Empire of Liberty

“Now that Saddam has been smashed and the UN made irrelevant, the indisputable moment of mastery has arrived for the American Gigapower. (‘Hyperpower’ is so passé; and, besides, was coined by the French). Leading a glorious coalition of the willing against pure evil, we fought for freedom and took one step closer to founding mankind’s final order: the Global Empire of Liberty.”

Dick Cheney never said that, but we all feel like he did. They reflect the grandiloquent and overheated first draft of history by the neo-con pan-hawks for Gulf War Redux. Just shy of top-notch research, surely.

But the naysayers’ and protesters’ pessimism will hardly win the Pulitzer for hard headed history. They hyperventilate about “new” doctrines of first strike and preemptive defense, a rouge America gone mad with “unilateral” militarism (protestors evidently are bad at either math or Latin), a superpower caught in a quagmire of its own hubris, and a world doomed to a downward spiral of collapsing trust, escalating violence, and impending Armageddon.

Bunk. The historical amnesia needed to transfigure a five-division desert skirmish into a climactic struggle for global dominance is staggering. One needs only look up “Eastern Front; World War II” with its hundred-division, thousand-tank epochal brawls to regain a sense of reality. Gulf War II was, after all, a medium-sized police action by a global cop; gunning down Dillinger as an example to the rest of ‘em before his crackpot nukes-and-oil racket got real.

But the pundits’ grating palaver is a reflection of a deeper truth. There is some Big History going on: not Gulf II, but something larger of which it was merely a part. President Bush had a rare moment of clarity during his mistimed “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Lincoln last year when he explicitly referred to the “battle of Iraq” and the “battle of Afghanistan” as part of a larger War. Then, true to form, Bush misspoke and called it the War on Terror.

The connection between the War on Terror and the War in Iraq is in the fuzzy background, but everyone knows it’s there. Critics’ conspiracy paranoia that “9/11 gave Cheney his excuse to invade Iraq” is simplistic and silly—it wouldn’t be an excuse unless there was a connection. Bush’s insistence that the two wars are the same thing, ie, “9/11 caused Gulf II”, is equally simplistic as it is absurd. Iraq had little to no connection with 9/11. Iraq funded terrorists, but not those ‘of global reach’, the purported targets of Operation Enduring Freedom.

But, Bush responds, Saddam proliferated WMD and could have given some to the mega-terrorists. Reducto ad Bin Ladan; ergo, Hussein delenda est. For shame: that’s fuzzy logic. Much more immediately dangerous than potential nukes in the pockets of terrorists is the actual cash, which enables the slaughter of thousands without the hassle of smuggling uranium. If Gulf War II was about dis-empowering Al-Qaida, Marines should be in Riyadh, not Baghdad. Besides, Saddam’s totalitarian persona was never commensurate with the idea of him building The Bomb and then simply giving it away to Islamist zealots with whom he mostly disagreed anyway.

As Presidential rhetoric tells it, the forces of causation leading from 9/11 to Gulf II is as invisible and mysterious as that on Hume’s pool table. But the narrative pattern of world events since 9/11 is much simpler than an opaque and never-proven story about terrorism, dictators, nuclear weapons, and proliferation. In the end, even the President seemed to grasp this, and took an Ockham’s razor to his own words. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (not “Operation No to Nukes”), says all that needs to be said about the Administration’s understanding of the war. It was a War for Liberty to undercut the tyranny at the roots of terrorism.

Gulf War II was America’s second battle in a knock-down, drag-out fight that (re)started with 9/11 but goes beyond a fight against terrorism. A full-blooded response to 9/11 requires nothing less than massive intervention in the Arab world to attack the underlying causes of terrorism: tyranny, poverty, oppression, and injustice. The War in Iraq is connected to the War on Terror not because Saddam Hussein financed Al Qaida or plotted 9/11– he didn’t, no matter how many times Cheney or the Weekly Standard say so – but because overthrowing Saddam was a just and fitting opening act in a generation-long struggle to sweep away the misgovernance that feeds the despair and radicalism of a million footsoldiers in the armies of Terror.

And if the War on Terror is defined so broadly as to include any foreign policy relating to democratization, prosperity, liberty, and human rights, it is functionally just a pretext for reviving a much older doctrine of American foreign policy: “We will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Wilsonianism from the barrel of an M1A1 Abrahms.

Let's call a spade a spade. The response to 9/11 began with the Al Qaida War. It moved on to the Iraq War. But the long, broad, massive intervention in the Arab world is a War on Poverty, a War on Tyranny, and a War on Oppression as much as anything. Military guru Elliot Cohen and former spook-in-chief James Woolsey have both termed this World War IV. As Korea and Vietnam were battles of the broader Cold War (World War III), so Iraq and Afghanistan are the opening salvos in a new global struggle in which the United States will fight everything not free. The neo-cons might have the right rhetoric – empire and liberation – after all. This is a War for Global Liberty, to found an Empire of Liberty. Understanding that is crucial to understanding our war aims, and that is crucial to victory.

The author, a veteran of the Al Qaida War, would like to dedicate this article to the families, victims, and heroes of 9/11.