Archived Edition: April 20, 2004 | Back to Current	Sep 09, 2010

Right and wrong: Another look
Ben Cronin '05

Last year about this time, I wrote an article criticizing Emily Kirby ’04 and the anti-war Left in general for being on the wrong side of history. I stand by that – I still believe the war in Iraq was, and is, justified.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that Kirby, and the sane Left, did get a great deal right, especially when talking about the Right. The problem is not with the idea of toppling the totalitarian butcher of Halabja; it is eminently moral, eminently liberal and eminently just to smash regimes that slaughter their citizens.

Where the problem lies is in the way in the Bush Administration, and the Right generally, has refused to take responsibility for the new Iraq and has tried to nation-build on the cheap. What Iraq and America need in the current crisis is a New Deal style Democrat, someone not afraid of using the power of the government, and – take a deep breath, my neocon friends – taxes, to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.

But we don’t have that in the White House right now. What we do have is the scaly love-child of Nixonian opportunism and Reaganesque supply side-ism, with a dash of Woodrow Wilson thrown in for good measure. It is admirable that the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan has mostly adopted Wilson’s position, the traditionally Democratic foreign policy axiom that our interests and values are one, that democracy and human rights are more important than traditional, “realist” power calculations.  

But it is deeply regrettable to see the extent to which this Republican Administration has bungled the affair. While proclaiming the highest ideals for the nation and the world, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al, have actively retarded the realization of those ideals.

I realize this may be an uncontroversial stance for Williams. Lots of people hate Bush; after all, he’s the Man to Hate in this land of square-rimmed glasses and nalgenes. But I don’t hate the man at all: he led the country well in those first terrible weeks after Sept. 11, and I think that his rhetoric is wonderful (if not his delivery) - but I just wish he would act in a way that allows for its realization, not its failure.

The Bush Administration has gone about this war – a war of choice, but a just choice – in a self-defeating manner. Let alone the issue of post-war planning; that’s been pretty extensively covered. Consider the issue of diplomacy. Many on the Right say that the President not only assembled an international coalition – true enough – but that he and his Administration made the best-faith effort possible in the face of, among others, French, German and Russian intransigence.

But the President didn’t do this at all; compare how much time Colin Powell spent in Europe selling this war to the amount of time James Baker spent there selling Bush Sr.’s response to his own Gulf conflagration. Or how much legitimacy Tony Blair (and Colin Powell) realized a UN Resolution, or even a united NATO, would have produced.

More than this, though, the Bush Administration betrays a disturbing disinclination to explain its actions. It’s not enough to deliver moral judgments while eschewing public moral reasoning; it’s a fundamentally shallow kind of rhetoric. Perhaps people in, say, France don’t automatically see the necessity of deposing Hussein; we should explain our position – maybe even in French! – rather than idiotically denouncing the opposition candidate as “looking French.”

Not that Tony Blair didn’t try to convince the French – he did and failed. The French government unfortunately threatened to veto UN Resolution 1442, which would have punished Hussein for violating Resolution 1441 and the 16 other resolutions he had violated since 1991. So it failed. But the point is that at least Blair tried. He didn’t needlessly insult the very people we were trying to get on board (ahem, Donald Rumsfeld).

A number of things are needed now: one is the return of a belief in the progressive possibilities of the U.S. Government. The requirements of both the War on Terror, of which Iraq is a part, perhaps a misguided part, but we can debate that elsewhere, and of building a decent society at home, require the state to do a lot of heavy lifting. An ideology which seeks the minimal involvement of the state in our affairs (unless, of course, they happen to be reproductive or nuptial affairs) is less than ideally suited for the times.

We ought to be using the power of the federal government to wean ourselves from oil to require some form of national service – teach or fight or farm for America, your choice. We also have a responsibility to address the growing inequality within our society; it is absolutely shameful that in a country this wealthy, families are forced to sleep in the streets.

It’s shameful that the weakest in our society – the elderly, the illegal immigrant, the minimum-wage worker – are left to fend for themselves, while the great captains of industry and the great corporations, the plutocrats and the haves, are showered with the favors and largesse of the State. We can do better than this in America.

This is not the time for an ideology which devotes resources to tax cuts that could have gone to equipment for the troops in the middle of the inferno. This is the time for a government that can both win the War on Terror and fight poverty and injustice in our own backyard.

That’s why this November, George Bush has got to go.