PROF. GADDIS ON CURRENT EVENTS

Via Atrios, I came across this lecture by John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale. It is an odd mixture of learning and ignorance. Here I will point of some of the ignorance.

The only solution, the President has insisted, is to neutralize where possible, but to remove where necessary, regimes that embrace such ideologies.

Under Saddam, Iraq was secular and did not embrace Al-Quida's ideology.

A second major point made in the inaugural is that the task of spreading democracy and ending tyranny requires help from allies: “division among free nations,” the President pointed out, “is a primary goal of freedom’s enemies.”

Bush has alienated most of our allies and is quite possibly the most hated man in the world.

It is fair to say, I believe, that the administration never wanted to undertake preemption in Iraq unilaterally – or with only minimal multilateral support: hence its efforts, even if unsuccessful, at the United Nations.

Bush was determined to invade Iraq and the UN efforts were simply for show and to appease Tony Blair. There is an enormous amount of evidence for this claim which I won't go into here but I will direct the reader to the Downing Street Memo.

One is that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. But every intelligence agency in the world also believed that they were there, and it may be that Saddam Hussein believed that also. That they weren’t, was universally unexpected.

No, many did not believe the Bush lies. Here's just one example:

U.S. Allies Were Not Persuaded By U.S. Assertions on Iraq WMD

June 9, 2003
Institute for Science and International Security

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/usallieswmd.html

Despite the Bush Administration's assertions, allies of the United States did not fully agree with the Administration's assessment on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

For example, Russia was not convinced by either the September 24, 2002 British dossier or the October 4, 2002 CIA report. Lacking sufficient evidence, Russia dismissed the claims as a part of a "propaganda furor."2 Specifically targeting the CIA report, Putin said, "Fears are one thing, hard facts are another." He goes on to say, "Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress."3 However, Putin was apprehensive about the possibility that Iraq may have WMDs and he therefore supported inspections. The Russian ambassador to London thought that the dossier was a document of concern. "It is impressive, but not always…convincing."4

French intelligence services did not come up with the same alarming assessment of Iraq and WMD as did the Britain and the United States. "According to secret agents at the DGSE, Saddam's Iraq does not represent any kind of nuclear threat at this time…It [the French assessment] contradicts the CIA's analysis…"5 French spies said that the Iraqi nuclear threat claimed by the United States was a "phony threat."6

...I think we ought at least to entertain the radical notion that the President means exactly what he says when he talks about democratization – and that what he means is what he believes. But how can you say that, other critics have argued, in the light of the Bush administration’s obvious denials of basic human rights at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere? That criticism holds up, it seems to me, only if you require, of presidential administrations, freedom from inconsistency – the absence throughout their term in office of gaps between aspirations and actual practices.

The problem here is that the talk of rights by the U.S. is widely perceived as being hypocritical in light of the abuses. The war on terror is in part a battle for "hearts and minds" and Bush's lapses have badly hurt our efforts.

A better one is that the American electorate does not appear overwhelmingly to have rejected Bush’s domestic policies,

As I write this, Bush's plan to destroy Social Security is going nowhere and Bush's approval rating may be as low as 43%.

OK, some critics will insist, but isn’t the administration’s agenda still inconsistent with international law?Only, I think, if you understand international law as unconditionally safeguarding sovereignty, whatever the abuses sovereigns may have committed.But that principle began to be called into question by the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and we have seen it further questioned by international actions that have violated sovereignty in the defense of human rights: in Bosnia in 1995, in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan in 2001 – and as almost everyone would now wish had happened, in Rwanda in 1994 and in the Sudan today. If you favor, or favored, those interventions, I’m not sure you can easily take the view that Saddam Hussein – one of the worst abusers of human rights on record – should have been left in power, especially since he had also demonstrated his serial contempt for over a dozen United Nations
resolutions.

We went into Bosnia and Kosovo with our NATO allies and we went into Afghanistan for self-defense, again with our NATO allies. Only Britain is giving us substantial support in Iraq and we did not invade because we were worried about human rights. As Wolfowitz said, the defense of human rights was not a justification for the action we took.

This brings the Bush policy into line with the famous distinction Isaiah Berlin once made between “negative” and “positive” liberty: negative liberty was the freedom to arrange your own life; positive liberty was the claim advanced by somebody else to know how to do that for you.

Another misunderstanding. Berlin's concept of "positive liberty" involves choosing the goals which we are willing to pursue. The choice can be individual or collective and only runs into moral problems when it is imposed.

Doesn’t the Bush grand strategy violate John Quincy Adams’s great principle that “the United States goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy”? Not really, and this brings us back to 9/11. Because the danger now is that the monsters from abroad, if nothing is done to counter them, will seek to destroy us here at home. The trend in global politics is indeed toward democracy, but the trend could be reversed by just a few more well-placed attacks on the scale of 9/11 or greater, whether in this country or elsewhere. In this sense, the world itself is now like Iraq, in which the depredations of a few place all at risk. Given the choice, the President insists, people will choose freedom. But tyrants and terrorists – even just a few of them – could still deny that choice for many if they were to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. If we wait for them to act, it will be too late.

Once again, we have the "9/11 changed everything" scare meme. If anything, Bush's policies have put us at greater risk of another attack. I cannot see how the use of a WMD will deny others freedom but Gaddis may expand on this someday.

Nor will saying that you voted for the $87 billion appropriation before you voted against it.

Kerry expressed himself poorly on this fake issue but that does not excuse Gaddis from learning the facts of the matter. There were two issues at stake: (1) do we make the Iraqis repay the 20 billion for reconstruction? and (2) do we spend 67 billion without increasing revenue?

Third, grand strategy requires the ability to respond rapidly to the unexpected.

Bremer asked for an additional 50,000 troops in the summer of 2003 but he was turned down. Rumsfeld claimed that the lack of armored humvees was "a matter of physics" yet two days later the manufacturer said he could increase production by 20%. Both cases show Bush's inability to respond to unexpected challenges.

Fourth, grand strategy requires the making of moral judgments, because that’s how leadership takes place: in that sense, it’s a faith-based initiative. You have to convince people that your aspirations correspond with their own, and that you’re serious about advancing them. You don’t lead by trying to persuade people that distinctions between good and evil are social constructions, that there are no universal standards for making them, that we should always try to understand the viewpoint of others, even when they are trying to kill us.

The United States has lost the moral high ground as a direct result of Bush's policies. The strawdog about "social constructions" should be left to talk radio whores like Hannity, not a tenured Yale professor.

Finally, grand strategy requires great language.

"Is your children learning?" - G.W. Bush.