Looking Inward
We are Siddhartha after he has gone out into the city. We have seen the deformed and the dying, we have seen electricity failures, crime, terror and guerilla insurgency, fanaticism and bigotry, poverty, the challenge of establishing a legitimate government. We have learned something about the nature of our power, about its limits to be sure, but also about its power to do good. As the future of Iraq unfolds, we will continue to learn. And President Bush has articulated a national mission to spread freedom, which we can embrace or refuse to embrace. We can enter what E. D. Hirsch, in At War With Ourselves, has described as “the Permanent Quagmire” of engaging the world, nation-building, and promoting development and freedom. Or—as John Kerry beckons—we can try to turn back, to get back to “the place where we were,” the charmed citadel. We can call it all a mistake, as we did after Vietnam. We can try to forget what we have seen. We can dismiss Bush’s lofty zeal with a casual skepticism—what is truth, anyway?—and then we can wash our hands of the case.
The two options were presented clearly in the first debate, and Kerry’s convinced more people. His friends say the “global test” line was a red herring, and would prefer to highlight this line: “I made a mistake in what I said, but you made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?” It was a blunt remark, even harsh, persuasive only inasmuch as we agree that going into Iraq was a mistake. Was it? Bush closed with remarks that were no less eloquent than usual, about the “transformational power of liberty,” but it seemed weak next to Kerry’s onslaught. Kerry, of course, never speaks of the transformational power of liberty. He never expresses pride in what America has done in Afghanistan and Iraq. He emulates Bush only in his determination to hunt down and kill the terrorists, not in his desire to spread freedom. Kerry saw through the rhetoric about the transforming power of liberty long ago, in Vietnam. Bush speaks of “hard work.” As Winston Churchill once promised “blood, sweat and tears.” Not surprising, then, that Kerry’s vision is more appealing.
I fear, however, that the charmed citadel cannot be the same again. We know too much now. There is a sense in which all the world’s children are our children. Our medicine, our technology made population growth possible and summoned them into being. We do not acknowledge them; we shut them out. They look to us but we do not look back. But now our sons have fought alongside their sons. We have come to know something of the desire for freedom and the agony of fear. If we turn back now, will the memory of those whose freedom we once fought for helped haunt us, like an unwed father who feels unease in the night that somewhere his own child and a woman he made love to are struggling without him? Will we watch the news with new eyes, not quite believing our pretense of helplessness? When the high school history textbooks of the future record that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time, what will they say, what will they imply, about freedom, about courage, about the brotherhood of man?
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