David Brooks has always been one of the smartest, most perceptive voices in journalism. But in the last week, the New York Times' conservative columnist has also become one of the bravest. He has written two pieces admitting that he and other advocates of Iraqi regime change were "blinded by idealism," that they didn't see what the results of U. S. power would be on the people our soldiers tried to liberate. With his usual eagle eye for historical precident, he looks back to the nation-builders following World War II:
They took a tragically ironic view of their situation. They understood that we can't defeat ruthless enemies without wielding power. But we can't wield power without sometimes being corrupted by it. Therefore, we can't do good without losing our innocence.
That rugged idealism looks appealing today. We went into Iraq with what, in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy. We were going to topple Saddam, establish democracy and hand the country back to grateful Iraqis. We expected to be universally admired when it was all over.
We didn't understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness. As long as we seemed so mighty, others, even those we were aiming to assist, were bound to revolt. They would do so for their own self-respect. In taking out Saddam, we robbed the Iraqis of the honor of liberating themselves. The fact that they had no means to do so is beside the point.
This is profound writing, not least because it's an admission of failure without a loss of hope. I can feel the pain seeping from every word here, particularly Brook's tired conclusion, "From the looting of the Iraqi National Museum to Abu Ghraib, this has been a horrible year." The writing is so good, in fact, that I think the lessons in these essays are not simply political. What Brooks is talking about is the hard admission of failure, as a nation or as a person -- the realization that something in you is flawed and that your refusal to see that flaw has caused pain all around. Idealism has its place -- its active, heedlessly euphoric place -- but the time comes when you have to admit that your righteous intentions don't insulate you from joining the ranks of the evildoers. As Tom Bissell memorably wrote in a recent Believer, "we are all, as Solzhenitsyn insists, capable of evil. I am capable of evil, you are capable of evil. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn himself are capable of evil. Our capacity to recognize this is what separates us from all the beasts of the field."
But once we've admitted this, once we've acknowledged the evils worked in the blindness of our own idealism, what then? Brooks suggests continuing to fight for the good, while giving up any efforts to save national face. "That means the good Iraqis, the ones who support democracy, have to have a forum in which they can defy us. If the insurgents are the only anti-Americans, then there will always be a soft spot for them in the hearts of Iraqi patriots... If the Iraqis do campaign this fall, then at their rallies they will jeer at us. We will still be hated around the world. But we will have succeeded in doing what we set out to do."
Once again, I think this is the kind of wisdom that not only is a significant and eloquent geopolitical truth, but something that translates to each one of our lives, and maybe even to how we relate to Jesus. When we fail, when our best intentions flounder in our weaknesses, maybe the thing to do is not to defy our failings, but to embrace them as the way in which we will reach our greatest goal.
Or maybe none of what I've said makes any sense outside of my own stressed-out head. I have no idea.
Posted by mesh at May 12, 2004 04:26 PM | TrackBackMakes heart-wrenching sense. History and literature have tried to teach us to know ourselves for centuries. I believe that it is "how we relate to Jesus." In Him and by Him and through Him is all truth and knowledge and victory.
Posted by: heidi at May 12, 2004 05:22 PMExcellent post, Mesh. Cutting and perceptive.
Posted by: KornSt@r at May 13, 2004 02:31 AMOh, yeah... Mesh, can you email me or call me sometime. I want to get in touch with Bill Colorus, and the only way I can think of right now is through the blog or the Pulse, neither of which I expect will elicit much of a response.
My new email is MyAeroplaneFliesHigh@juno.com
--Chris
Posted by: KornSt@r at May 13, 2004 02:36 AMWhat I don't understand was how people managed to be so idealistic in the first place. I watch the news and I see talking heads acting suprised that things aren't all going swell and I have a hard time seeing how it was that people didn't expect exactly what is happening. Sometimes it seems like I was the only one who predicted before the war even started that they weren't going to have an easy job of rebuilding the country.
Posted by: kathryn at May 14, 2004 02:53 AMKathryn you feel like you were the only one to foresee the struggles in rebuilding the entire country of Iraq? Very interesting.
Posted by: hkm at May 14, 2004 11:09 AMBrooks is an amazing journalist who never takes a blind approach to ideology - his careful reflectiveness is what impresses me most. While he is not without ideals, he is willing to admit failures of his own thinking on certain issues. The history of American foreign relations is all about credibility, and if we were to relinquish it a little (or a lot) at this point it would be truly historic.
Posted by: anna kaufmann at May 14, 2004 11:37 AMI hope being a Canadian will protect me from accusations of jingoism when I say that I am perplexed by the "disillusionment" of Brooks and other erstwhile "hawks" with the Iraqi war/occupation effort. To find the theft of a few items from the Iraqi National Musem and the anomalous abuses of a few rogue prison guards sufficient to discredit what has so far been the one of the most dramatically successful military missions in history suggests a more dangerous idealism than any found in the members of the Bush administration - if America loses heart this quickly it will never be able to achieve anything of significance again. No one in the administration to my recollection ever stated or believed that victory would be achieved without any deaths or any misteps. It is only the absurd perfectionism of the media and the Democrats - whose own lack of involvement comfortably insulates them against similar obsessive and petty criticism - which has led to the growing public perception of failure. Anyone can critique a decision when given weeks or months to contemplate it, and every enacted choice can later be replaced by an arguably better one in the hypothetical reality of an editorial column. I was ambivalent about the Iraqi war effort from the outset and think its eventual success is far from assured, but those who expect the American military to have liberated, administered, and begun the reconstruction of a country of over 20 million people with less casualties and less mistakes than have already occurred display more naivete and shortsightedness than most of the people they critique. The ones who have ended up looking childishly idealistic in the wake of recent events are not America's president or her military leaders, who have always realized that a certain measure of sacrifice and failure are involved in any grand enterprise, but rather those who thought that success could be achieved without any loss at all, and are thus seismically discomfitted by events which, despite their great contemporary psychic impact, are in the context of military and political history little more than trivia.
Julian, you're the man, comments like that are why you need your own blog.
Posted by: JosiahQ at May 18, 2004 08:15 AM