Remember We Were Wrong, Finale

Remember we were wrong about Iraq because we gave our panicked administration an unlimited license to kill one man. Even the strongest nation on earth, frenzied as it may be, should not consider going after one foreign man even if to liberate the people of his country from his despotic rule or free its own citizens from the fear of his threat.

It’s not that we can’t do it. We’ve proven a superpower can. But it is wrong.

This is a difficult hill to climb but our government and much of our media made blatant attempts to compare Hussein to Hitler in the days leading up to the attack. The purpose, I suppose, was to rationalize our planned action against Hussein under the dark cloak of fear that still envelopes Hitler’s memory. No civilized people on this earth want to be the ones to ignore or tolerate another Hitler.

Like the calculated depiction of “evil doers”, the ghost of Hitler was conjured up to scare us.

Maybe it’s a matter of scope, maybe it’s just too insane to compare such brutal men, but that comparison never made any sense to me. While there were frightening similarities, both men were charismatic leaders capable of galvanizing their followers to do the most unthinkable things, the differences were just too profound.

Even if it was not a popular notion in Washington, Hussein’s track record up to 2002 seemed far more similar to Panama’s Noriega. Certainly, Washington’s reaction to Hussein was more like the reaction to Noriega than it was to Hitler. Looking back now, even the initial result of the Iraq invasion was far more Panama than it was Germany.

For reasons that have been well documented in the last 60 years, we couldn’t just waltz into Berlin by ourselves and steal Hitler from his bunker. Of course, the US wasn’t the world’s only superpower in 1940.

In 2003, we blew into Baghdad, plucked a demented Hussein from his hiding hole and put him on trial. In 1989, the US invaded the sovereign nation of Panama, captured the greasy dictator Noriega, whisked him off in the middle of the night and locked him in jail.

Obviously, Noriega wasn’t summarily hanged like Hussein. Had we left him in Panama to face the court of our choosing, he may have been. And he still may hang. As of this writing, Noriega is due to be released from jail in September, 2007. He is expected to return to Panama to face murder charges among other things. His ordeal is not over yet.

But, in fact, there are more similarities between 1989 and 2003 than we may want to remember.

It is said Washington once considered both Noriega and Hussein allies of the US. Our tax dollars supported them both at one time. The same can be said for bin Laden. For the conspiracy nuts who are surprisingly still on the bus, yes, all of these men faced off with an American President named Bush who needed to prove to somebody that he wasn’t just a cautious and inept wimp afraid to take on the bullies of the world.

Over the last century or so, our government has done more than just bravely bankroll despots like these men. We constantly sent conflicting signals to a host of others like them around the world. We sometimes congratulated them, sometimes ignored them, and other times scolded them. For years we gave them money and weapons and power then, at some point, politely asked them to not use any of it.

We didn’t create another Hitler in Iraq, we just bought another Noriega.

I was not directly involved in Panama in 1989 but as I recall it was another efficient blitzkrieg-style production, a textbook example of overwhelming force advocated by Colin Powell, who just happened to be along for the ride in 2003 as well. The only tactical critique I’ve ever heard about Panama was that the screws of the operation were turned by a D.C. screwdriver that was at least 1,000 miles too long. The good news was it was over very quickly.

Unlike Iraq, Panama is in our own backyard. The US had military forces already based in Panama in 1989. We knew much more about Noriega than we ever knew about Hussein because we had trained him. We could install another puppet of our choosing in Panama without any lengthy or irritating public anarchy. If Noriega was lucky at all, he was lucky to be 1989 instead of 2003, when he would have been surely and instantly vaporized by the initial cruise missile attack.

In our own backyard or half way around the world, others in our community observe that we and our government act like we own these countries. We act like foreign leaders can be bought and sold, propped up and cast aside at the time of our choosing. This is how we defile our own consecrated land, how we ruin our legacy as good neighbors and how we lose credibility as defenders of freedom and justice.

There must be something wrong with that. And if we were wrong in Panama then we were wrong in Iraq.

The reason this is all wrong is because with every despot we sustain and with the murder of every tyrant we once propped up, we purchase a grave and enduring burden. We end up owning all the troubles of all the people who were stepped on, troubles that the one selfish dictator encouraged but some select troubles that we paid for and that we may have not even completely resolved in our own home, troubles that we can’t claim to be experts in resolving. That’s not fair to us or anyone else.

We should attempt to contain, we should blockade and economically choke, but we should never again allow the elimination of one cruel man as a cause worthy of our military force. We can’t credibly do that as long as we continue to support every ham-fisted dictator in the world for our own expedient purposes.

We should pay attention to all threats and defend ourselves from them as if they are real. Preemptive attacks, however, are wrong if not fundamentally un-American because they are only justified by fear. Fear, as we now know it, can be molded and fomented like table cheese, bought and sold in any market around the globe. In America, we learned a long time ago that we have nothing to fear, that working together we can overcome fear and that fear alone is not worth the sacrifice of our children’s lives.

Somehow with Iraq, perhaps due to its mischievous design, we seemed to forget that all too easily.

Protecting freedom and democracy within our borders is our just cause. Caring for our own people should be our first cause. Caring for and protecting our nation includes not leading our people into a battle they shouldn’t fight or a battle they can’t win.

Urging freedom and democracy around the world is in the best interests of everyone. But we must remember enforcing freedom and democracy for every country in the world is not yet the sole mission of the United States of America.

We know from our own history that one nation can not be forced to resemble another. Democracy building is not just the premeditated gamble of social scientists, it is a huge mistake and an incredibly ironic blunder for a nation that prides itself as a democratic republic of free people, a nation that flatly refuses to allow any other nation to tell us what to do.

Before the attack on Iraq began, some members of the Bush administration ruminated on the possibility of dancing Iraqi citizens greeting our invading, liberating troops with flowers and adulation. If we’d paid attention to the lessons of our own history, we would have known we were wrong to believe that hogwash for even a moment, too.

During the run down of the invasion, around the time of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, I took note of several stories in the press about how the USA had helped if not single-handedly rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II. The hopeful theme was that if we did it once we could do it again.

The theme only indirectly reminded us that to the victor goes the cost of rebuilding.

That theme also conveniently overlooked a significant truth about modern Germany and Japan which are definitely not Little Americas. Yes, the USA did contribute a great deal to guide the development and rebuild the infrastructure of those nations after the war was over, as it was in our best interests and our logical obligation to do. But their magical rise from the ashes didn’t happen overnight nor was it purely the result of the USA’s enlightened and benevolent oversight.

We must never belittle the contributions that honest, industrious German and Japanese citizens made for themselves. We must always honor them for the hardships that they overcame. We must never forget, and this is very important, that over a long period of time they healed themselves for themselves. They swallowed a lot of pride and endured profound anguish and shame for the atrocities that were committed in the name of their countries. Together they chose a stronger way and today they are better nations because of their diligence in working towards peaceful goals.

If there ever was a hopeful theme that what was once done might be done again, I think that is it.

It takes a very enlightened nation to realize that the people of Iraq, like all other nations of the world, must get what they need the same way we all did. They must at some point collectively decide what democracy and freedom is worth to them. As we surely remember by our own battle cries, there is a distinct and painful price for all that but they must determine the price for themselves. No single well-intentioned nation outside their borders can establish that price for them.

When a single ambitious man extends his despotic rule beyond his borders, when the cause is not just to liberate his own country but to prevent him from dominating other peoples outside his country or the entire world, then we can claim proper justification for such forceful tactics. Then we can and should put everything we own behind that effort even if we remain unsure of our ability to do it or uncertain of the end result.

At those crucial points in history, when the freedom of our whole community is at stake, as founding members of the nations of free people, we must be willing to sacrifice in a grand strategic way for that cause. The fight against hegemony and world domination is an all or nothing cause all freedom-loving people must share, even if that struggle is against hegemony pursued by our own self-righteous government.

That is the lesson we remember of Adolf Hitler not Saddam Hussein.

I hope you understand I shed no tear for Saddam Hussein, his family or his henchmen. I don’t think his downfall was wrong. I think he was a monumental brute who earned all that he received.

But I do believe we did not properly consider the consequences of our actions and we were ultimately wrong from the beginning for the poor, panicked and desperate reasons we offered ourselves and the world for why we had to do it. And if we had rationally considered our obligation and the ensuing turmoil before ever buying into him, I doubt we would have let it happen the way we did. At the very least, we should have overcome our fears and secret urges to logically debate it a bit more thoroughly.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding and in this case the abhorrent pudding is anarchy in a miserable corner of the world.

Saddam Hussein was a man who lived and died by his own sword. He forced his self-destructive will on his own people. He bottled them up, ignored them and mistreated them as it pleased him. We know how people react when they are mistreated.

We blasted the top off that bottle in a fit of anger, distracted and unaware of what calamity was inside, forgetting it was a calamity that we had once helped brew. We can be blamed for that. But for Hussein’s chronically domineering rule, he still carries to his grave much of the blame for infecting his socially diseased nation, a nation mad with itself and mad with world, viscously tearing at its own seams.

I hope that is the national emotion our children’s children won’t forget about Iraq.

Cheers,
Mb