Bringing Neoconservatism Home
(written by Lancelot Finn, May 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal)
What would you have done if you were an Iraqi when the Baathist tyranny fell? Would you have have embraced the new Iraq, by starting a political party, or a newspaper, or a business? Would you have signed up for the Iraqi police, risking your life and being scorned by some as an American stooge, to fight terrorists, criminals and insurgents, to keep at bay the bloody chaos that threatened to drown your country's new hopes? Or would you have joined the passive masses, who waited in fear, who took the course of least resistance, complained about the problems but did not contribute to solutions? Iraqis wanted, and want, freedom. Many Iraqis have taken the brave path, and in their courage and efforts lies the hope of their country. But it took courage to embrace the new order. The future was uncertain. The Americans were strong for the moment, but would soon be gone. Every day the theocrats, the fanatics, the thugs took their toll, and they would be around a long time to exact vengeance.
The war in Iraq is not a failure, whatever you may have heard. It has become fashionable, for some reason, to ridicule the (alleged) predictions of neoconservative optimists that Iraqis would "welcome us with open arms." Yet they did, didn't they? My generation will never forget the scenes of April 9, 2003, when joyous, liberated Iraqis embraced coalition soldiers, cheered on American tanks, threw candy and flowers, and pulled down the famous statue. The polls confirmed that most Iraqis welcomed Saddam's fall and wanted him brought to justice, and their country to become a democracy. Naturally, they were more ambivalent about the occupation. What were the coalition's motives? How long would they stay? And would you like to have heavily-armed, foreign-speaking young men scouring the streets? At best, Iraqis and Americans agreed, the occupation was a necessary evil. What the press dignifies with the term "resistance" kills more Iraqis than Americans and was always a small minority which most Iraqis despised, but they forced US troops to enact curfews and carry out raids that marred Iraq's new freedom, while insecurity darkened the political horizon. Though positive developments are masked by the pornographic preferences of the press, much has been achieved. General security remains elusive, but there is stability in many areas of Iraq. Iraqis now enjoy freedom of speech, and a lively free press has sprung up which may yet prove the antidote to the venom of al-Jazeera and the hate-driven state-sponsored Arab press in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Shiites enjoy religious freeom, and can celebrate their long-banned festivals. And while the fog of war interferes with national accounts, so that it's hard to say anything about Iraq's economy for sure, it seems to be booming. Indeed, the very fact that prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib is such a scandal is the most eloquent testimony yet to how far we have come. When Bush came into office, far worse crimes were being committed, but the world did not care, the perpetrators were unpunished, and Iraqis dared not breathe a word of protest.
Wise neoconservatives knew our enterprise in Iraq was ambitious and unprecedented. There were bound to be problems we could not foresee, and we would not have predicted that, a year after the war, things would be better than they are. Yet we hoped for better, somehow, and as the months have passed and the problems mounted, the pain of disappointment grows more acute. We invested so much blood and treasure, so much diplomatic capital and international esteem, so much hope and idealism in Iraq's freedom. Yet the world, unmoved by Iraqis' joy of liberation, persisted in its contempt. On the ground, it was so hard to make an interim government legitimate, or to lay the foundation for democracy, and our fragile beginnings were so vulnerable to brutal spoilers. We opened the door for Iraq to a brighter future. But they seemed strangely reluctant and clumsy about entering it.
Now, all of a sudden, we find the brutal spoilers in our own ranks, with their pictures broadcast all over the world. To billions, fair or unfair, those few scoundrels now represent America. They represent you and me. And the question I began with—what would you have done?—takes on a different and more intimate meaning. What would you have done, terrified and under stress, with a few Iraqis in your power and many more trying to kill you, in what you thought was the privacy of an interrogation room at Abu Ghraib? Would you have had the fine, rigid scruples of what we now call, with new emphasis, an honorable soldier? Or would you have succumbed to the temptation to abuse your power? When we look at the prisoner abusers of Abu Ghraib, how many of us are looking at the face in the mirror?
All this happened once before, in a way. America was surprise-attacked, struck back in righteous indignation, toppled two totalitarian regimes. Then we were not vengeful in victory, but repaid evil with good, not demanding reparations but bringing aid, not conquering but nation-building. Meanwhile, to sustain the great effort, to give our soldiers something to fight and die for, our leaders (it was Roosevelt then, now it's Bush) articulated the American creed in the loftiest of terms. Democracy and liberty were the cause, and we were its model, its bastion, its champion, saints at home, saviors abroad, apostles of freedom everywhere. A lot of moral blank checks were signed; later, we would find the balance in our account was too small to pay them.
For some reason, things went wrong. How could anyone prefer the grim tyranny of communism to freedom (or, today, Islamofascism to democracy)? And yet it seemed that so many people abroad did. We managed to avert communist takeovers in France and Italy, but only just. In Korea, we were beaten back from the north; and in Vietnam, the people seemed ready to acquiesce in or even support the encroachments of the Vietcong. Why? Maybe what we had been taught about freedom was all a lie. Maybe there is no truth, no right and wrong, no good and evil, no use in trying to help anybody. One young soldier looked at the Vietnamese peasants who (it seemed to him) just wanted to be left alone, and abandoned the cause. Whatever his other "flip-flops," that penitent soldier has been faithful in this: he has never again tried to advance the cause of freedom. And the Democrats beckon us to vote for John Kerry's voice of disillusionment.
And so in the 1960s, our idealism took an introspective turn. We began trying to take the beam out of our own eye before taking the mote out of our brother's. Were we really such a great role model for the world? We looked around us and saw racial segregation and rural poverty. So we rushed into a decade of dramatic social change. Yes, in some ways the sixties led us astray. The "war on poverty" created a culture of welfare dependency and handicapped our economy's productivity while it lasted, and we've spent much of the past generation backtracking from the excesses of the cultural revolution. Yet millions of Americans look back on the sixties with nostalgia, affection, even longing. We faced up to our social problems and became a bit humbler, we developed a new art form (rock-n-roll), we became more open-minded. Most importantly, the civil rights movement awakened our consciences and opened our eyes to, in the haunting phrase that served as the title of Ralph Ellison's great novel, the "invisible men," the blacks, who suddenly became visible. We began to purge ourselves of racism, and to recognize black people as an integral, essential, wonderful part of our nation.
Maybe the time has come for this national outburst of idealism (usually labeled "neoconservative") to take its introspective turn. For if the Iraqis are lucky to be liberated (luckier than North Koreans, Zimbabweans and Burmans, for example) aren't we even more lucky to be born in the world's richest and freest country? And yet, like the Iraqis, too often we succumb to fear and helplessness, we don't take responsibility for our country and its future, we are afraid to compete in the global economy on free and fair terms, we resist the compromises and sacrifices necessary to share this country harmoniously with everyone who lives in it. Just as Americans forty years ago looked around them and saw racial segregation and rural poverty, we can look around us and see among the elderly a culture of dependency on an unsustainable Social Security program. We see Americans deep in debt because the system is stacked against saving and investment. We see a small minority of unionized workers trying to prevent their jobs being shifted to people overseas who can do them cheaper and need them more, while denying to the vast majority of their fellow citizens the benefits of free trade. We see courts usurping power, disenfranchising the people and abrogating democracy on sensitive issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. We overthrew Saddam and gave the Shiites the right to public expression of their religion, yet here at home those too poor to afford private school cannot even educate their children according to their own beliefs, but must entrust them to school where God is refuted through eloquent silence, schools steeped in a secular humanist faith which is anathema to millions of Americans.
And we see millions of immigrants living in an undocumented, vulnerable, sub-legal situation while they try to feed their families by providing services that our economy needs. If dark-skinned Third World nations were once persuaded by communist propaganda that portrayed white Americans as exploitative bourgeois pigs, it was because white Americans were behaving like exploitative bourgeois pigs towards dark-skinned Americans here at home. Likewise, if the images from Abu Ghraib strike hundreds of millions around the world the world as an accurate symbol of America, it is because scenes like those at Abu Ghraib are enacted every day in US embassies all over the world. No, there is no stripping naked and no hooding. But foreigners who pay us the compliment of wanting to come to our country are rewarded by being frisked and hustled through military checkpoints, crammed in endless lines, finger-printed, background-checked and eyed with suspicion like criminals, charged huge fees which will never be repaid even if the visa is denied, then have their lives and futures subjected to the arbitrary power of an official of Colin Powell's State Department, questioned and told to wait, left hanging with no information for a while, then, usually, denied, barred from a job or an education or a visit to friends and loved ones by US brute force. If they have to come illegally, they are deprived of the protection of the law and of basic life needs like a driver's license, deprived of the "inalienable rights" which the Declaration of Independence (written, significantly, by the slaveowning hand of Jefferson—this hypocrisy is a long tradition) proclaims. Of course, the American-born, who know they will never suffer the immigrant's indignities, tend to look at all this differently. But it is no wonder that Arabs, Iranians, Russians, Africans, Indians and Chinese find the images of Abu Ghraib so poignant, so symbolic, so familiar, so true.
George W. Bush, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, is a man on whom privilege has had a salutary effect. He is able to stand taller, think bigger, see further, to rise above the mud-slinging media and keep his eye on America's ideals. Thus, while the Democrats' chosen windbag fusses and fumes and complains, the Bush campaign has a message, which will open the door to a brighter future for Americans, as we did for the Iraqis: the ownership society. We will shift the tax burden away from savings and investment, empowering the middle class to avoid debt and become small-scale capitalists. We will ease the regulatory burden for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Through the No Child Left Behind Act, we will continue to hold schools accountable, moving towards the time when disadvantaged children of all races will have a fair chance to take charge of their futures. America will continue to lead the world in pro-development, pro-business free trade policies, and economic growth will continue to create jobs so that workers displaced by trade can move to new jobs with positive net social value.
And most important of all, Bush has given the cue for what may (must!) prove to be the civil rights movement for Generation X. Bush wants to deliver a better life to undocumented workers, allowing them to switch jobs, to visit their families, and to enjoy the benefits of registration. He also wants to expand opportunities for legal immigration. While the Democrats cynically dismissed this as a "political ploy" and then (speaking of political ploys) outflanked Bush with a politically unpalatable counter-proposal, Bush has not recanted the words he spoke:
Their search for a better life is one of the most basic desires of human beings. Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile, through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Some have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings, or entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of heartless human smugglers. Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in the shadows of American life -- fearful, often abused and exploited. When they are victimized by crime, they are afraid to call the police, or seek recourse in the legal system. They are cut off from their families far away, fearing if they leave our country to visit relatives back home, they might never be able to return to their jobs. The situation I described is wrong. It is not the American way.
Where the idealists of the 1960s extended the American dream to people born with a different skin color, our task is to extend it to people before in a different place. Only when we begin to welcome immigrants to America the way the best of the Iraqis welcomed our soldiers to Baghdad will the world see the Statue of Liberty, and not the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, as the symbol of America.
So there is much work to do. We should stay a bit longer in Iraq and finish our project, but the time has come to bring neoconservatism home.