Yet another mea culpa from a liberal who supported the war. Coming from The New Republic's Peter Beinart, this one is more noteworthy than usual. An excerpt:
I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It's a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.Some non-Americans did, too. "All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive," wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, "are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?"
I couldn't answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can't be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That's why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force--because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it's why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That's not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It's not even to say that we can't, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we're there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war--as they did in Vietnam and Iraq--because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn't have trusted ourselves.
Although I'm willing to buy the all volunteer military point, I'm far less willing to let him off with the "I'm too young to know any better" line. Study the history of this country in any detail - and I mean the real history, not the stuff you get in high school or American History 101, and you'll quickly discover that we have never, EVER been a country with superior "wisdom and virtue." We've often convinced ourselves otherwise, but it has never been true.
But Beinart should know this, whatever his age. In fact, I suspect that's something Beinart already knew, no matter what he claims here. His "no nation is governed by angels" gives him away. I suppose its possible that phrase was used accidentally, but I doubt it.
From James Madison in Federalist #51, one of the most famous passages in American history:
The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.
For the framers of our constitution, the history of absolute rulers forcing the people into unnecessary wars was a very real and pressing concern. They had lived through it, and they wanted to do everything in their power to make sure it did not happen again.
Much is often made by critics of the founders that they did not trust the people to rule themselves. As I often try to explain to my students, that interpretation simply is not correct. It wasn't that they didn't trust the common people; they didn't trust anyone with with power. That, more than any other single reason, is why they deliberately designed a cumbersome, inefficient, and complex system of checks and balances at every level of our government. Only by forcing individuals to work both with and against one another did they believe both the liberty and security of the nation could be protected.
We are not angles. We never will be. That does not mean we cannot be a force for good in the world, but it does mean we must always be aware of our limits. As the neoc-onservatives of the 1950s and 1960s so clearly understood, all actions, even the most well intentioned ones, have unintended consequences. That must always be kept in mind when we choose to act in the world. Always.
A nation cannot truly be considered strong if it does not know its own limits. I had hoped that the painful experience of Vietnam had taught us this, but apparently not. I hope and pray that we do not make that same mistake again.
Which brings me to Beinart's point about our all volunteer force. Over the past few years, I've grown more and more convinced that our reliance on an volunteer force is a serious mistake. I've always felt that the burden of national defense is one that should be shared by everyone, but in the past I always was motivated by a belief in the positive effects of shared sacrifice and collective effort. It has only been in the past few years that I've developed a second, more negative understanding of the issue. Only by spreading the burden across our society equally can we ensure that we only fight the wars that absolutely must be fought.
For far, FAR too many citizens, the war is something they experience only on TV. If, as so many supporters of the war often say, freedom isn't free, why should only a tiny fraction of society be asked to pay the price? The truth is, for most Americans today, freedom is free. Where is the wisdom and virtue in that?
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