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Volume CXXXII, Number 21 |
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Morality in American foreign policy
GIL BARNDOLLAR
COLUMNIST
It's been a week now, but the pictures from Baghdad's Firdos Square remain fresh, the most enduring images of this television war. In a scene reminiscent of the fall of communism, Iraqi men jubilantly attacked a 20-foot statue of Saddam Hussein, then tore it down with American help. If the mass surrenders of Iraqi troops and Iraqi civilians' joyful embracing of American soldiers didn't prove it, Firdos Square's exuberant eruption did: American forces came into Iraq as liberators, in every sense of the word. For all the skepticism and sneers of the press, when the threat of retribution was gone, Iraqis embraced their conquerors as saviors.
While everyone is patting themselves on the back and trying to ignore the gloomy predictions about postwar Iraq (predictions made by the same people who predicted a long, bloody war), one of the main lessons of the war, and indeed of the post-9/11 world, is in danger of being lost. In barely a year's time, the underfunded and outnumbered American military has swept into two countries, tossed out their reprehensible rulers, and begun the arduous path to peace and freedom for peoples who have never known much of either. Both wars were fought for national security. No one is seriously suggesting that the poorly-named Operation Iraqi Freedom (couldn't we have just called it The Ninth Crusade, since Arab public opinion wasn't all that supportive anyhow?) was fought mainly for Iraqi freedom. But here's the thing: shouldn't it have been?
Our America is in an almost unprecedented position. Even Victorian Britain and Imperial Rome didn't have the kind of overwhelming military and economic dominance we now possess. As former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan noted, the US is not a superpower, but a "hyperpower." The threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction remain very real, but we are nonetheless in a unique position to positively shape the course of world history.
Freed from the harsh strategic imperatives of the Cold War, the need to compromise with dictators and thugs is gone. The time for a moral American foreign policy, the antithesis of the cold realpolitik of Europe, is now. This war has proved that we don't need the corrupt and helpless United Nations to accomplish anything; in fact, the UN is a hindrance to both American aims and the spread of democracy and freedom. President Bush bravely ignored the weight of world opinion, and the anti-American peace movement that weeps for Iraqi children but couldn't care less about starvation in Zimbabwe or ethnic strife in Nigeria. As a result, we have one of the most impressive military victories in history, a tyrant dead or on the run, and the liberation of a people who had endured decades of the most brutal repression.
In the coming months, we have the opportunity to do far more. The White House is already making threatening noises toward Syria, another repressive secular Muslim state with tastes in terrorists and chemical weapons. The regime in Iran should realize that its days are similarly numbered, and the Saudis are going to have to finally and unequivocally choose sides in the war on terror.
The real test, though, will come when American security and prosperity are not at stake. When doing what is best for the world means confronting Israel about its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. When doing what is right means spending American money and American lives to end a decades-long civil war in the Sudan, the only country that still practices slavery.
At this moment, we have, if not the obligation, then at least the opportunity to be a powerful force for social and political change, which unfortunately sounds like something out of a Sixties protest manual. No one else is going to take on this task; the Europeans were willing to passively watch genocide occur in their own backyard until the US intervened in Bosnia. America would be doing the world a great service if we took up, as Rudyard Kipling put it in far less politically correct times, "the white man's burden." I don't mean the imperialism or the racism inherent in the phrase, only the evangelical, crusading spirit that it embodies. If we can even just look past forty years of leftist deconstructionism, and admit to ourselves that our values and our system of government are universally good things, we will have taken a vital step towards bettering the planet. The next step is offering the poor and the oppressed of the world the blessings we enjoy.
Do I honestly believe this is the course our nation will take in its foreign policy? No. We live in the richest country on earth, but it is a country that devotes a mere .5 percent of its federal budget, the smallest percentage in the industrialized world, to foreign aid. And even though 80 percent of this already paltry sum goes directly to American companies, politicians routinely summon up foreign aid as an example of wasted money. As shown in Black Hawk Down, we also live in a country where eighteen dead soldiers were enough for us to stop feeding the starving masses of Somalia. An American foreign policy with morality as its central plank seems unlikely. Nonetheless, a Pax Americana for this young century would be a truly worthy goal.
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