It is worth taking this walk down memory lane as the United States struggles with the task of midwiving the birth of a new regime in Iraq. The U.S. challenge is not just to produce an Iraqi head of government. It is to make sure that that person is not a Kerensky–an historical blip followed by a protracted horror.
The midwiving is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Diplomats from Iran, which is one third of the Axis of Evil, are in Iraq to facilitate the construction of a new regime. And an envoy from the United Nations is there to suggest what price the United States might have to pay in diminished control in order to acquire more international support for whatever government is born on June 30.
All of this maneuvering is taking place in the context of the armed resistance to the occupation forces. That resistance has inflicted something akin to “shock and awe.”
Shock, certainly, because the administration did not plan for months, let alone years, of protracted low-intensity warfare. Awe? Perhaps not, but the U.S. military expresses grudging professional respect for what the insurgents are doing. U.S. officers have been impressed by the coordination of the insurgents’ attacks, and the fact that they have even included such relatively sophisticated tactics as the use of illuminating flares in nighttime combat.
“Interesting.” That word should earn Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard a medal, with oak-leaf cluster, for understatement in the line of duty. He was referring to this: Although a convoy of U.S. troops heading south from Baghdad to a base in central Iraq was using a convoy route for the first time, one highway bridge was destroyed by insurgents and two other bridges were too badly damaged to be crossed by heavy Army vehicles.
Said Pittard: “The dropping of the bridges was very interesting because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization.” Organization sufficient to learn U.S. movements and quickly get explosives in place. As U.S. Army Sgt. James Amyett told The Washington Post, “I guess the Iraqis didn’t get the memo that the war is over.”
The president correctly says, “It’s not a civil war.” But that is bad news. Were it a civil war, many Iraqis would be eagerly fighting the insurgents, and we could help them. Perhaps Iraqis are, as the president says, “a proud and independent people.” But they have no living memory of moderate politics of which they can be proud. Hence America’s necessarily hurried attempts to build political and civil structures that will generate and legitimize an Iraqi leader who can be more durable than Kerensky was.
These attempts are Wilsonian, expressing President Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America’s mission–a practical mission–is to pacify the world by multiplying free governments. Wilson, a former professor of political science, was not the last or wisest Wilson in that profession.
Three and a half decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to Richard Nixon, urged the president to listen to “the smartest man in America.” James Q. Wilson still is that. He had been Moynihan’s colleague on the Harvard faculty, and is the pre-eminent political scientist of our time.
Moynihan wanted Nixon to know what Wilson knew about such domestic problems as crime and drug abuse. Today’s president is waist deep in the problems of a Wilsonian (Woodrow, not James Q.) project of nation-building in a bad neighborhood. He might profit from pondering the foreign policy pertinence of this James Q. Wilson thought about why the combination of economic affluence and personal freedom is an achievement relatively rare in human experience:
“So common have despotic regimes been that some scholars have argued that they are, unhappily, the natural state of human rule. This tendency raises a profound question: Does human nature lend itself to freedom? It is not difficult to make arguments for personal freedom, but the history of mankind suggests that human autonomy usually will be subordinated to political control. If that is true, then our effort to increase individual freedom is an evolutionary oddity, a weak and probably vain effort to equip people with an opportunity some do not want and many will readily sacrifice.”
Notice that Wilson, who wrote that long before the United States began the nation-building project in Iraq, was noncommittal. He said, “If that is true…” He was not necessarily endorsing pessimism. But before rejecting pessimism, consider its pleasures. Pessimists are right more often than not, and when they are wrong they are pleased to be so.
