ON THE WAR IN IRAQ & THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

By Camden W. "Cam" McConnell

Explains the background of the "War on Terror" and what we should want our government to do.

First, I will discuss the background of the so-called War on Terror. In doing so, I will skip over the ostensible reasons for our invasion of Iraq because I consider them to be immaterial. Next, I will address the question of whether we can "win" in Iraq. And finally, I will tell you what we must do not only to end this war, but also to prevent it from recurring in another thirty years. Before I begin, let me tell you that our young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are enthusiastic and committed. They believe that they are doing good for us and for the people of those countries. They believe that the administration knows what it is doing and that their deployment is legal. I understand that feeling well because that is what I believed almost forty years ago as a young officer of the Regular Army in Viet-Nam. I have since spent over thirty years trying to understand how we got there, what we were doing there and why we could not succeed. I have only a few of the answers, and they are not encouraging.

We are today at war with all of Arab Islam. Now when did this war start? It did not start on March 19, 2003. It did not start on September 11, 2001. It did not start on November 4, 1979, when the Iranian students took the American embassy in Tehran. Actually, Arab "terrorists" have been attacking the established government for centuries. Until the First World War, the established government was the Turk-led Ottoman Empire. At the time of the First World War, the Arabs attacked the Turks with British help. T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") tells his personal story of coordinating that aid in "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

After the War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious European powers established "protectorates" throughout the Middle East and became the established government.

In our own time, we should be aware of American meddling in the Middle East continuously from the Second World War on. We should be aware that our government is trying to get the UAE to adopt our monetary and banking standards. We should remember the CIA-engineered overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran in 1953. These and many more details of which I am not aware have caused the extensive dislike of western influence in general and American intervention in particular which feeds the recruiting of guerrilla organizations by Islamic extremist groups such as Al Qaeda.

If we can understand this picture, we can see immediately that we will not see an end to the "War on Terror" until the western world stops trying to tell the Middle East how to live. It is not hard to understand. If someone else had been interfering in our political life for the last ninety years, we would probably be chafing a bit ourselves. Why does our government insist on interfering in the affairs of the Middle Eastern countries? It is certainly not as simple as to say that because we must have oil and they have it, we have to secure "our interests." The Arabs cannot eat their oil! They can only sell it on the world market! And they are not the only producers of oil. So, if we interfere because we think we are securing an oil supply, we are doing the hard way that which would happen by itself. Perhaps, nevertheless, American oil companies have convinced successive administrations that only by diplomatic and other interference in the area can we obtain oil at an acceptable price.

There is a pattern of U. S. interference in the affairs of foreign countries that goes back to the War of 1812, when American interventionists wanted to annex part of Canada. Then those who wanted to annex the present western United States succeeded in starting the War with Mexico in 1848. U. S. Grant tells us in his memoirs that that war (in which he was a young Regular Army officer) was "the most immoral and unjust war that was ever fought." As I see it, the Founding Fathers clearly did not intend for the United States to interfere with other countries affairs. Unfortunately, just as corporations often lose their way when the founders pass from the scene, as the Founding Fathers passed from the scene in the early part of the 19th Century, their successors in the American government did not appreciate the wisdom they had been bequeathed. The inclination to go beyond the limits of the Constitution grew stronger and the acceptance of the usurpations, to use the word of James Madison, became more palatable.

The pattern continued with the War with Spain in 1898 and Woodrow Wilson's unnecessary entrance into the First World War the settlement of which set the stage for the Second World War. In that War, our government developed a habit of clandestine interference that may have made sense for the war, but should never have been allowed to continue afterward. Nevertheless, it was institutionalized as the CIA.

What I would suggest is that we should see George Bush not as the sole evil perpetrator of our present woes, but as the inevitable result of a century and a half of sliding away from the ideals of the Founding Fathers. This is not to suggest that anyone should like the Bush Presidency. Except for the premise that the winners write the history, I would imagine that historians will look back on the Bush Presidency as the most disastrous in American history. But the next one could be worse if we do not reverse our course.

So in summary, our invasion of Iraq is merely another step along a long path of practicing foreign intervention as the Founding Fathers never envisioned nor would have countenanced.

Can we "win" in Iraq. The answer, in a word, is "No!" The problem is that our government has undertaken to install democracy in Iraq. Our country is a democracy, but it was never intended to be so by the Founding Fathers. Consider this quotation from James Madison, "The Father of the Constitution," and as you read it, ask yourself if we do not see in our own country exactly what Madison was talking about in the beginning and whether we want what he was describing at the end: "...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." This quotation will be found in The Federalist, No. 10.

The emergent "democracy" in Iraq already shows the "spectacle of turbulence and contention," and that is exactly because the emergent democracy does not put personal security and property rights above all other considerations. Since the democratic principle is that the majority can make the rules on any subject it pleases, every possible grouping must try to seize control of the government to avoid being persecuted.

If we had undertaken to teach the Iraqis the meaning of liberty and personal rights of all to live as they see fit, we might have had a chance. Since our government, no matter how well-meaning, has entirely misunderstood the significance of the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States, it cannot succeed in establishing stability and we will eventually have to give it up as a lost cause, just as we did in Viet-Nam thirty years ago.

Finally, what can we American citizens do to extricate ourselves from Iraq and also to ensure that we do not repeat the experience in another thirty years. We must return our government to the principles of the Founding Fathers. In order to do that, Americans must study the history and political philosophy of the American Revolution and its leaders. If we will do that, we will see the necessity of electing as temporary custodians of the severely limited powers conferred on the government by the Constitution, men and women who understand liberty and accept that in demanding liberty for themselves they must guarantee it to all. This means that the liberty-loving citizen understands that he may not use the coercive power of government to impose his own standards on others simply by having a majority. This was the lesson of the Founders and it is the solution to our woes at the hands of the political elite today.

A liberty-loving Congress will, indeed, demand an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, not to be redeployed in the region, but to return home and end all foreign interference. The neo-cons refer to this as "cut and run," but a better description is "cutting our losses." A fair description of the present course of action is that we are beating our head against a wall in anticipation of its feeling so good when we eventually stop. And the cost is an ever-growing list of casualties. Every war leaves the streets of both the victor and the vanquished filled with maimed veterans, and not all of the wounds are physical. We see this already today. If we will not elect liberty-loving representatives, we can only say with Shakespeare's Cassius "The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."