TROY SENIK
Staff Writer
In his 1955 book “The Public Philosophy,” Walter Lippmann fretted over the future of democratic governments unable to muster the necessary resolve to shoulder the slow, great burdens that would be necessary to preserve the freedoms of a liberal society. He noted:
“Strategic and diplomatic decisions call for a kind of knowledge – not to speak of an experience and a seasoned judgment — which cannot be had by glancing at newspapers, listening to snatches of radio comment, watching politicians perform on television, hearing occasional lectures and reading a few books. It would not be enough to make a man competent to decide whether to amputate a leg, and it is not enough to qualify him to choose war or peace, to arm or not to arm, to intervene or to withdraw, to fight on or to negotiate.”
When World War II ended in 1945, Gen. George Patton was a solitary voice calling for the offensive to continue from Nazi Germany into the vast expanses of the Soviet Union in order to decapitate the next great threat to the West and finish the task of smothering the Bolshevism that had taken root with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Though the logistical hurdles of such a daring Allied transcontinentalism damned any endeavor at embossing the American imprimatur across Europe, the first impediment to any such mission was the lack of American will in the wake of the defeats of Germany and Imperial Japan.
The concept of democratic sentiments as the guiding force behind matters of war and global strategy, a relatively new innovation in world history, had extinguished the ages of conquering generals parlaying each victory into the next great campaign for national honor and glory. Americans had fought off the immediate evil and were anxious to recede with the tides at Dunkirk, back to the hemisphere that the war had left relatively unscathed.
The United States is beginning to find itself the exponential multiplication of Lippmann’s fear from 50 years ago, a landscape where the gravity of our challenges and the competency of the democratic layman move inversely at a speed that seems destined to doom the American body politic to forever be the second runner in Xeno’s paradox.
Moreover, though our military challenges have not been nearly so great, particularly in terms of casualties or raw manpower, public sentiment breathes heavy on the same iron lung that at least partially incapacitated Patton’s ambition.
Of course, there is good reason for the sort of combat fatigue that has swollen U.S. glands over the past few years. After a quick and effective war in Afghanistan, the nation has found itself immersed in Iraq for three years, wherein defenders and opponents of the war alike have been hard-pressed to make their case wholly digestible.
The unfortunate byproduct of this has been a nation in which the citizenry sits like a child between two parents bickering at the dinner table, caring less about the virtues of each side than they do about hastening the end of the discussion. For this reason, that same democratic will that kept Patton from extinguishing the Soviet threat four years prior to the development of a Russian nuclear weapon that made the Cold War inevitable now threatens to revisit us with even graver consequences.
The Islamic Republic of Iran stands astride the Middle East, developing nuclear weaponry while forcing Western societies to slowly impale their own security on the Salisbury Rules. The emergence of a nuclear Iran spells a future in which the West is engaged in yet another Cold War. The stakes would be nothing less than the trajectory of a Middle East poised either to be ameliorated by liberal democratic inroads, or poisoned by a vision of theocratic Islamic hegemony in the Middle East literally bent on an apocalypse shepherded by a well-tanned Bob Denver.
The best case outcome of this scenario is yet another generation-defining cold war, with a distant conclusion hopefully resolved in America’s favor courtesy of a new generation of leaders as intrepid as Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. The worst is Western weakness being divined by the Iranian regime much as Hitler accurately intuited it when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 sans consequences, and the emergence of an Islamic empire happy to shelter al-Qaeda under its expansive wings.
We have experienced historical precedents of both phenomenons with the Cold War and World War II. Perhaps, then, the only way to stave off revisiting the ghost of apathies past is to take up the charge to smother this nascent threat in the cradle. Let’s hope that this time democracy finds the will.
04-13-2006