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The U.S. has lost nearly 3,000 lives and spent
$300 billion in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Sectarian hatred is so strong in Iraq that the wrong answer on
the street can get you killed. Meanwhile,
if you didn’t vote for war supporter Joe Lieberman, Vice-President Dick
Cheney says you are an Al Qaeda supporter.
Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah agreed to a
tenuous ceasefire after a month of war, including the launching of several
thousand rockets. Syria and Iran threaten to widen the
Muslim wars into a global conflict. Within the present political morass,
many of us yearn for a clear vision to support. We search for personalities and
explanations that can lead us out of this mess. Looking into the past, we see a leader
who had vision, strength, consistency, and the power to lead. So I ask the question, “What would
Winston Churchill do now?”
Two World Leaders
Naturally our biggest difficulty in trying to mine
Churchill’s personality and the crises he lived through for principles that
we might apply today is that the world has changed in so many ways. Yet, we must also believe that age after
age has faced similar problems, and we can’t let the hubris of our
modernity isolate us from insights within conflicts between nations that
trail back into antiquity.
Churchill was a complex person, and we need to take
care as we try to insert him into these times we are living through. An exercise that might provide
understanding is to compare Churchill’s qualities and reactions to conflict
to our current leader, George W. Bush.
Common Traits
Bush and Churchill do share personality traits. They share a personal confidence that few
men have. Both feel capable of
carrying out their charge as leaders.
Both Bush and Churchill have a clear sense of morality and don’t
hesitate to make decisions based on their moral convictions. In the face of heavy political and public
opposition, Bush has consistently voted against expanding embryonic stem
cell line because he thinks it’s wrong.
Churchill pushed ahead with giving Ireland home rule in 1922 even
though most of his colleagues and the public were against it.
Bush and Churchill share the perhaps unfortunate
trait that they are not particularly good listeners. Bush has no hesitation against giving
staffers and even visiting foreign dignitaries new nicknames and playfully
using them to their faces. Churchill
admitted that he didn’t like to listen to anyone; his idea of a great lunch
was fine food followed by a monologue “by me.” He learned his dogs’, fish’s, and birds’
names but rarely could remember the secretaries who took his dictation in
the wee hours of the morning.
Bush and Churchill did not hesitate to wield the
power of their nations’ militaries in what both would call a just
cause. Churchill sounded the alarm
for years that Britain
had to match military might with Hitler; Bush has spared no expense to wage
war in Iraq
with the putative purpose of stopping terrorism abroad.
These then are the ways that Churchill and Bush are
alike: confident, tenacious, morally clear, and ready to fight to defend
their countries.
Not Peas in a Pod
But these are rather general qualities that are
counterbalanced by the huge differences in their personalities. Churchill was always scrambling to ensure
that his income in support of his lavish lifestyle stayed ahead of his
creditors. By the time he was 26 he
was a self-made millionaire, all from writing books. Churchill brought a giant intellect and a
powerful energy to his politics from the outset. Bush, in contrast, has not penned a
single public policy document, as far as I know. And unlike Churchill, he has become
wealthy via the connections of his father.
Despite being well-connected, several of his business ventures
failed before he was able to turn a baseball team and some oil investments
into big enough money to be comfortably able to enter politics.
Though a pudgy
215 pounds on a 5’ 6” frame, Churchill was an intellectual, political, and
even a physical dynamo. When his
political fortunes tumbled, Churchill turned to other pursuits. He took up oil painting in his depression
after the Dardanelles tragedy and over
time became a respected artist whose works sold well and are hung in
distinguished museums. After he
bought his home at Chartwell, he learned to lay bricks and helped build
retaining walls and a small guest cottage on the property. Always the
military enthusiast, he learned to fly and then envisioned the tactical
necessity of the modern tank. He had
a hand in numerous technological advances in the warfare of his time,
including floating bridges.
Bush, a solid 195 pounds on a six foot
frame, is in fine physical shape, with a resting heart rate of 46, but
finds his greatest enjoyment riding his mountain bike, cutting firewood, or
shooting birds on his ranch in Crawford,
Texas and to my knowledge
pursues no other stimulating hobby aside from these.
Articulate and Artless
Churchill was one of the great orators in the English
language. He wrote all his own
speeches and could astound his audience with soaring phrases for several
hours at a stretch. In addition to
the money he made as a writer, he also was very well paid as a speaker on
trips through the United
States and elsewhere. Bush, in contrast, may be one of the
least able presidents when it comes to expressing himself in public. He does an adequate job in a formal
speech setting, but he doesn’t write his own speeches. In press conferences or informal question
and answer sessions, Bush’s inability to find the right word and his
choppy, uneven delivery leaves communication professionals squirming
painfully in their chairs. Bush
simply can scarcely negotiate an extemporaneous English sentence without
appearing clumsy and to some—not very bright.
Churchill clearly had a gift for speaking that Bush
simply doesn’t have. Bush appears to
be congenitally verbally challenged.
Many argue that he speaks much better in informal settings and in
fact has intellect sufficient for his job.
However, no one would argue another big difference between the two
leaders related to their communication abilities: knowledge of history and
politics. Churchill trained at Sandhurst as a soldier. He did not have a formal education in the
classics as many great leaders do.
But he was an auto-didactic whose interest in world history was
all-encompassing. As a historian
himself, he assembled a large research staff to go find him the information
he needed. Among his many historical
volumes was a biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, and
A History of the English Speaking
Peoples. He also wrote
expansive, highly-praised accounts of both world wars. When it comes to fundamental knowledge of
the world, Winston Churchill was peerless among recent statesmen. In this regard, George Bush cannot even
be considered in the same scholarly company as Winston Churchill.
Religion Sí: Religion No
Bush’s
strongly held values derive from his embrace of “born again” fundamentalist
Christianity. His remaking of
himself from an errant son prone to drinking and carousing into a pious,
firm-jawed teetotaler has earned him respect from the Christian right wing
and at the same time alienated him from a large block of Americans whose
sympathies are less doctrinaire. Many
opponents of Bush share an irreligious interest in a spiritual eclecticism,
an amalgam of eastern religious traditions, native spiritual traditions,
and other oddly-matched metaphysical maps that Bush’s camp derides as
bankrupt secular humanism.
To credit
Bush, his closest advisors are non-religious. And though he himself has from time to
time claimed guidance from God, his overall policy shows no element of
revelation as a justification.
Where would
Churchill fit in this crazy-quilt religious landscape that has woven
religion into politics from the right and Hollywood into politics from the
left? In my opinion, Churchill would
turn his trademark bulldog growl of derision toward both camps. When once asked about what religion he
practiced, Churchill replied, “All reasonable men have the same
religion.” And when pressed to
explain what he meant, he demurred.
“Reasonable men don’t tell.”
For Churchill, then, religion and politics did not mix. We can conclude that when it came to
addressing questions about the religious source of fanatical Muslims’
designs on killing infidels, Churchill would give no truck. He would condemn that form of Islam, and
he would condemn the people who claimed Islam to be the foundation of their
terrorism as perverters of a tradition which should not enter politics.
Alcohol
As I mentioned, Bush stopped drinking many years
ago. Many admire this as a mark of a
more matured character. Churchill’s
relationship with alcohol, on the other hand, may be one of the most
enduring sidebars to his reputation as “an original.” Biographers claim that he started each
day with a scotch and soda, and wasn’t done with that spirit until he had
consumed 8 more during the day. His
scotch drinking was interrupted by the champagne, wine, and brandy that he
imbibed at every meal save breakfast.
Despite Churchill’s portentous rate of consumption, biographers also
claim that he was rarely seen to be obviously drunk. He is known to famously have said, “I
have gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has gotten out of me.” And, “There are too kinds of problem
drinkers: those that drink too much and those that drink too little.”
Churchill’s liberal use of alcohol coheres with his
lifestyle as a voluptuary, a man who though not a libertine, enjoyed the
fine life. He loathed having
anything but silk next to his body.
His appetite for liquor tended to quality as well as quantity, and
this appetite extended to his food.
His rhetoric was of a piece–always reaching for dramatic
majesty. Perhaps his eloquence came
inspired as he imbibed. The late
American poet Charles Bukowski said of alcohol, “I opened the bottle, and
the words poured out.” I don’t wish to pretend that alcoholism is not a
disabling disease for individuals and their families, but in the special
case of Winston Churchill, it seemed to do him no harm and may have
facilitated his lofty prose.
Who had the common touch?
Both men mixed
easily in the company of the elite, but perhaps in the arena of the common
people, Bush holds the edge. Maybe
his folksy Texas
dialect and his appeal to simple values are what endear him to conservative
blue collar workers as well as the wealthy.
Churchill, in contrast,–though he was a champion for better working
conditions for the lower classes– did not have the same kind of “man of the
people” touch that George Bush commands.
Choosing advisors
Bush also seems to have a better talent for
surrounding himself with competent advisors compared to Churchill. Though Bush has been criticized for not
being of the highest intellect, he is politically astute and has chosen
well. Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Dick
Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld are all competent with impeccable
credentials from business and academia.
They’ve been his friends as well as his advisors, and Bush has stood
by them as they have stood by him amid much public pressure, especially in
the case of Rumsfeld. In contrast,
Churchill was double-crossed by his colleagues, most especially David Lloyd
George and First Sea Lord John Fisher in the wake of the tragic folly of
the 1915 Dardanelles campaign in which
213,000 British soldiers died on Gallipoli with no gain whatsoever. Early on, the newspaperman Max
Beaverbrook was as likely to take sides against Churchill as to aid him
(but later became a steady and staunch supporter). In short, Bush is a much better judge of
people than was Churchill.
The Political Touch
In regards to
long term political success, once again Bush comes out more favorably for
his consistent triumphs. Churchill was often alone during the mercurial
course of his long political career. Bush has so far been batting a
thousand, with election to the Texas
governorship and two terms as President.
Churchill lost four elections, was dismissed in disgrace as First
Lord of the Admiralty (after the Dardanelles),
and had to live outside of party politics for many years.
Attitudes to Alliance
Against the popular opinion in the 1930’s Churchill
lobbied hard for England
to re-arm, but he also lobbied equally ardently for a grand alliance of
European nations against the rising Germanic threat. It was one of the keystones of his
foreign policy to protect the British Empire
to create pacts of nations as equals.
Bush has given much lip service to the “coalition of the willing” in
the war in Iraq, but in
fact, only the British have provided any significant number of troops and
war material, and their contribution is small compared to the U.S.’s. Bush talks about multi-lateral talks in
negotiating with North Korea,
but in many other forums, such as the Kyoto
treaty and the World Court,
Bush has chosen to go it alone, believing that the United States can profit from
its superpower status and not compromise its interests within bodies
composed of lesser nations. Bush’s
attitude toward our potential allies seems to be one of condescension or
bullying. Though in Churchill’s
time, the British Empire ruled the seas and perhaps could lay claim to
being the most powerful military force on the planet, he treated the
friendly nations of Europe as equals. I think this difference in attitude would
translate into a very different tone for a Churchillian foreign policy in
today’s world.
Power and Empire
Power and empire should be a theme for us to explore
further in comparing these two world leaders. Bush inherited a steady expansion of the United States’
influence and power worldwide. Some
observers now call this global dominance a new sort of empire. Would Churchill have done the same? We must remember that the British Empire
reached its short-lived zenith just after WWI, when it added countries in
the Mid-East to its worldwide collection of colonies ranging from Ireland to the British West Indies to India to Australia. Churchill gloried in that, but he lived
in the twilight of that power, and after two wars did not have the
resources to expand or even maintain it.
Churchill v. Hussein
Now that we have tried to reveal Churchill’s
character via this comparison and contrast with our present world leader,
George Bush, we can turn to our central questions: How would Churchill have
responded to the crisis of the terrorism of the extremist Muslims? How would he have managed the problems of
the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, the resurgence of fundamental Islam
in Iran, and of course, the biggest problem of all—Saddam Hussein?
I’m not a historian, nor a scholar, but just an
admirer of Churchill who is most troubled by the war in Iraq and the series of events
that put us there. So I’ll try to
confine myself to imagining Churchill’s response to Iraq.
To answer this I will take the several justifications
for the war in Iraq
and explore Churchill’s likely relationship.
- Hussein
had ties with Al Qaeda, and therefore was an incubator of the
terrorist movement that gave birth to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.
I don’t
believe that Churchill would have accepted this rationale because evidence
now and evidence at the time prove it to be a hollow claim. Hussein’s relationship with Al Qaeda was
minimal. Although this rationale was
given prior to the invasion of Iraq, not long afterwards, it
was disavowed by the Bush administration.
Churchill was always straightforward with the British people and
wouldn’t have stooped to lying.
In the same breath, many other
countries would have been equally good targets for invasion had this
rationale been taken seriously. Most
of the terrorists were Saudi Arabian.
Why not invade Saudi
Arabia, for they were not able to
contain the burgeoning fanatical Muslim movement in its territory (perhaps
we could read this as “harboring” terrorists in Bushspeak.)
Even today, though Pakistan
is our ally, that country receives tens of thousands of Muslims from around
the world to attend the madrassas schools whose only curriculum is to teach
the Koran. These schools offer no
science, math, political science, or history, and the students by and large
don’t even understand the words they are memorizing. The one-item curriculum has only one
message: Islam is the supreme religion and the West is the devil’s tool.
If we want to excise the sources of terrorism overseas, shouldn’t we
do something to shut down these schools?
Apparently Pakistan’s
government-sponsored schools are very bad; shouldn’t the U.S. step in as the good guys
from the West to attract students away from the madrassas to schools that
actually prepares students for a better life?
Had this rationale been true, Churchill would have attacked Iraq
with swift and decisive force to cut off Al Qaeda at its roots. But it was not true: objective observers
knew this all along.
- The United States (and by corollary all the
allies of the U.S.)
saw Iraq
as a credible threat against the safety of its people.
This has been worked over many times, so I set out the briefest of
summaries:
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; he had used them before; he
was a maniac who would use them again.
Without question, Churchill would have launched a pre-emptive attack
if he felt that Iraq
indeed possessed biological or chemical or nuclear weapons of mass
destruction and therefore posed an imminent threat to U.S. Churchill
gloried in war and considered it part of the human condition. He saw it as a most natural way to solve
conflicts between states.
But at this point we have to bear witness to the many doubts that
reasonable people have about Bush’s claims on Iraqi intelligence. Weapons inspectors had searched high and
low throughout Iraq
and found no weapons of mass destruction.
Hussein’s military had been gutted by a brutal 8-year war with Iran and by the additional loss of at least
130,000 men after the failed invasion of Kuwait. His entire military budget for the years
prior to our invasion in 2003 was less than $2 billion a year—about the
same amount of money spent yearly on California’s
Highway Patrol.
Hussein couldn’t move without being under constant surveillance from
the best technology in the air and space.
He was hemmed in on all sides by international sanctions. To compare Hussein, or even all of the
Islamic extremist organizations combined to Hitler, is hyperbole in the
extreme. Hitler spent seven years
marshaling the resources of the entire nation of Germany, from its lowliest foot
soldiers to its wealthiest industrialists, in an all-out effort to create a
military power. By comparison,
Hussein had nothing.
Moreover, if Hussein had developed a supply of chemical or biological
weapons, an invasion is not the simple, formulaic solution, as these forms
of weapons are very portable and can be moved out of a country in a short
time.
Given Churchill’s deep understanding of military history, strategy,
and tactics. I see no reason to conclude that he would accept the very
small possibility of the existence of WMD in Iraq to be a sufficient reason
for a full-scale invasion of that country.
That response does not match the problem.
In addition, many reasonable people think that the WMD rationale was
not the true reason that the U.S.
went to Iraq. So given suspicion of this
administration’s exaggeration or outright lying, we can’t assume anything
about what Churchill would do under this reason.
- Hussein
was a vicious, bloody, cruel tyrant to his people. Any noble, generous power should
come to the aid of the Iraqi people.
Would
Churchill have accepted this as a reason for declaring war and staging an
all out invasion of a country?
Certainly, Churchill was a humanist.
During WWII his purpose for waging war soon turned from defending Britain to liberating Europe. Even before the war, Churchill was beside
himself as he learned about Hitler’s Germany’s cruelties to the
Jews. He lashed out when Chamberlain did not honor Britain’s commitment to defend Czechoslovakia
against Hitler.
But in terms
of realpolitik, his overarching dismay about these events revolved around
his concern for England
itself. He knew what Hitler was up
to, and he saw all these barbarous acts as preludes to an assault on England. As far as I know, he never unilaterally
sent a massive force into a sovereign nation when no alliance, no treaty
had to be honored. So the situation
for liberating an oppressed people by itself does not seem to be enough to
call Churchill into action. After England caved in on its pledge to defend Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain guaranteed Poland’s safety, apparently in a gesture to
shore up international confidence in England. It was a futile effort, and Churchill was
squarely against it—because Churchill knew it was a promise that made no
sense. Churchill knew that given the
day’s military technology, England
could not mount a defense of a country on the other side of Germany. A defensive force sent from the west into
the Polish port of Gdansk (called Danzig then) by sea would easily have
been blocked by the Germans, and any troop movement from the east would
have been through Russia from the south through the Black Sea: a distant
front impossible to maintain and a repetition of the 1915 attempt to force
the Dardanelles and take Constantinople.
If Churchill
had been a humanitarian ready to defend people’s rights throughout the
world, there existed enough barbarity to keep a police power (such as the British Empire could have exercised) in constant
action.
Interestingly,
our own foreign policy also says “no” to this rationale for war. We have over and over made Faustian
bargains with repressive regime when it suited our vital political
interests and the economic interests of American entrepreneurs and
investors. We have left repressive,
vicious regimes alone to their devices, most notably in Saudia
Arabia, Albania,
Sierra Leone, Libya, Sudan,
Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
and Chile. Today China
remains a country whose form of government and human rights record remains
squarely at odds with our own dearly beloved values of personal freedoms,
yet China is a major
trading partner, a good friend to the U.S.
Human rights
abuses overseas have never been grounds for foreign invasion, and Churchill
would not allow British soldiers to be killed for this pretext, especially
as there was no opposition forces at the time in Iraq from which to form a new,
viable, stable government. Churchill would not have invaded Iraq
on this rationale.
- We need to
bring democracy to the Mid East.
No. Churchill was not one to throw around the
democracy and the freedom buzzwords.
These were not engraved at the time into the psyche as the power
syllables behind every bellicose movement.
Churchill, of course, believed that the British way of life was
superior, but this way of life was not encompassed solely by the concepts
of freedom and democracy as they are today in the Bush propaganda
machine. General civility, good
manners, scholarship, industry, the heritage of the arts and so on–in other
words, the whole gamut of elements that make up a culture–that’s what
Churchill thought superior. Today
all these things have been reduced to a sound bite, a magic bullet, a
cure-all pill that once swallowed would transform a backward, tribal
peoples into a member of the modern age.
This part is a lie. It’s a
ruse to trick us into believing that we are a generous nation bringing our
way of life to stupid, incompetent peoples.
Would
Churchill have supported wars to build democratic nations, as Bush and
friends have characterized our invasion of Iraq? Churchill was sympathetic to the rebels
in Cuba
as a youth, but he pondered the worthiness of the Cuban people for
independence. As I mentioned
earlier, he did aid Ireland
in its quest for Home Rule, but opposed the independence of India. Churchill thought of the British form of
life and society as superior to these foreign nations’, but he was not at
any time one to carry the torch to bring British democracy into foreign
lands as a liberator. Where Britain
did acquire new territories, he helped choose a suitable king and left the
rule of those countries in native hands.
I don’t see any evidence that Churchill would have mounted an
invasion to give a country western style democracy.
A Warm (not Cold) War Approach
After all of
this, I do think that Churchill may have taken military action in the case
of Saddam. He would have accepted a
political rationale that for some reason Bush and his friends have never
used, a rationale more in keeping with Republican tradition in foreign
policy. George Kenan and Henry
Kissinger worked out a very logical, effective foreign policy based on
protecting U.S.
vital interests and containing foreign powers. This same policy can be defended in the
region of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and all the other
“stans”. Churchill in all likelihood
would not have hesitated to embrace some kind of strong hand using this
rationale. Let’s review why once
more.
Churchill is
most famous for his bulldog perseverance in sounding the alarm against
Hitler through the 1930’s when Britain
and most of Europe were silent. Unlike others, he had measured Hitler’s
intentions early on and lobbied hard for England to match Hitler’s
preparations for war. So one problem
in our analysis is that we don’t have a Hitler or a Germany today. Our global situation is much more
complex. We don’t have one
megalomaniacal man and one bellicose people to combat. We have a multi-headed hydra of hate
springing up in fanatical Muslims around the world.
Today many observers say that the U.S. has become a
vast and unique sort of empire, a sort never before seen, built on a
political domination much deeper than achieved by the Roman Empire, the
Ottoman Empire or the British Empire. Today, what Eisenhower called the
military-industrial complex has enormous influence over government.
Churchill loved the British
Empire, and loved it for being a noble empire, bringing
British civility and order to lesser peoples around the globe. Even in his own time, Churchill was
criticized as being out of date. The
glory days of the empire were long past when Churchill became Prime
Minister in 1940. Yet he carried a
19th century sense of chivalry and code of honor with him into
his ministry. In light of all these
traits, he would very likely support the idea of the U.S. in its current
expansionist policy around the globe.
Another of Churchill’s traits was his
decisiveness. In his own time, many
of his critics took this trait as extreme to a fault. Some called him impetuous or even
reckless. He was guided by a very
clear moral compass and knew in his heart that his actions were inspired by
clear, noble motives. He regularly
spoke his mind when it would have been more politically prudent to remain
silent. He changed parties twice on
the basis of his convictions and principles and as a result made enemies in
the party he left behind and the one he joined. Especially when it came to sounding the
alarm against Hitler, he spoke out against an entire country that wanted no
part of preparing for war in the aftermath of the bloody slaughter that was
WWI.
Churchill did not couch his message, did not
prevaricate or dissemble. He always
spoke from conviction and principles and only when he was beholden to the Baldwin government in a quest for a position did he
soften his message so as to preserve his chance to get into office where he
could work to answer the threat of Hitler.
Unlike the men who I see in office today, Churchill
retained an air of personal innocence till the end. He had a boyish exuberance to try new
things. This I suppose goes along with his impetuosity. In this aspect of Churchill’s personality
I don’t see him deceiving the public the way I see the present
administration.
Churchill would have quickly perceived
that the U.S.
has the chance today to create a permanent outpost in the Iraqi region. We could never accuse Churchill of
timidity, and if he felt an action was ripe, he would leap for the throat
of his enemy. It was Churchill who
authorized the firebombing of Dresden
in an attempt to bring the German people to its knees. After the German surrender, Churchill
also begged the Americans to take Berlin
and Prague
before the Russians could move in.
He knew when to seize the advantage in the global balance of
power.
Our high
standard of living, our sense of individualism and personal freedom is
based on large consumption of the world’s resources. Churchill would state that up front. We need the oil; now is the time to
establish a more stable control over that oil and pre-empt a disruption of
the oil supply and promote future oil exploration by putting ourselves into
Iraq. It’s a good time because (1) Iraq
is weak. (2) Hussein is held in
contempt by most of his people and by his neighbors. (3) Iran is becoming more
dangerous. Today, Iran is run by fanatical Shiite
Muslims who have created an Islamic state based on Sharia law. The book Reading Lolita in Tehran
details the transformation of Iran from a tolerant secular
state under the shah into a deadly, intolerant place where the slightest
infraction could mean imprisonment or execution. The Shiites support the
terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is not our friend. We can’t trust them when they say that
they want to develop peaceful uses for nuclear energy. They want a bomb. They want to become part of the nuclear
community. (4) China is fast becoming a legitimate
international economic player and in the future may out-compete the US
for needed resources. (5) An outpost in Iraq
would establish another friendly buffer to guard our traditional ally Israel
against all threats from the Arab/Muslim world.
Churchill would have not shirked the
responsibility of telling the nation that perhaps our form of life is at
stake. Our rate of consumption of
the world’s natural resources, from petroleum to plastics to aluminum to
copper far exceeds every other country per capita. Churchill would tell it to us
straight: if we want to continue to
drive the cars we drive and the frequency with which we drive; if we want
to build our giant houses and run our air-conditioners; if we want buy our
high-tech and high horsepower toys, we have to expand our control over the
world.
So to conclude our analysis: Churchill may have taken
military action to create a western stronghold in Iraq that would contain the
growing power of Islamic states in the region. From an “Iraqi colony,” the U.S.
could offer credible threats to neighbors in the region who chose to
violate the norms of Western-style world hegemony. He may have seen this as a chance to
create the India
of the 21st century.
The details of
his move are a completely different question, one for a person more
knowledgeable about military strategy.
However, we can explore one key component of that question. Bush was quite satisfied to crush the
Iraqi army with some help from England and token forces from
the “coalition of the willing.” He
made little effort to win the support of other European nations. I feel that Churchill would have been
more compromising in finding allies as explained above. Churchill constantly lobbied for the
grand alliance that would have held Germany–or any other nation
attempting to dominate a region–in check.
He very likely would have done the same regarding any invasion of Iraq.
Now that we have decided on Churchill’s course of
action, we ought to consider how popular it would have been. I suspect it would not have been
popular. If Americans were told
straight that their sons’ lives must be sacrificed for the sake of
Americans’ consumption habits, they would hesitate, they would waver. The newspapers tell us that in many ways
we are a nation in decline: our people are obese, our children’s academic
performance is way below most other developed nations, immigrants are
grabbing jobs that require elite educations, and many specialized fields
are being shipped off shore. This is
bad news, and we know the cause: we are a people grown soft and stupid from
an overwhelming supply of amusements.
Would we be able to look ourselves in the mirror as Churchill’s
straightforward explanation would force us to do?
No we
wouldn’t. Certainly, there would
exist a base of hard-working, self-made conservatives who would rally to
his side and say, “Yes, that is exactly what we are fighting for. America
consumes more because our economy is so successful. We deserve to live as we do.”
But I believe that a growing majority would see that America
needs to embrace its own values of equality and responsibility. When told more directly that America
is the biggest polluter, the biggest waste-producing, the largest
contributor to green house gases and to global warming, Americans would no
longer think that those privileges are worth sending their children to die
for. If the U.S. applied its intelligence
and technology to the cause of a national policy based on the efficient use
of resources, material, and energy, we wouldn’t be driven to a hegemonic
relationship with the developing world—and especially the oil-producing
nations.
I do agree that foreign policy should not be
conducted in a spirit of generosity.
A nation must guide its foreign relations to protect its vital
interests. But when “vital
interests” have been shown to cause irrational, unnecessary risks, loss of
life, and a huge financial drain, those vital interests may have to be
re-visited. In the recent political
election, our country was nearly evenly split between Bush and Kerry. Had Bush told the truth as Churchill
might have done, I propose that Kerry would have won. The American people could not vote for
the ungainly truth of our role within the developing world.
To conclude, though Winston Churchill, if alive
today, might want to wage war in Iraq in some form or another, I
don’t think he would be politically successful.
Bush, on the
other hand, has had his war. So
raise a hand in salute to George W. Bush in admiration if you believe in
the real rationale for going to war, for the clever, very calculated
political maneuvering that has the US now poised to settle in for
the long haul expanding its hegemony as the world’s only military and
political superpower. Get ready for
many more years of the US
spending more on its military budget than all the other nations of the
world combined. But pause to think
of the fate of other empires that have extended themselves too far.
References
Fears, J. Rufus. Churchill. Lecture series. The
Teaching Company. Course no. 807. http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=807&id=807&d=Churchill&pc=Search. No date available.
Kaplan, Robert D. Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands
a Pagan Ethos. Random House: New
York, 2002.
Manchester, William. The Last
Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932-1940. Bantam Doubleday
Dell: New York,
1988.
Manchester, William. The Last
Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Visions of Glory 1874-1932. Bantam
Doubleday Dell: New York,
1983.
Wilson, Charles. Churchill: Taken From the Diaries of
Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival 1940-1965. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1966.
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