Untitled Document
What America Should Tell Its President
—by Joe Steinberger
The great advantage of democracy is that the people who
hold power bear the consequences of their own decisions. The great problem
of democracy is that the people who hold power are not held accountable for
their decisions. In other words, when we screw up we must take our knocks,
but we are always free to blame others — and it seems we always do.
I watched George Bush on television last night and I
felt sorry for him. We put him up to all this, elected him and re-elected
him, egged him on with our ignorant nationalism, and now we are blaming him
for the fact that they hate us in Iraq. I remember poor George right after
September 11, 2001, confused and unsure what to do, calling the attackers
“those folks.” Boo! It took him a couple of days to feel the
pulse of the nation, and he found it: we wanted war! So he gave us war.
Now, three years later and soldiers getting killed and all, we are sick of
it.
You know what I am sick of? I am sick of the
irresponsibility of the American people. We are in charge here, after all.
We elect our leaders. That is to say we could elect leaders if we chose to.
Instead we elect politicians who pander to our foolishness.
It would be a good thing for America to have a foreign
policy. As we are a democracy, that policy would have to grow out of the
will of the American people. What is our will for the world? It seems that
we cannot get beyond wanting to form it in our image, as God did man. That
is impossible. Despite our awesome military power, our role must
necessarily be more humble. With what agony, with what paroxysm of blame
and recrimination, will we learn this lesson?
In his speech last night Bush said that our enemies the
terrorists don’t understand us. They believe we are decadent! To
prove them wrong the American people must show their support for our
troops. Fly the flag on the Fourth of July, and go online to
americasupportsyou.mil and click on a red-white-and-blue button to send a
message to “Thank the Troops for Your Freedom.”
What message, though, are we sending to the people of
Iraq, and the rest of the world? Where is the button to click on for that?
Over my lifetime we have changed enemies abroad and we
have changed parties in power here, but we have not much changed our
approach, or lack of it. The war in Vietnam was fought against communism.
We learned, or should have learned, that an ideology cannot be fought with
guns. Then, as now, we did not lack for guns. We failed then. We are
failing now. Then, as now, the war’s supporters countered growing
disillusionment with calls for greater nationalistic pride.
One thing that has changed is that the stakes are
higher. The Middle East is much more important to us today than Southeast
Asia was then, and the people we fought in Vietnam did not blow up
buildings in New York. It was a hard lesson then, but we learned that we
could afford to leave the Vietnamese alone to do their own thing.
Today’s conventional wisdom says we cannot afford to do that with the
people who we believe we are fighting in Iraq.
A key point of Bush’s speech was that we are
fighting the people who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and that we must
now defeat them abroad before they attack us again at home — we must
take the fight to them, we must pursue the offensive, etc. In this, though,
he is simply pandering to a popular misconception. There was no particular
concentration of terrorists in Iraq before we invaded that country. People
there are now using terrorist tactics to fight us, and terrorists from
other countries are going to Iraq now to fight us, but we could have
invaded any Arab country with the same effect.
By this logic, then, we could defeat the terrorists
more quickly by occupying the entire Middle East. Why not Saudi Arabia for
a start? American troops occupying Mecca would surely draw terrorists.
Killing or capturing all the terrorists, though, like
killing or capturing all the communists, is a hopeless fantasy. The only
realistic possibility is to convert them and those who might join them, if
not to free-market Christianity, at least to some degree of tolerance for
our ways.
How to go about that is the great challenge. The people
of the Middle East are not our enemies, the terrorists are. All Americans
say this, but we do get confused. To isolate the terrorists and reduce
their numbers we must make friends with the people, but we are doing the
opposite: we are alienating the people and creating more terrorists, and
more support for them.
To make friends, to win their “hearts and
minds,” we must stop trying to force them at gunpoint to do things
our way. To get respect we must give it. If we want the people of the
Middle East to leave us alone to do our thing, we must leave them alone to
do theirs.
