Ideology and Self-Interest By Donnel Jones, April 27, 2003

I'm back in the saddle after spending more than a week with family and friends. I hope those of you who celebrated Passover and Easter had a meaningful and happy holiday. Now to continue.

Classicist and historian, Victor Davis Hanson, gave a short interview last March with the U.S. Navy Institute's Fred L. Schultz. Courtesy of the blogsite Little Green Footballs

Ever incisive, here is Hanson's summary of the dilemma the Left faces today in not wanting to side with America's enemies while at the same time opposing America. The cognitive and moral "disconnect" takes this form when confronting America's radical turn in foreign policy:

We need to have a more sustainable, predictable pattern that we're going to promote open markets and consensual governments. The last several interventions were very different from the Cold War. We're not going into a Third World country and putting in a dictator like Somoza [Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle]. We got rid of [Panama dictator General Manuel] Noriega, who was a fascist, and then democracy followed. We're pulling out of the Philippines, where they have a plebiscite and don't want us there. We're removing Milosevic, who's a fascist. We're removing the Taliban, who are fascists. We're removing Saddam Hussein, who is a fascist.

This has created a profound dilemma for the left in the United States, because the traditional critique of U.S. military power has always been that it is promoting authoritarian fascism. But it's not. That's why we see this strange uncertainty on the radical left. They want to be against the United States, but they don't want to be friendly to the people who are against the United States—the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, for example.

Is the enemy of my enemy now my friend? Even American support for right wing dictatorships during the Cold War, though brutal if consistently anti-Marxist, is preferrable to such wobbling. At least al Queda is more consistent: they hate America AND the secular Left. That is why the question "which side are you on?" is a fair one. It need not connote that the person questioned is "anti-American" because citizens have a right to their conscience, a tradition in this country.

But after a while listening to the naysayers nitpick their way through the rubble in Baghdad to find more evidence of American malfeasance rather than a welcome revolutionary change in Iraq, to what degree can one say they are progressive? Criticism is certainly welcome and needed, but why, during a crisis in national security whose alarm was sounded on September 11th, do the inheriters of "revolution" oppose a progressive politics currently enacted by our government and supported largely by its people? Why reject an agressive shift in foreign policy that seeks to promote consensual government and the rule of law in a neglected and backward part of the globe?

It is precisely its ideology that makes this war so objectionable to the Left, which deems only itself to be idealistic. The rest of us are either bourgeois, post-colonial, overt or crypto racist, drones of multi-national corporate interests, or follow blindly in the path of any one of these like Nietzsche's "motley cow." It is easier to dismiss the war as "oil," the "Carlyle Group," "Haliburton," and the spoils of imperial prerogative, than to attribute to it something more lofty. Heaven forbid we get uppidity. Yet, if the Civil War was first and foremost about preserving the Union then later about slavery, the current conflict against terrorism is primarily about national security and secondarily about liberation of Third World peoples from dictatorships the U.S. largely supported in the first place.

It is interesting the Left does not nitpick about national self-defense, saying that now we learned our horrible lesson about supporting dictatorships in the name of oil and reaped its ugly fruit on 9/11. That interpretation is simplistic and reductive but, to consider it for a moment, why wouldn't the Left then, in consistency with a politics of liberation, support the U.S. action to remove just such a dictatorship? Here is Hanson on the subject, specifically with respect to Saudi Arabia:

The Saudi government is parasitic. It wants the patina of the West—capital affluence, technology, airlines, weapons, shopping malls, air conditioning, antibiotics, everything it imports from the West. But it is careful not to swallow the West whole. It has gender apartheid. It is anti-Semitic. It has a dictatorial government. And it has a closed, fascist press that publishes things we haven't seen on the world scene since the 1940s in Germany. That should bother us.

So what is our hypocrisy in foreign relations based on? Two things: One, Saudi Arabia is responsible for 25% of current oil reserves; and two, it was a bulwark against Soviet communism and Soviet aggression beyond its shores. I think both of those considerations are becoming more problematic. The world oil market is more complex now. We don't import as much from Saudi Arabia; oil is being found in Russia and off the coast of Africa. New technologies are on the horizon. As those two pillars of past U.S diplomacy start to lessen in importance, or topple, we are forced to look at Saudi Arabia in a very different way.

Those on the Left, for their part, are unlikely to say it is because of September 11th that U.S. foreign policy has shifted so dramatically. They view national security interests as an excuse to play cowboy hegemon. No shred of idealism is convincing because ideals for them, as is typical with many intellectuals, are formed in a perfect moral vacuum where self-interest plays no part. A perfect scenario where America does no wrong, because even looting and the unfortunate sacking of the national museum in Baghdad are deemed on a par with putting children in prison, is the only condition in which the U.S. is allowed to act. Usually that means the U.S. has no right to act at all because of past wrongs, even on behalf of winning the Cold War. The Left insists upon moral paralysis because of an absence of moral perfection. Yet, where exactly in history can one find it? Better to do nothing out of a pitiless rehearsal of America's wrongs than awaken to the danger she is in and the need to protect her.

How to satisfy the contrary claims of self-interest and ideology without losing moral credibility? The key is maintaining a balance between the rude exigencies of self-interest and the higher ground of idealism. Indeed, the Cold War was fought out of self-interest but that should not stop a modicum of gratitude from the brave peoples who opposed Soviet tyranny even if they have a bone or two to pick with the U.S.

Self-interest accompanies a change of heart. No one said the war against terrorism was not out of self-interest. It is and should be. We must defend our nation against terrorist attacks. For that to square with the secondary effect that peoples are thereby liberated from tyrannies in America's long-term plan to defend itself and the world by politically re-mapping the Middle East, is entirely unacceptable to the Left. It must resort to its "shareholder" oligarchy conspiracy theories.

The ever-idealistic yet practical neo-conservatives, on the backburner during the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations, have come to dominate U.S. foreign policy. That foreign policy is agressive, seeking to destabilize a region whose status quo was a danger to the U.S. years before 9/11.

The "idea" of toppling Saddam is nothing new and was even given token support with the "Iraq Liberation Act" of 1998, passed by Congress with Clinton's blessing. But it was the brutal reality of 9/11 that awoke the nation to the pursuit of its self-interest; that is, its self-defense. It just so happens to mean, also, that the peoples of the Middle East will do better when rogue regimes that support terrorism are removed. We should not fool ourselves into believing that this secondary goal is primary. It is not. Our self-defense comes first but it can be argued that the well-being of other peoples are a part of that primary goal. Without self-interest, without the need for self-preservation, how could the president and the nation embark on something so ambitious and idealistic as fostering democracy in the Middle East?

The path toward greater national security, and thereby a more stable world order, is fraught with risk and difficulty. Hence the radical nature of the turn in foreign policy. On the other hand, September 11th was a radical wake-up call. We are blessed to have a president who has listened to it. You can be sure that any mistake, no matter how small, made in the name of this policy will invoke the wrath of the Liberal/Left. That is because many of them do not believe that the motivation for this change in foreign policy is both rightful self-interest and ideology. Instead, it is the usual catch-all suspects of corporate greed and fossil fuels.

In speaking with Liberals about Bush, the one thing I keep hearing that bothers them the most is his religious faith. For the record, I'm a secularist who fully supports religious freedom, a principle that is a no-brainer for an American. Though my father was religious I never got the spirit, though I respect it in others. That is why I am befuddled and sometimes amused by the Liberal disdain for the president's faith and how it sustains him in this time of crisis: I say, good for him and good for the country, atheists and all.

We live in a nation where the president is moved by faith and ideology. What worse affront could the Left face than that?