Here are the facts as we know them. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and several other senior government officials in the U.S. and U.K. told us that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had large stockpiles of…
]]>Of course, I was using Washington’s address to make a polemical point, and there is historical context that needs to be considered here. But I’m not sure that Farber correctly understands Washington’s position. Neither Washington, nor the other founders, believed in “absolute non-interventionism.” Washington, Jefferson, et al. were perfectly happy with the idea of making temporary alliances born out of common strategic interests. What they opposed was the permanent entanglement of America with feuding powers abroad, along with the corresponding permanent state of war, formation of a standing military machine, growth of Executive power, etc.
Part of the reason behind Washington’s remarks, it should be noted, was that at that time the French were trying to make exactly the reverse argument. The idea was: “We got involved to help you out in your war with England, so now you should intervene to help us out in our war with England.” But entering into a permanent, reciprocal alliance with France would have gotten the U.S. embroiled in the next hundred years of feuds amongst the European powers and inflicted a warfare Leviathan on us in short order. (Instead, the Leviathan had to wait until World War I, when we did precisely what Washington urged us against–getting involved in the perpetual wars of the European powers.)
The point of saying all this is that a person can affirm something like the sentiments above while not being an “absolute non-interventionist.” Indeed, George Washington was one such person. To get a grip on the force of this point, consider some of the differences between, say, French intervention in George Washington’s war with England and American intervention George Bush’s war with Iraq.
French “intervention” in America aided a domestic uprising, already underway for several years, in order to establish a home rule. American intervention in Iraq was a military campaign of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans. It was not carried out as assistance to an existing local uprising (except for a very limited role by Kurdish peshmergas in the north), and it has ended in the conquest and occupation of Iraq by American forces.
French “intervention” in America represented a temporary policy born out of strategic interest, rather than a permanent military entanglement. The conquest and occupation of Iraq, on the other hand, is part of an apparently permanent military commitment to American command and control over the Middle East. Two points are of particular note:
These differences are all-important, because they represent a fundamental difference in the power relationships involved in the “intervention.” Imagine what would have happened if the French Crown’s “assistance” during the American Revolution was to land a huge army in order to “liberate” the Americans–with French troops storming New York City and Boston, patrolling the streets of Philadelphia, only occasionally deigning to cooperate with American troops, throwing out the British colonial governors, quartering their own French troops where the British troops had been quartered before, doling out lucrative reconstruction contracts to (only) French companies, and then making a vague quasi-commitment to convening a meeting of hand-picked American delegates to put together a French-friendly government… whenever they get around to it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the difference between these two approaches to intervention is the difference between strategic solidarity, and empire.
]]>Now, that isn’t to suggest any equivalence between a US war on Iraq and French war on Britain in assistance to the colonies. But it does illustrate that absolute non-interventionism is always colored by American history, and not always the most moral policy.
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