| « | You Can't Sell It Any Better Than This |
»
|
|
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Consensus And Constitutional Order, Part Three: Our Foreign Correspondents
Have just a wee bit more from the British letter-writing campaign attempting to defeat George W. Bush:
Now that all other justifications for the war are known to be lies, the warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly repeated: the world is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is. But that’s the Tony Martin school of foreign policy [Martin was a householder who shot dead a burglar who had broken into his house in 1999]. It’s not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave. The world would be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn’t justify an assassination attempt. The proper way to get rid of that smirking gunslinger is to vote him out.
That was from a missive penned by Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and author of The Selfish Gene. A more compact compendium of European misconceptions about the anti-terror campaign, Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush and Americans in general would be hard to compose:
- The justifications for war remain as they were. Not one has been disproved. Saddam Hussein himself believed them.
- President Bush and his team are hardly “warmongers.” If they were, we would have hit Iran, Syria, and North Korea by now—to say nothing about the Chinese provocation involving our downed EP-3E aircraft. Come to think of it, we’d probably have hit Venezuela as well.
- The “Tony Martin school of foreign policy,” albeit a nice turn of phrase—well, an Oxford professor should be expected to turn a good round phrase now and then, shouldn’t he?—is entirely inapposite. Martin was dealing with men who had broken into his home; America launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to deal with a human-rights nightmare and developing threat that the United Nations had allowed to fester for twelve years.
- With regard to the point above, the overwhelming majority of Americans would say that Tony Martin was within his rights to do as he did, and that British jurisprudence was lawless and wrong to incarcerate him. That’s our understanding of the rights of Man and the rule of law: when the official mechanisms aren’t there to do it for you, you have every right in the world to defend your life, liberty, and property by any means necessary.
- Civilized countries, above all other things, act to protect civilization and its basis, human rights. A country that would not go to war to remove a butcher like Saddam Hussein, because its narrow national interests would be affected—France, Germany, and Russia come to mind—is not civilized. Professor Dawkins should thank Tony Blair for lifting Britain out of that category.
- Therefore, the world would most certainly not be a better place without President Bush. But Americans don’t base their decisions on airy-fairy abstractions such as “making the world a better place.” We deploy our armed might specifically to oppose tyranny, brutality and injustice. These are the concepts which impelled us onto the field in World Wars I and II, concepts with which Professor Dawkins ought to familiarize himself before venturing again onto the field of political discourse.
- The “smirking gunslinger” phrase is beneath contempt. A president who conducts a successful war in a just cause is infinitely the moral superior of a foppish Oxford don who’s never had to carry a comparable weight, but castigates others for doing the best they can with a cup they could not pass.
Really, the whole thing is of a piece with the prevalent European misconceptions of our national character—yes, we do have one—and our constitutional order. One cannot be an American without grasping and conceding certain truths: that there are predators in the world with whom one cannot reason; that violence, however deplorable, is therefore sometimes necessary; that no moral weight attaches to war-making so long as the objectives and methods are wholesome and are not exceeded. The reason an American must grasp these things is that we are the world’s power. We are frequently called upon, implicitly or explicitly, to act as the world’s power. It has compelled us to learn to discriminate between illegitimate exertions of our power, and exertions that are in defense of civilization and human rights.
With the honorable exception of Britain, the older nations of Europe have sloughed the whole matter onto America’s shoulders. They should not now be heard to complain about it.
America’s constitutional order is set up to make an expedition such as Operation Iraqi Freedom very difficult to undertake. Congress must vote the authorization, and the funding. The president must agree to prosecute the war and assume overall strategic command. The federal courts must (tacitly) agree not to impede the adventure. If it’s not done acceptably, and in short order, the electorate can reverse all three assents by voting the president and Congress out of their seats. In short, it takes a wild degree of consensus to get it to happen at all.
That’s something else Europeans have failed to understand. Our constitutional system was designed to make governmental action difficult, and we like it that way. Their parliamentary model makes consensus between the executive and the legislative branches an enduring fact, so that government can easily do whatever it pleases.
It is supremely revealing that European governments meddle endlessly in their citizens’ lives, regulating and circumscribing matters Americans regard as private, in which our governments are forbidden to interfere. But Euro-states have the advantage of disarmed citizenries suffused with socialist doctrine. They can prey upon their peoples without fear of forcible resistance. America’s governments have to take that into account at every turn.
Our “foreign correspondents,” who entreat us so earnestly to depose “warmonger” President Bush, understand practically nothing about geopolitics and the primacy of force. But worse, as revealed by letters such as the Dawkins missive cited above, they understand nothing about America—not even the brightest of them. Given their proclivities, their socialist preferences, and the indifference they’ve displayed toward the suffering of the subjects of tyrants, it’s likely that they never will.
Comments
This is one of your more eloquent expositions. I commend it to be brought to the attention of the children of your readers. (hint, hint). I doubt they would taught to fully appreciate the civics lesson you present here in any school.
Posted by Pascal on 10/16/2004 at 11:50 AMGee, he says The “Tony Martin school of foreign policy” like that’s a Bad Thing. ;]
I’d agree, Pascal, but I chose not to breed. How ‘bout we print it out and staple it to the foreheads of DU posters and then release them back into the wild? ;]
Posted by Ironbear on 10/16/2004 at 03:21 PMYour response is much more eloquent than the two-word rejoinder that comes to my mind:
“Sod off!”
Posted by Thibodeaux on 10/16/2004 at 06:52 PMI think the Tony Martin analogy is apt. He’s comparing the U.S. and someone who used justifiable violence and was opposed by boneheads.
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 10/16/2004 at 10:54 PM
