Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, a leader of postwar liberalism first as mayor of Minneapolis and then as a US senator, found Vietnam exhilarating: “We ought to be excited about this challenge, because here’s where we can put to work some of the ideas about…nation building, of new concepts of education, development of local government, the improvement of health standards of people and really the achievement and fulfillment of full social justice.”70 In The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s Vietnam novel, a character says of the title character, “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”71
Vietnam became a heartbreaking story—comic, were it not staggeringly tragic—of earnestness foundering on mutual incomprehension. In 1954, when North and South Vietnam were being sorted out, refugees from the North were greeted in the South by Americans who gave them gifts, including, Max Boot writes, large, cellophane-wrapped blocks of American cheese. The Vietnamese received this politely but soon there were complaints: The cellophane-wrapped soap did not foam properly. Informed that it was cheese, they sold it to street merchants, who sold it back to the Americans. McNamara, on a 1964 visit to Saigon, tried to say, in Vietnamese, to a crowd “Vietnam ten thousand years,” but, Boot writes, “his pronunciation was so atrocious that it sounded to many listeners as if he had said, ‘Ruptured duck wants to lie down.’” Also in 1964, General William Westmoreland, the senior military officer in Vietnam, received a young Harvard professor, to whom Westmoreland said that Americans were much better liked than the French had been in Vietnam because “when the French wanted a woman they simply grabbed her off the streets and went to bed with her,” but “when an American soldier wants a woman he pays for her.” The professor, Henry Kissinger, wrote in his diary, “I thought at first he was kidding but then I found out he was absolutely serious.”72 As was the predicament of the United States, having embarked with the likes of Westmoreland on a long, waist-deep wade into the morass of another nation’s history and culture.
Military expertise supposedly would enable the United States to economize violence by administering finely calibrated—“flexible” and “graduated”—force. By adjusting the bombing intensity up and down, the United States would communicate the nuances of our intentions, and would adjust, as with a rheostat, incentives for North Vietnam to behave better. When in 1966 McNamara was asked if an increase in US troop levels constituted an escalation of the war, McNamara replied in language suitable to a laboratory experiment: “Not at all. It is merely an incremental adjustment to meet a new stimulus level.” The United States used prodigious quantities of ordnance to communicate with North Vietnam—to “get our point across,” in McNamara’s words. Even before the Tet offensive began on January 30, 1968, US bomb tonnage dropped in the theater exceeded that dropped in the European and Pacific theaters in all of World War II. In 1967, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the Vietnam War “most surely must be judged our doing.” By “our” he meant progressives, and particularly progressive intellectuals suffused with confidence about their ability to control a world that they thought would be, abroad as well as at home, malleable in their skillful hands.73
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott warned that “the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.”74 Or, in foreign policy, it generates overreaching. Karl Marlantes, who was a decorated combat Marine in Vietnam before writing one of the great novels about that war, Matterhorn, regrets that “the prudence we learned from our involvement in Indochina has been widely derided as ‘Vietnam syndrome.’” He says: “If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) ‘nation building’ in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or ‘government of, by, and for the people’ are not directly threatened, then we should never get over the Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.”75
The vaccination soon wore off. The December 1989 invasion of Panama, ordered by President George H. W. Bush, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was for the United States the dawn of the post–Cold War world, the use of force to enforce international etiquette, without reference to a threat, existential or otherwise, to the United States. It was back to the future, an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s vow “to teach the South American republics to elect good men,” an application of Wilson’s faith that “when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government.”76 This was an impulse indulged after 9/11. In October 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said of terrorists and the nations that supported them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter.”77 Changing the way people live turned out to be a very comprehensive and open-ended undertaking.
In 1946, at the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals, the tribunal declared: “To initiate a war of aggression…is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”78 On June 1, 2002, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, President George W. Bush announced a war of aggression as US policy. Modern technology had, he said, come into the hands of people whose pre-modern and anti-modern beliefs rendered them impervious to the sort of prudential reasoning on which deterrence depends. So, he said, “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Hence he endorsed what his administration would call “anticipatory self-defense”: “In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.”79
In 1949, with membership in NATO, which committed the United States to go to war if other nations were attacked, something fundamental changed. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Foreign policy began to anticipate, rather than merely react to, conflicts.”80 NATO’s primary function—muscular anticipation of a threat to Western Europe by conventional Soviet forces—was a resounding success. But the business of anticipating conflicts has been less so. Three weeks before the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq, President Bush said, “Human cultures can be vastly different, yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth…freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.”81 This statement is either demonstrably false or it is unfalsifiable. That is, either it is refuted by the blood-soaked history of many fanaticisms, political and religious, including the history currently being written, or it necessarily means that wherever freedom and democracy are not preferred, “the human heart” is not being expressed, or heard, or heeded.
The assumption that “the human heart” is the same everywhere, and hence that everyone is more or less alike, give or take a few cultural differences, can lead to interesting misjudgments. Patrick Hurley, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative in China in 1944, reported that Mao Zedong was an agrarian populist: “The only difference between Chinese Communists and Oklahoma Republicans is that Oklahoma Republicans aren’t armed.” Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, thought Pancho Villa was an “idealist” because he neither smoked nor drank. He did, however, have a short fuse, as Barbara Tuchman related: “On one occasion, angered by the yells of a drunken soldier while he was being interviewed by an American journalist, Villa casually pulled his pistol and killed the man from the window without interrupting the conversation.”82
The “human heart theory” of foreign policy died in Iraq. In April 2004, as the Iraq war entered its second year, Bush said, “I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country’s gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.”83 This was a justification for the invasion that was quite independent of the prudent
ial justification—the theory that something specific, the “survival” of American liberty, depended on something particular, this invasion. In his January 20, 2005, second inaugural address, Bush said, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”84 Note the word “survival,” which makes the spread of liberty a matter of existential urgency for the United States. Bush began with the idea that American liberty is made insecure by all deprivations of liberty elsewhere: “The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom.”85 Bush was a short step from Woodrow Wilson’s insatiable hunger for world improvement. Wilson said: “I will not cry ‘peace’ so long as there is sin and wrong in the world.”86 Bush could have learned a saving moderation from an unlikely source, Robespierre: “The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries.”87
America invaded Iraq to disarm a rogue regime thought to be accumulating weapons of mass destruction. When no such weapons were found, the appropriate reaction would have been dismay and indignation about intelligence failures. Instead, Washington’s reaction was Wilsonian. Never mind the weapons of mass destruction; a sufficient justification for the war was Iraq’s noncompliance with various UN resolutions. So a conservative American administration said that war was justified by the need—the opportunity—to strengthen the UN, aka the “international community,” as the arbiter of international behavior. It was then counted as realism in Washington to say that creating a new Iraqi regime might require perhaps two years. Washington did not remember that it took about 110, from 1865 to 1975, to bring about, in effect, regime change—a change of Jim Crow institutions and mores—in the American South. Would a Middle Eastern nation prove more plastic to Washington’s touch than Mississippi was? Would two years suffice for America to teach Iraq to elect good men?
One of the animating theories that were involved to justify the Iraq invasion was espoused by, among others, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security advisor. The theory was that democratic institutions do not always need to spring from a hospitable culture; they also can help to create such a culture. Certainly they can. They did, she correctly said, in America. Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician, had spoken of first establishing government institutions and then preparing “the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for those forms of government.”88 Iraq, however, was different in ways that advocates of the war were too ideologically blinkered to see.
It is perhaps unfair to say that America’s nation-builders went about their work incompetently. That suggests that there is, somewhere, a reservoir of nation-building competence. But many misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere would have been more forgivable if they had not been driven by an ideology. They came from the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism. If everyone yearns for freedom, and freedom is understood identically everywhere, how hard can building a democratic nation be? Why would many US forces, or much time and treasure, be needed? If a natural—almost spontaneous—moral consensus, not power, is going to be the regulator of people and of relations among nations, then of course international politics will be undemanding.
An English skeptic once said he wanted to carve on all the churches of England three cautionary words: “Important If True.”89 Those words were germane in July 2003 when, with the invasion of Iraq just four months old, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told a joint session of the US Congress: It is a “myth” that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture,” and he added: “Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom, not tyranny. Democracy, not dictatorship. The rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.” That assertion is important. But is it true? Everyone everywhere does not share “our attachment to freedom.” Freedom is not defined the same way everywhere, let alone valued the same way relative to other political goods such as equality, security, social cohesion, and piety. Did Blair really believe that our attachment to freedom is not the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries—the centuries that it took to prepare the stony social ground for seeds of democracy? When Blair said that freedom as we understand it, and democracy and the rule of law as we administer them, are “the universal values of the human spirit,” he was not speaking as America’s Founders did when they spoke of “self-evident” truths.90 The Founders meant truths obvious not to everyone everywhere but to minds unclouded by superstition and other ignorance—minds like theirs. Blair seemed to think: Boston, Baghdad, Manchester, Mecca—what’s the difference?
At the beginning of the Iraq misadventure, Bush also said something that is important—if true. Actually, it is even more important if it is not true. He denounced “cultural condescension”—the belief that some cultures lack the requisite aptitudes for democracy. He said: “Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country or that people or this group are ready for democracy, as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress.”91 Multiculturalists probably purred with pleasure about the president’s delicate avoidance of gauche chauvinism about “Western standards of progress.” His idea—that there is no necessary connection between Western political traditions and the success of democracy—is important. But is it true? His hypothesis was tested in Iraq, where an old baseball joke was pertinent. At spring training, a manager says, “Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Iraq was just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three were George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.
Iraq lacked a Washington, a universally revered hero emblematic of national unity and identity. Iraq lacked a Madison, a genius of constitutional architecture, a profound student of what the president called “Western standards of progress,” and a subtle analyst of the problem of factions and their centrifugal, disintegrative possibilities. Iraq lacked a Marshall, someone who could so persuasively construe the text of a constitution that the prestige of a court, and of law itself, ensures national compliance. Iraq lacked a Washington, a Madison, a Marshall—and it lacked the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people can sprout. From America’s social soil in the eighteenth century sprang all the members of the Constitutional Convention and of all the state legislatures that created all the conventions that ratified the Constitution. So, Iraq in its quest for democracy lacked only what America in 1776 had: an existing democratic culture.
It is a historical truism that the Declaration of Independence was less the creator of independence than the affirmation that Americans had already become independent. In the decades before 1776 they had become a distinct people, a demos, a nation held together by the glue of shared memories, common strivings, and shared ideals. In his 1982 Westminster address to the British parliament, Ronald Reagan said the US aim was “to foster the infrastructure of democracy,” including a free press, political parties, labor unions, and other means of achieving peaceful resolution of domestic conflicts. Then Reagan used the phrase that George W. Bush would several times appropriate: Reagan said it would be “cultural condescension” to say that “any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.”92
People are, however, rarely confronted with such a binary choice. Rather, they are faced with moving from a messy present to an opaque future in which they might be required to do unaccustomed things and accept discomfiting outcomes—tolerate religious and political pluralism, compromise deeply held social convictions, abandon cherished national aspirations. So, people tiptoeing toward, or sidling crabwise into, an open society rarely have tidy preferences or clear expectations. Rather, the
y have a concrete present to weigh against a hypothetical future. In February 2004, Condoleezza Rice said: “We reject the cultural condescension which alleges that Arabs or Muslims are somehow not interested in freedom, or aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities.”93 But being “interested” in a demanding social system and being ready for it are very different. In December 2004, President Bush said: “It is cultural condescension to claim that some peoples or some cultures or some religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government.”94 Perhaps it is necessary—perhaps it is, in the best sense, politic—for a president to talk that way. But being “destined” or “unsuited” for something is not an informative description. The truth is that life in an open society—a society that is democratic in governance so that it can remain open—requires talents and aptitudes that do not appear spontaneously, and are not distributed democratically, meaning evenly, across the globe.
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