Resize Text: History does not repeat itself, either as tragedy or farce or anything else. Saddam Hussein was neither Slobodan Milosevic nor Ho Chi Minh, neither of whom in turn was Stalin or Hitler, any more than Yalta was Munich, Kyoto was Yalta, or September 11, 2001 was December 7, 1941. Nor should we regard al-Qaeda as the equivalent of the Nazis, the Communists, the Baathists, or of anyone but themselves. All challenges qualify as unique challenges, as do all enemies and the dangers they present. Wars will always be atrocious, but sometimes the absence of war will be atrocious, too. Circumstances count. Ends count, means count, and the relations between them count. Attaching a Roman numeral to the prospect of war does not make it either just or smart. Metaphorical overstretch bids to be the thought disorder of our time.
If all these seem to be primitive clichés, such clichés have their moments, especially when overlooked at immense cost. Imprisoned within the prism of Munich, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Maxwell Taylor peered at Vietnam in 1964 and saw Czechoslovakia in 1938. The problem with historical lessons being that they tend to be overlearned (which means not learned at all), the Bush team glanced backward and concluded that America was at risk from certain small- or medium-size powers that were, or were supposed to be, equipped with weapons of mass destruction and that, consequently, preventive war was sound policy.
It seems clear that preventive war in Iraq failed not because a wise policy was poorly executed but because the whole project was doomed to begin with. Even if the resort to war had been wise in the first place, it was unwise in the second, third, and fourth places, if for no other reason than that George W. Bush’s government possessed an exalted idea of its own power, an overblown sense of its own righteousness, no capacity to appreciate the limits of its knowledge and its power, and an impoverished idea of the complexity of the world around it.
Beyond the immediate panic that made the war politically feasible, however, there was a methodical lineage: the tradition that the U.S. may, without condition and regardless of consequence, do as it pleases abroad. And that, when it does so, it not only deserves to triumph but succeeds. True, Manifest Destiny in a triumphalist spirit is not our only tradition. But in this sixth year of the Iraq War, the triumphalist strain in American foreign policy remains a clear and present danger to American national security, however diminished it may be by the grim experience of the Bush Doctrine as enshrined in the 2002 National Security Strategy and as wheeled out in Iraq a year later.
Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.
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