September 21, 2004 -- 'WE'VE lost the peace,' men tell you. We cannot make it stick . . . Europeans, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bit terly they are disappointed in you as an American . . . [Liberation] stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing: looting. Never has American prestige in Europe been lower."
Another media report from Iraq? No. This was novelist John Dos Passos in 1945, reporting for Life magazine, from newly-liberated Europe.
Dos Passos knew, almost by instinct, what journalists learn in practice: Good news is no news. There was no point in reporting from Berlin on how people were able to sit in the ruins of cafes and speak freely for the first time in 13 years.
Nor was there any point in celebrating the rebirth of a free German press with the first post-Hitler newspaper appearing in a single sheet. Nor again would Life devote space to such mundane subjects as refugees returning home and Europeans starting to rebuild their lives from scratch.
Needless to say, Dos Passos could not have imagined that 50 years later Germany would not only be reunited but would also be a working democracy. And could he have guessed that, thanks to those same "low prestige" Americans, Europe would enjoy the longest period of peace it has experienced in more than 1,500 years of its history?
Because history is never written in advance, post-war Europe could have gone in other directions. One factor, above all, ensured the direction that it took toward democratic reconstruction. That was the American determination to drain the swamps that had bred the evil of war in Europe for millennia. "We are in this for the long haul," President Harry Truman had said, reflecting the sentiments of most Americans.
TO be sure, the American resolve to build a new Europe, and around it a new world system, was not motivated by pure altruism but by enlightened self-interest — the key ingredient of virtually all lasting achievements in global politics.
The Americans realized that all the wars they had been forced to fight during the 170 years of the existence of their nation, including two world wars, had been provoked by undemocratic nations, mostly located in Europe.
Experience had taught the Americans that it was not sufficient to win a war against a despotic power for it to cease to be a threat. To remove the threat once and for all, and thus ensure U.S. security, required the democratization of nations that had been enemies of America at different times.
The American analysis has proved right: Democratic Europe is no longer a threat to U.S. national security.
Now, let us return to Iraq and the Middle East in general.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush must have pondered the same questions that Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Truman had asked in their time. The key question: Where does the most serious threat to America's national security come from?
In the post-Cold War world and with the elimination of the Soviet threat, the answer was clear. It was the broader Middle East region that represented the principal source of threat to the security and national interests of the US and its allies.
Even before 9/11, there was much evidence for this — from the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 to the 1993 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and passing by the mass murder of 241 Marines in Beirut and the killing of more than a thousand other Americans in dozens of terrorist operations over two decades.
IT was in the Middle East that Ameri can flags were burned as part of na tional rituals. It was also there that official textbooks taught schoolchildren to hate America and devote their lives to killing "Jews and Cross-worshippers."
There was more. The United States had intervened in the Middle East, including by direct military action. Between 1956 and 2003, when the U.S. led the coalition that liberated Iraq, American forces had seen action in various parts of the Middle East on half a dozen occasions: in 1956 in the Arab Peninsula, in 1958 in Jordan and Lebanon, and in 1987 against the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. And in 1991 the U.S. led a coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.
During the same period, U.S. support was a major element in preventing the destruction of Israel by its Arab neighbors in 1967 and '73.
Looking back, it is clear that half a century of American military and political intervention in the Middle East failed to tackle the fundamental cause of the violence, war and terror bred in that region: the absence of democracy.
During the Cold War, the United States could not have built its Middle East policy on the imperative of democratization. Such a policy would have forced the despotic regimes to switch to the Soviet side, thus altering the global balance of power against the bloc led by the United States.
Today, however, such regimes have nowhere to go. The United States is, therefore, in a position to adopt the democratization as the central goal of its policy in the Middle East.
ONCE again, let us recall that what is at issue is not altruism or the inher ent goodness of helping Arab and other Muslim peoples to achieve freedom. The dismantling of despotic regimes and the defeat of the Islamofascist and pan-Arab ideologies that sustain them are essential for U.S. national security.
Americans will not be safe in their homes until and unless the Middle Eastern swamps of despotism and Islamofascism that breed terrorism are drained.
Some might say: Very well, but why start with Iraq? The answer is simple. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the only country in the region that had invaded two of its neighbors in a decade. It was also the only country ever to be formally at war against the entire United Nations, after trying to wipe a U.N. member off the map.
Saddam's regime had violated 15 mandatory resolutions of the United Nations' Security Council for 13 years, an all-time record. It was also host to 23 terrorist organizations from all over the world.
That regime boasted other distinctions: It was the only one to have used chemical weapons in war since 1916, and the only one to have wiped out the population of one of its own cities in a gas attack.
The United States had recognized Saddam's regime as a threat to U.S. national security long before George W. Bush became president. The Iraq Liberation Act had been passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton after months of debate that concluded with a dire assertion: Saddam was a time-bomb that, if not defused, would one day do irreparable harm to the United States and its allies.
This was how Sen. John McCain responded to those who opposed the liberation of Iraq: "Giving peace a chance only gives Saddam Hussein more time to prepare for war on his terms, at a time of his choosing, in pursuit of ambitions that will only grow as his power to achieve them grows."
In the House, former Speaker Richard Gephardt was even more specific in urging the removal of Saddam from
