Our many wars of choice

Robert Kagan:

It is astonishing how little Americans understand their own nation. Recently, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a man long on intellect and government experience, opined that the Iraq war has generated so much controversy because it is such an aberration: “The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq – all of these are departures from the traditional approach.”

Many Europeans would certainly like to believe that Iraq was the product of aberrant “neo-conservative” ideas about foreign policy and that a traditional America lies just around the corner. Many Americans would like to believe this, too. We prefer to see ourselves as a peace-loving, introspective lot, a nation born in innocence and historically never choosing war but compelled to war by others.

This self-image is at odds with reality, however. Americans have gone to war frequently in their history, rarely out of genuine necessity. Since the cold war, America has launched more military interventions than all other great powers combined. The interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice, waged for moral and humanitarian ends, not strategic or economic necessity, just as realist critics protested at the time. Even the first Gulf war in 1991 was a war of choice, fought not for oil but to defend the principles of a “new world order” in which aggression could not go unpunished. The US might have drawn the line at Saudi Arabia, as Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed.

The first US military intervention of the post-cold war era, the 1989 invasion of Panama, was a war for “regime change” and democracy. President George H. W. Bush sent 22,500 troops to oust Manuel Noriega and, as he declared, “to defend democracy” in a conflict “between Noriega and the people of Panama”. The conservative columnist George Will favoured this “act of hemispheric hygiene” even though American national interests, “narrowly construed”, did not justify war. That was an argument “against the narrow construing of national interests”.

Americans, in fact, have always defined their interests broadly to include the defence and promotion of the “universal” principles of liberalism and democracy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” Benjamin Franklin declared at the time of the American revolution, and as William Appleman Williams once commented, Americans believe their nation “has meaning . . . only as it realises natural right and reason throughout the universe”.

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... True realism would recognise America for what it is, an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief.

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Critics of US policy in Iraq seems to lose perspective and Kagan does a nice job of reminding them of the history of US "wars of choice." The neo quagmirest did not like the choice we made in Iraq and have gone to extraordinary lengths to find a way to lose this war especially after the defeat of Saddam. The advocates for defeat have been emboldened by the recent election. They need a good dose of reality of the consequences of the defeat they seek.