Shame on Krauthammer

It's hard to know what to say about Krauthammer's latest screed in the WaPo. I've actually been doing a lot of reflecting on W and his role in recent events, trying to look at it all from different angles, trying to see whether there's any rational way to grant him credit for recent developments. Irrational partisan drivel like Krauthammer's piece is not making my attempts at objectivity any easier, I've got to say.

I came back from Spring break with the intention of asking us all to consider the following: most of us seem to give credit to FDR for pulling the U.S. toward involvement in WWII against its will. Well, I do, anyway. Fighting Hitler was morally obligatory but most Americans didn't realize that. Consequently, FDR was forced to act anti-democratically, in ways designed (at least in part) to entangle us in affairs most of us had no desire to become entangled in. Although Pearl Harbor came along and decided the matter, that doesn't change anything.

So, if these actions redound to FDR's credit, then it seems that the following general principle must be true: a (in particular, democratic) leader acts rightly if he convinces his country to do the right thing, even if this requires deceiving the electorate.

But if that principle is true, then George W. Bush deserves credit for getting us to oust Saddam, even though he had to deceive us in order to do it. Considerations of consistency seem to prevent us from judging FDR one way and W another.

The difference, however, is that democratizing the Middle East was, so far as anyone can tell, never the real goal of W's invasion of Iraq. We still don't know what the real goal was, and may never know. As I've noted several times, the hypothesis that the goal was finding WMDs seems strongest, though that hypothesis faces obvious problems: in particular, that the evidence was so flimsy and so obviously "cooked." It was rather surprising to me that anyone outside the administration took the evidence seriously, so it's extraordinarily difficult to believe that any of those involved in cooking it really took it seriously. One might respond that they all clearly believed the conclusion ahead of time, and that's why they cooked the data, and that's a strong response. On the other hand, it just pushes the question back a step: whence their certainty?

The other obvious hypothesis is that they acted on humanitarian grounds. This is the hypothesis that Krathammer tacitly assumes to be true. But it is unlikely to be. The GOP has spent most of my lifetime scoffing at every Democratic proposal to use our military for humantarian purposes. We could not, as their battle-cry went, be the world's policeman. W himself repeated the "no nation-building" mantra over and over again during the 2000 campaign. Humanitarian rationalizations of the invasion were only used to bolster the national defense/WMD case in the lead-up to the war, and this rationalization became the primary "justification" only after it became clear that Clinton had destroyed the remnants of Saddam's WMDs years earlier.

So, how do we answer the question Krauthammer so relishes, was George W. Bush right? Well, there were no WMDs in Iraq, so he wasn't right about that. And he didn't undertake the war in order to establish democracy in the Middle East, so he wasn't right about that, either. What happened is that he drug us into an ill-conceived war at the worst possible time, leaving al Qaeda untouched (except insofar as it was strengthened)--but this disastrously foolish course of action has had some strikingly good results in the region. If only Bush had really been aiming at those results when he went on his quest for the Fountain of Sarin, he would deserve a good bit of praise. But he wasn't, so he doesn't. The administration started talking about humanitarian goals and democratization when WMDs turned out to be the phantom menace.

One thing Krauthammer gets right is that there is a segment of the left that is so foolishly anti-Bush and anti-war that they refuse to admit that anything good could ever come from a war, let alone a war started by W. They are fools, and Krauthammer is right to ridicule them, but they represent only a part of the left. That segment of the left recognizes that Bush is bad, but seems to think that his badness is inextricably linked with the failure of his policies. This is one thing that the mindlessly anti-Bush left and the mindlessly pro-Bush right have in common. The former think that Bush is bad, so his policies must have no good results; the latter see that Bush's policies are having some good results, so they conclude that Bush must be good. But mere results are irrelevant when we are asking about a person's moral character. What matter are intentions. Bush might succeed in democratizing the entire Middle East, and that would be one of the greatest things of all time. But if that's not what he intended to do, it's merely a happy consequence of the bad actions of a man who is--at best--not terribly good.

It is, in fact, liberals who should be happy about recent events in the Middle East. The administration's own miscalculations have forced it to pose as liberal interventionists. And to make this pose at all plausible, they will have to take at least some actions consistent with the pose. Liberals should take advantage of this, allying themselves with the administration and forcing them to take real action to spread democracy and human rights in the Middle East--and elsewhere. Instead, many liberals have chosen to whine about "spreading democracy at the point of a gun." Conservatives are politically savvy enough to realize that posing as liberals is preferable to admitting error on such a grand scale. Unfortunately liberals are not politically savvy enough to take advantage of this pose. Instead of siezing on any opportunity to achieve their justifiable goals, they have become sulky and surly, seemingly resentful of the fact that liberal reforms now seem like a real possibility in the Middle East.

Perhaps liberals are worried--as am I--that a man who stole an American election might go down in history as a champion of democracy. But if so, they they need to emphasize the points I've made above about Bush's motives rather than rooting for the failure of liberalism in the Arab world.