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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 25, 2002
Bush & Lincoln
In an article I wrote this last week which of course I thought rather important but the world has tended to ignore I stated that the U.S. president George W. Bush has out of a kind of intellectual humility drifted ... "into the boldest most counter-intuitive of all the possible courses of action". Behind the superficial confusion of daily events and incremental measures towards the larger goal he has decided on a large course of action: a strategy that includes deposing dictators but goes far beyond that. I concluded that this course was "Lincolnesque" itself a rather large statement. I had no space to explain it further so I am going to try to do that today. Indeed the clue I dropped was a little misleading. I wrote that Mr. Bush has conceived "a project to re-align the United States explicitly with every opposition force that can be found within the Middle East no matter how small that aspires to democratic constitutional reform; and to gradually manoeuvring the full power of the U.S. behind them. In other words truly digging to the root cause of terrorism: which is the intellectual and material enslavement of the Arab and Persian masses." A reader might think I meant he wants to free the slaves . But to understand what is Lincolnesque about Mr. Bush's strategy it is first necessary to understand that Lincoln himself did not set out to free slaves as an end in itself. He was not most certainly not some kind of crazy idealist willing to sacrifice 700 000 lives in order to advance a social programme. Rather his express purpose -- and his only possible excuse for war -- was to save the Union. Now Abraham Lincoln did in the end free the slaves ; and did intend this result all along; but he intended it because it was the only way to achieve his larger goal. He explained this himself in plain language in reply to a letter from Horace Greeley of August 1862: "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." In other words he did what he had to do. Here was an expression of a very clear mind; and despite the opinions of many pundits everything I know about George Bush persuades me he too has a clear mind; the kind of mind that can see large things by ignoring small. (The opposite to the kind of mind that makes a successful pundit.) He has several luminous advisers too; but advisers are useless without an end in view. From what Mr. Bush says and what he doesn't say; from the allies he seeks and the ones he ignores; from the distinctions he makes between "policies" and "doctrines"; from the consistent direction of every small change in policy I am convinced that he sees the present "Islamist" challenge to the United States and the West as parallel to the Confederate challenge to the Union -- something which has passed the point at which it can be dealt with piecemeal. Implicit within this is an extension of his father's idea of a "new world order" one which necessarily grows out of the serendipitous accident that an American "hyperpower" remained after the collapse of Soviet Communism. Implicit also is an extension of the "Reagan doctrine" in which the United States moved from containment of Soviet Communism towards an unstated policy of bringing the evil empire down. A lot of nonsense has been written about "globalization" but to understand our post-modern world we must grasp the small part of the verbiage that is true. The idea that the world has become economically interdependent has been repeated as a cliche; the truth is the world was more economically unified a century ago in the high tide of European imperialism. Instead the world has become politically interdependent to an unprecedented degree. It has become so precisely because of the development of "weapons of mass destruction" -- the natural technological outgrowth of the principle of "total war" which came to maturity in the last century. It was once possible for political leaders to ignore political economic social and especially religious developments in faraway countries -- even countries with which they had extensive trading relations. As we learned on 9/11 this is no longer possible. It is "one world after all" when terrorists spawned in the fantasy life of another culture half way round the globe begin to interact with the skyline of Manhattan. The idea of state sovereignty at the root of our conception of international law ceases to apply in such circumstances; or more precisely requires creative amendment making the U.S. for the foreseeable future the guardian of the integrity of that state system. For there is no world government no prospect of such a thing and no conceivable way that a group of allies "in a committee" could possibly act with the resolution required by President Bush's unavoidable doctrine of pre-emption. (Even Britain is proving an awkward ally.) Whether the terror strikes were on New York and Washington or on Rome and London the United States was compelled to act as if it were the world government. It is actually obliged to interpret the action of mutually-supporting rogue states and international terror networks as if this were a challenge to the Union -- of the world. Hence Mr. Bush's rhetoric which has several interesting dimensions but for the present purpose I will point to his habit of speaking on behalf not merely of the West or some such abstraction as "the civilized world" but of "the world" period. Hence also his daily growing commitment not only to regime change but to seeding democracy. He is defending a Union from which such states as Iraq Iran North Korea -- the aptly described "axis of evil" -- have in effect seceded. And he realizes that neither war nor diplomacy nor any sort of state-to-state pressure can in itself ultimately patch this up. That without the democracy and rule of law that are taken as the norm in the rest of the Union the threat of "secession" will not go away. That these "seceded" and other failed states now threaten the state system on which the peace of the world depends. In another era before the proliferation of "WMD" it was possible to ignore the fact that great masses of people were kept by evil masters in a state equivalent to slavery. This "Union of the world" was not threatened. But today the preservation of that Union has come to require the freeing of the slaves. The "North" is obliged to tell the "South" how to live no matter who likes it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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