptians Rue Election Day Gone Awry,” New York Times, December 9, 2005.
15 See the statistics compiled by icasualties.org using data from CENTCOM and the U.S. Department of Defense.
16 Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Threat Is Said to Grow in Afghan South,” New York Times, May 3, 2006; Carlotta Gall, “Attacks in Afghanistan Grow More Frequent and Lethal,” New York Times, September 27, 2006; Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa, “Taliban Truce in District of Afghanistan Sets Off Debate,” New York Times, December 2, 2006.
17 Associated Press, “U.K. Tracking 30 Terror Plots, 1,600 Suspects,” MSNBC.com, November 10, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15646571/.
18 Dimitri Simes, “No More Middle East Crusades,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2007.
19 Anthony Cordesman, “Al Qaeda’s Small Victories Add Up,” New York Times, June 3, 2004.
20 Lawrence Kaplan, “Springtime for Realism,” The New Republic, June 21, 2004.
21 Michael Rubin, “Right War, Botched Occupation,” USA Today, November 27, 2006.
22 Max Boot, “Defending and Advancing Freedom: A Symposium,” Commentary, vol. 120, no. 4, November 2005, p. 24.
23 Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 2.
24 On the motivation of totalitarian Islam, see Elan Journo, “Jihad on America,” The Objective Standard, vol. 1, no. 3, Fall 2006.
25 For a detailed consideration of what’s required to defeat the enemy, see John David Lewis, “‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism,” The Objective Standard, vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 2006–2007; see also Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, “‘Just War Theory’ vs. U.S. Self-Defense,” The Objective Standard, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 2006.
26 MacArthur and the writer, Theodore Cohen, are quoted in Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny, revised paperback ed. (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1992), pp. 101–102.
27 President Addresses American Legion, February 24, 2006.
28 President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004.
29 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1999), p. 49.
30 Associated Press, “Bush Doesn’t See Longtime U.S. Presence in Iraq,” FoxNews.com, October 19, 2004.
31 President Discusses the Future of Iraq, February 26, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030226-11.html.
32 Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, “American Planners Stick With the Scalpel Instead of the Bludgeon,” New York Times, March 27, 2003.
33 For more on the self-destructive rules of engagement governing U.S. forces, see Brook and Epstein, “Just War Theory.”
34 President Discusses the Future of Iraq, February 26, 2003.
35 State of the Union address, January 31, 2006.
36 President Bush, Address to the Nation on U.S. Policy in Iraq, January 10, 2007.
37 President Bush Speaks to United Nations, November 10, 2001.
38 Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, (CRS Report for Congress [RL33110], Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress), updated September 22, 2006, p. 11.
39 Churchill quoted in Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust War: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 261.
40 President Bush, Swearing-In Ceremony, January 20, 2005; Inaugural Address, January 20, 2001.
41 The Holy Bible, King James Version, (New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000), The Gospel according to St. Matthew.
42 President Bush, State of the Union, January 28, 2003, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html.
43 President Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
44 George Bush, Presidential Address to the Nation, October 7, 2001, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html.
45National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, National Security Council, November 2005; http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051130-2.html.
46 See, for example, “Blair Says Hope Can Fight Terror,” BBC News online, July 8, 2005.
47 President Bush, Address to the Nation on U.S. Policy in Iraq, January 10, 2007. Quotations as recorded in the transcript of the New York Times, January 11, 2007.
48 Nicholas Kristof, “Talking With the Monsters,” New York Times, October 10, 2006. Baker’s comment is quoted in this article.
49 We here offer a non-exhaustive discussion of the subject; for a detailed treatment of it, see Peter Schwartz’s book The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. See also Brook and Epstein, “Just War Theory.”
50 On the practicality of such a campaign, see Lewis, “No Substitute for Victory.”
The Bush administration claims to have a way to deter the militant theocracy of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — and thwart its ambition to bring “death to America.” Washington’s plan aims to pressure Teheran, financially and psychologically. The idea is to cut off Iran’s nuclear program from banks and businesses in other nations, and to undermine the confidence of Iranian officials. The right amount of pressure, we are told, can induce Teheran to give up its nuclear program.
In fact this policy is a pathetic sham. It is a cover-up for Washington’s abdication of the responsibility to protect American lives.
When you consider the plan in detail, it is incredible that anyone thinks it could thwart Iran. The financial “pressure” so far includes a prohibition on the Iranian Bank Sepah from completing transactions in U.S. dollars. That bank is “the financial linchpin of Iran’s missile procurement network,” according to a Treasury Department official. The ban means Bank Sepah can no longer facilitate sales of oil in dollars — but Teheran has announced that it is now selling oil in euros.
To extend its financial “pressure” overseas, Washington hopes to persuade foreign governments, international banks and companies not to lend Iran money or sell it technology or nuclear expertise. This entails groveling before the likes of France and Germany, keen appeasers of Iran, and Russia, which gutted the already toothless U.N. sanctions against Iran. Even if some companies or countries, like Japan, agree to reduce some of their trade with Iran — the regime is about to open a brand new Russian-built reactor believed capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and apparently begin industrial-scale efforts to produce uranium.
Washington’s scheme also calls for undermining the self-assurance of Iran’s zealous leadership by responding “firmly” to Iranian hostility. In one notable case, four Iranian officials were detained in Iraq on suspicion of abetting insurgents, but after protests from Teheran and Baghdad, the officials were promptly released. Preposterously, this catch-and-release scheme is allegedly “precisely the type of thing that will chip away at their confidence,” as one European diplomat approvingly confided to the New York Times. Recently, U.S. forces detained other Iranian operatives (releasing some of them) and raided an Iranian consular office in Iraq. While our troops are now permitted to kill Iranian operatives in self-defense, these measures, in sum, are but pinpricks.
How could such a feeble policy fail to encourage Iran’s belief that it is free to pursue its hostile goals with impunity?
This plan is not some mistaken or naive attempt to deal with Iran. It is an evasion of Iran’s nature and goals — an evasion of the need to eliminate the Iranian menace.
Iran’s nuclear quest (like its funding of insurgents who slaughter our troops in Iraq) is just the latest in a series of hostilities stretching back to the 1979 invasion of our embassy. To protect American lives, we must recognize Iran as an enemy stained with U.S. blood and assert ourselves militarily to make it non-threatening. This does not mean an Iraq-like crusade to bring them elections; it means protecting U.S. lives by destroying Iran’s militant regime. But that is precisely what our leaders refuse to do.
Washington has resigned itself to the emergence of a nuclear Iran (and an endless insurgency in Iraq), because our leaders do not believe we have the moral right to stop it. To do that would be self-assertive: it would mean putting America’s interests first. Today’s prevailing ethical standard condemns such action as selfish, and therefore immoral. Washington’s moral premise rules out as illegitimate the dedicated pursuit of American self-defense. But wishing to evade the self-destructive implications of their moral principle, our leaders concoct a plan that creates the illusion of their commitment to our defense.
The squeeze-Iran policy is a ruse that must be repudiated as impractical because immoral. We, the people of America, have a moral right to pursue our happiness in freedom. We owe it to ourselves to demand that our government actually fulfill its obligation to defend our freedom — not merely pretend to.
Critics of CEO pay are lampooning the $210 million Robert Nardelli received after a disappointing six-year tenure at Home Depot. Rep. Barney Frank, the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, calls Nardelli’s pay package “confirmation of the need to deal with a pattern of CEO pay that appears to be out of control.”
By what right does the government, or anyone else, claim the power to dictate what owners of Home Depot or any other private company can pay someone to run their company? It’s their company. If through error or irrationality they overpay (or underpay, and so fail to attract good managers), as Home Depot may have done, the loss is theirs.
The only valid reason to be concerned about CEO pay is that our government actively prevents market forces from operating. For instance, restrictions on board membership and hostile takeovers today stop large shareholders with extensive business knowledge, especially financial institutions, from influencing CEO pay. Anyone concerned about the health of corporate America would demand repeal of all such regulations.
But far from demanding repeal of the regulations, critics of CEO pay agitate for ever more control over corporate governance. They are not concerned with corporate wealth creation, but with “corporate social responsibility” — the idea that executives and shareholders should be forced to sacrifice moneymaking for the sake of sundry “stakeholders.” These critics demand that companies staff boards with labor activists, invest in irrational environmental schemes and provide above-market health benefits with no regard for the cost to shareholders.
This vision of corporate altruism is not only destructive, it is immoral. America is the land in which every individual, including a CEO, can pursue happiness through productive work. Morally, CEOs should focus on creating wealth and making profits for their shareholders, and they should be regarded as heroes, not villains, for doing so. Theirs is an enormously demanding job, with billions of dollars riding on their judgment. They should be paid handsomely for their services.
How much? That is for the owners of each company — and more widely, the participants in a truly free market — to establish.
The Iraq Study Group has issued many specific recommendations, but the options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: pull out or send more troops to do democracy-building and, either way, “engage” the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. Missing from the list is the one option our self-defense demands: a war to defeat the enemy. If you think we’ve already tried this option and failed, think again. Washington’s campaign in Iraq looks nothing like the war necessary for our self-defense.
What does such a war look like?
America’s security depends on identifying precisely the enemy that threatens our lives — and then crushing it, rendering it a non-threat. It depends on proudly defending our right to live free of foreign aggression — by unapologetically killing the killers who want us dead.
Those who say this is a “new kind of conflict” against a “faceless enemy” are wrong. The enemy Washington evasively calls “terrorism” is actually an ideologically inspired political movement: Islamic totalitarianism. It seeks to subjugate the West under a totalitarian Islamic regime by means of terrorism, negotiation, war — anything that will win its jihad. The movement’s inspiration, its first triumph, its standard-bearer, is the theocracy of Iran. Iran’s regime has, for decades, used terrorist proxies to attack America. It openly seeks nuclear weapons and zealously sponsors and harbors jihadists. Without Iran’s support, legions of holy warriors would be untrained, unarmed, unmotivated, impotent.
Destroying Islamic totalitarianism requires a punishing military onslaught to end its primary state representative and demoralize its supporters. We need to deploy all necessary force to destroy Iran’s ability to fight, while minimizing our own casualties. We need a campaign that ruthlessly inflicts the pain of war so intensely that the jihadists renounce their cause as hopeless and fear to take up arms against us. This is how America and its Allies defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan.
Victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan. The enemy and its supporters were exhausted materially and crushed in spirit. What our actions demonstrated to them was that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction and death. Since their defeat, Nazism and Japanese imperialism have essentially withered as ideological forces. Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran’s totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile.
We triumphed over both Japan and Germany in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die daily in Iraq. Why? Because this war is neither assertive nor ruthless — it is a tragically meek pretense at war.
Consider what Washington has done. The Islamist regime in Iran remains untouched, fomenting terrorism. (And now our leaders hope to “engage” Iran diplomatically.)
We went to battle not with theocratic Iran, but with the secular dictatorship of Iraq. And the campaign there was not aimed at crushing whatever threat Hussein’s regime posed to us. “Shock and awe” bombing never materialized. Our brave and capable forces were hamstrung: ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities. Instead, we sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers — a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.
U.S. troops were sent, not to crush an enemy threatening America, but (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. They were prevented from using all necessary force to win or even to protect themselves. No wonder the insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington’s self-crippling policies. (Perversely, some want even more Americans tossed into this quagmire.)
Bush did all this to bring Iraqis the vote. Any objective assessment of the Middle East would have told one who would win elections, given the widespread popular support for Islamic totalitarianism. Iraqis swept to power a pro-Islamist leadership intimately tied to Iran. The most influential figure in Iraqi politics is now Moktadr al-Sadr, an Islamist warlord lusting after theocratic rule and American blood. When asked whether he would accept just such an outcome from the elections, Bush said that of course he would, because “democracy is democracy.”
No war that ushers Islamists into political office has U.S. self-defense as its goal.
This war has been worse than doing nothing, because it has galvanized our enemy to believe its success more likely than ever — even as it has drained Americans’ will to fight. Washington’s feeble campaign demonstrates the ruinous effects of refusing to assert our self-interest and defend our freedom. It is past time to consider our only moral and practical option: end the senseless sacrifice of our soldiers — and let them go to war.
