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Sparrowhawk
10-16-02, 08:25 PM
America Commits Itself
Iraq is only the first step in liberating the Mideast.

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, October 16, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

Five times in the last century America made substantial international military commitments to rid the world of serious threats to civilization: World War I, World War II, 1947 (when President Truman began to resist communist expansion in southern Europe), Korea and Vietnam.

They were long-term commitments. Our containment commitment lasted until the U.S.S.R. disintegrated in 1989; we are still keeping the 1941 commitment with U.S. troops in Germany and Japan, and U.S. forces secure South Korea's freedom. Indeed, we help maintain a safer world by stationing troops in more than 100 countries.

In 2002 the threat is not the Kaiser, Hitler or Stalin, but Islamist terrorism. Once again, America is making an international military commitment, this time to see that terrorists and rogue states do not destroy the peace, security and liberty we secured in the past half century. Our commitment in 2002 is as noble as that of D-Day in 1944, the Korean War or the Berlin Airlift. It is a commitment to keep America, and the world, safe from future Sept. 11ths.





In taking on Saddam Hussein, there is a broader agenda, something of more lasting significance than eliminating the immediate threat posed by his weapons of mass destruction. America's long-term goal is to change the dynamics of the Middle East, the most dangerous region in the world today. The fundamentalist and authoritarian cultures of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority are a serious danger--Not greater than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia in their time perhaps, but the greatest challenge to the peace and prosperity of the world community today.
President Bush seeks immediate regime change in Baghdad, but Saddam's demise will be the beginning of Iraq's transformation into a free and stable nation--just as the end of the Taliban was only the beginning of a free Afghanistan. When Iraq is free of Saddam's dictatorship, it can begin its transformation into a nation where, in the president's words, people can "speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children, male and female; own property and enjoy the benefits of their labor."

The people of other Middle Eastern nations--Iran, Saudi Arabia and perhaps even Syria--will begin to see the advantages of liberty too. It may not come to them quickly. It didn't come quickly in Poland or Hungary where a dictatorship as repressive as some in the Middle East similarly prohibited these things. But the concepts of individual liberty, representative democracy and market economies will take hold within Middle Eastern nations, just as they did in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Or at least that is the unstated, long-term hope of the Bush administration.

The war against terrorism will be long and difficult; so will the American effort in Iraq. Will we be in Iraq for decades, as we have been in Europe and Korea? Perhaps, for it takes years, not weeks, to help nations ravaged by war, terrorism and dictatorship to discover and then begin to practice freedom and individualism.





To achieve these goals America must exercise its power. No one else can, and many nations would not even if they could, so if peace is to be preserved we must preserve it. America will act, Saddam and his terrorist government will be replaced or destroyed, and then the concept of liberty will begin to take root in Middle Eastern society.
Not everyone in America agrees with this objective or our course of action to achieve it. The far left (allegedly with 10,000 university professors signed on) has been staging "peace" protests, arguing that there is no right and wrong or good and evil, that all cultures are equal, that we should be more afraid of attacking a totalitarian regime than of being attacked ourselves. This opposition believes we should not use military force, but instead push for alternatives to war ("peace through niceness" in James Taranto's phrase). They prefer that America not pursue its own vision, but ask the United Nations for permission.

They remind me of the violent European reaction in the 1983, when Ronald Reagan decided to put Pershing missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet military threat. Millions of people marched in Germany, France and England, morally equating America with the U.S.S.R. The protesters demanded unilateral disarmament (the actual program of the German Social Democrats) and recommended a "security partnership" with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, it is easy to see who was right and who was wrong. Six years later the U.S.S.R. imploded and Europe was free of the greatest threat to its future liberty. In a few months it will become even clearer that the American left is as wrong in 2002 as the European left was in 1983.

In 1801 Thomas Jefferson went to war against the Barbary Pirates, who sought an annual ransom from the United States; two centuries later George W. Bush is going to war against Iraq. In the first case only money was at stake and there was no direct threat to America; in the second, the stakes are higher, for the threat to America is real--another Sept. 11.

So the U.S. Senate agreed by a 3-to-1 margin that protecting America's security is a good idea. Perhaps the senators did not consider that they were approving a long-term commitment to change the dynamics of governance in the Middle East, but it will turn out that is what they have done. And as we are likely to come to understand over time, it is a very good thing to have done.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.