NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: History Ignored
Regnery, Alfred S.
NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER History Ignored BY ALFRED S, REGNERY G EORGE SANTAYANA'S QUIP that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it has almost become a platitude. But I'll...
...One could have an Iraq, but without democracy," says Kurth, "or one could have democracy, but without an Iraq...
...Iraq stayed together as a nation, until the arrival of the U.S...
...But, says Kurth, the democratizers couldn't be bothered to look that far back...
...In the second installment of The American SpectatoFs series on the pursuit of liberty, James Kurth, professor of political science at Swarthmore, and a visiting professor at the Naval War College, gives us a history lesson on America's attempts, mostly during the 20th century, at "nation building...
...4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006...
...Not only did the architects of the Iraq war not read their history, but they didn't even seem to want to think about it for a moment, as if the outrage 9/11 evoked in all of us freed them from having to remain intelligent about how they go about America's business...
...Only an accurate reading of the past," they write, "and an insightful understanding or our enemies' motives and goals can serve as a reliable guide to action in the present and future...
...But to be effective (given the circumstances, the war on terror can probably never be "won" in the usual sense of winning awar) will take original thinking and extraordinary analysis...
...y ET WHETHER OR NOT we are able to succeed in Iraq, the war on terror or, as we prefer to call it, the war on radical Islam, will continue, as it must...
...Army, only because of the presence of a brutal dictatorship...
...The Bush administration's democratization efforts now lie in ruins as civil war rages in Iraq...
...Conservatives often accuse the Bush team and the neoconservatives of being "Wilsonians" in their foreign policy but, as Kurth reminds us, every single one of WoodrowWilson's democratization projects ended badly...
...As Kurth points out, idealists usually ignore the historical record, as though the cultural and social particularities would only get in the way of their idealism...
...What we learn-perhaps to the surprise of many-is that most of these efforts failed...
...Although the planners may have been realistic in terms of the military effort, in attempting to turn Iraq into a democracy they let their idealism get the better of them...
...But one could not have both:' Once that dictatorship was gone, ethnic warfare was the logical result...
...Clifford May and Alykhan Velshi present an excellent primer on the vast amount offactuaUyinaccurate--or outright mendacious--information that has become the conventional wisdom...
...The American Spectatorwill continue to do its best to see to it that the truth can survive...
...The Muslim world, Kurth tells us, and specifically Iraq have always been torn by ethnic strife- something not conducive to democracy...
...whether the new"Wilsonians" are as well I will leave to you, our readers...
...Lies and half-truths always abound in perilous times, the current conflict being no exception...
...We welcome the return to our pages of radical Islam expert Laurie Mylroie, who challenges the conventional wisdom about the terror network and who its masterminds are, and concludes that the jihadi networks, al Qaeda prominently among them, may not be as divorced from nation states as the conventional wisdom would have it...
...Those few American efforts that worked-particularly those involving the Axis powers after World War I I - b e a r no parallel to the situation in Iraq at all...
...One needed only to go back to the Clinton administration's attempts at nation building in the Balkans, or to the post-Soviet bloodshed in the Caucasian republics, to see how that ethnic discord resulted in destructive violence and even genocide...
...May and Velshi do us a great service by cataloguing and then debunking these myths...
...But I'll use it anyway, because current events are teaching us that Santayana could not have been more right...
...When the Baath regime no longer had control, the Western substitute, democracy, quickly became a pipe dream, despite assurances from its promoters that it was a workable solution...
...Woodrow Wilson was certainly an idealist...
...Alfred S. Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator, is writing a book on the conservative movement...
...That history was ignored should not be a surprise...
...It has often been said that the truth is the first casualty of war...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
