AUSTIN, Texas -- A substantial nit to pick
with President Bush's second Inaugural Address and some questions about
his theme.
"From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man
and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value,
because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the
generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because
no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."
Oh dear. It took us almost 100 years to get rid of slavery right here
in the Land of the Free, it took us another 100 years to get rid of legal
discrimination based on race and gender, and how long it will take us
to achieve equal opportunity for all in this country no one can say. At
least we're working at it. Or we were.
The Bush theme of what someone else christened "evangelical democracy"
is rather like the "From the day of our founding ..." passage
-- actually, it's more complicated than that. I, too, am happy to proselytize
for freedom and democracy, but I don't think we can export it by force
and I don't think we can expect the world to accept our noble intentions.
Nor is democracy necessarily the cure for terrorism. As a British journalist
pointed out, if Britain had been following the Bush plan, it would have
nuked us years ago for being the largest single source of money for the
Irish Republican Army. Reality is so often much more complicated than
George W. Bush thinks it is.
Why didn't the Iraqis welcome us with flowers? Wasn't Saddam Hussein about
as nasty a dictator as you can find? Because we invaded their country
and are now occupying it. It is extremely difficult to convince people
that you are killing them (and torturing them) for their own good. How
would you feel? The British medical magazine Lancet estimates Americans
have now killed about 100,000 Iraqis. We don't know for sure, because
America has several policies that prevent anyone from keeping an accurate
count.
Unfortunately, because of the violence in Iraq, we have achieved very
little in the way of reconstruction there, so many Iraqis are actually
worse off today, in terms of basic services like water and electricity,
than they were under Saddam Hussein. We can still hope that the elections
work out well in most of the country, but it's silly to say things are
going well in Iraq, as some of my more delusional colleagues claim.
Actually, we have already tried foreign policy based on idealism: In one
case, it didn't work worth a damn, and in the second, it produced pretty
handsome results based on a pragmatic application of principle.
The first great foreign policy idealist in the presidency was Woodrow
Wilson, everyone else having pretty much stuck to the Monroe Doctrine
pace our unfortunate venture into the Philippines, a sort of
early Vietnam). Wilson got us into the insanely named "War to End
War." (As A.J. Muste, the great pacifist, observed, "The way
to peace is through peace.") After that hideous slaughter, Wilson
signed a treaty that set up the same war to happen all over again 20 years
later. He was famously unable to get his own Senate to join the doomed
League of Nations.
A rather better effort was made by Jimmy Carter, who based much of his
foreign policy on human rights, the equivalent of Bush's "freedom."
This consistent emphasis, applied over time, resulted in every country
in Latin America (though not Central America) becoming a democracy.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world is skeptical of Bush's benign intent,
mostly because he invaded a country that not only hadn't done anything
to us, but also was no threat to us. (There is a new line on the right
that goes, "But everybody in the whole world was saying Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction." Actually, everybody wasn't. Hans
Blix and the U.N. inspectors had been unable to find any, even though
we claimed we knew exactly where they were and had pictures of them. Quite
a few people were beginning to doubt the existence of WMD, and what "everybody
in the world" was saying at the time we went to war was, "Give
the inspectors more time." In retrospect, it was quite good advice,
wasn't it?)
At other points in the speech, one was left wondering, as one so often
is, about Bush's grip on reality. Talking about his "ownership society,"
he said, "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny,
we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear,
and make our society more prosperous and just and equal."
He's delusional: He cannot possibly believe his tax cuts are making this
country more just and equal -- they are making it more unjust and unequal
every day, not to mention getting us ever deeper into debt. One does not
provide "freedom from want and fear" by privatizing Social Security.
We've been there, we've done this -- we tried unregulated capitalism at
the end of the 19th century, and it was awful.
