To Do List-What We Want To Find Out

My son says that we will not know for forty years what really went on in the George W. Bush Administration. I've told college students if they are interested in history it's the one period where they can make a positive contribution to our understanding of our own country.

I am becoming obsessed with finding out why we invaded Iraq. Is there some larger game we all missed? It certainly was not because of Saddam Hussein's brutality. After all we were his allies before. It was certainly not because of Weapons of Mass Destruction since our own intelligence agencies and the United Nations warned us there were none. And certainly it was not because of any connection with Al Qaeda. Although, I have been shocked to review the many, many videos where everyone from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney actually argued this case before the American people.In the Chilicote Inquiry in the UK,it's been revealed that Tony Blair agreed to the invasion of Iraq prior to 9/11. We know it wasn't for the oil because almost everyone but American firms have gotten the concessions. And it wasn't to create a democracy because that was slapped on at the end by the White House to rationalize the mission. Even the neoconservative supporters of the invasion such as Doug Feith have been explicit that Wolfowitz and company never entertained this as viable. And certainly it was not because of Saddam harboring terrorists. The best they could do is document Abu Nidal and the PFLP hanging around and one Islamic terrorist group on the border with Iran where Iraqi troops kept them under observation as well as the CIA. So what really was the reason or reasons?

It's not that the reasons given have been shredded by the countervailing evidence. It's because within the whole process of going to war we know that large parts of our institutions knew better and that even they didn't believe the reasons given to the public. Was it more strategic? The political leadership felt that American strategic doctrine unnecessarily restrained The United States from projecting its power at a time we were the sole remaining global superpower. I have begun reading many articles suggesting this very thing--that the United States was pre-empting the rise of a united Middle East with the possibility of crippling our energy supplies. It didn't matter that we didn't directly get the oil, it was important that no political or military force could restrain the United States and the Developed World. This is still too complicated for me to digest. The articles seem to rationalize the invasion after the fact as yielding a strategic good.

There are other issues that still baffle me. During the George W. Bush Administration ,the United States fought a prolonged counter-insurgency war in the Phillippines that would very rarely make it in the press here. I understand that it had been successful but I have yet to hear or read anything about it since.

I'm trying to forgive myself for having remained in my humanitarian intervention mode left over from the Balkans to accept the Iraqi invasion as an act of liberation. The fact was that it created the largest outflow of refugees in Middle Eastern history, the elimination of a part of ancient Christianity,the monstrous events at Abu Ghraib and a stunning legacy of American-induced corruption. Hopefully, the Iraqis can make something out of the mess that remains. Right now it looks like the Iranians and Turks are hovering like vultures over the country. That's not to say everyday life to a large extent hasn't returned and the natural rhythmn of Middle eastern life hasn't resumed.

Another issue that has surfaced in our political life is the overt proclamation of the United States as exceptional. Peggy Noonan's first critiques of Barack Obama were that he didn't understand what makes America tick. This was elaborated by the conservatives such as Newt Gingrich who said that Barack Obama didn't believe in American Exceptionalism. There has been a small library generated by right-wingers developing this theme with their own peculiar axe to grind. When Barack Obama did use the term American Exceptionalism abroad, he gracefully indicated that other countries might feel they were exceptional. This was not enough. America must be proclaimed by every political leader as The City On The Hill, whether the surrounding village is destroyed on not or whether people are unemployed or not. The issue of American Exceptionalism had always been discussed at seminars with academics and only referred to obliquely in political rhetoric ,which we accept as the American Creed. Actually referring to American Exceptionalism as why the country can not have health care or why the country doesn't have to obey international laws or treaties is a very new thing for me.

The subject of American Exceptionalism has sparked a flood of books in the last year and this coming year. Donald Pease from Dartmouth wrote "The New American Exceptionalism", which traces the history of the idea and reflects how the George W. Bush administration totally warped the idea. Pease notes the other side of the concept. In international law, we recognize states of exception where civil liberties are suspended for a specific time-frame because of insurrrection or war. Pease talks about Bush declares that all of America was a State of Exception in this sense. He introduces the whole idea about the new American view of "exemptionalism". The United States perceives itself as exempt from the international restraints on other nation states. Actually, quite clever. It certainly applies to the whole Patriot Act,and the legalization of torture even though we ratified the Torture Convention and as signatory are duly bound to prosecute the violators, including ourselves.

Godfrey Hodgson, who is a pro-American Brit,wrote "The Myth of American Exceptionalism", which explores the history of the idea and how it stimulated the best America offered in our foreign policy. He starts the book with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., "There can be no deep disappontment where there is no deep love." Hodgson accepts Richard Hofstadter's statement," it has been our fate as a nation not to have an ideology, but to be one." Hodgson ends his book with a few chapters on how the rise of the so-called "neo-conservatives" in the Bush Administration perverted the positive elements of American excpetionalism and committed the ultimate sin for Hodgson of "the corruption of the best."

I was surprised by the wise analysis of Seymour Martin Lipset in his 1995 book "American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword" (re-issued by Norton). This was written toward the end of Bill Clinton's first term and the impetus for writing the book was the worry among policy elites that the United States was being overtaken by....drumroll...Japan. If you read Paul Krugman's columns you will just think about Japan's lost decade and its failure to adopt economic polices to grow out of a deep recession. The idea that Americans felt in the mid-1990s anxiety that Japan, a very aging population, would out perform economically the United States appears ludicrous. But I suspect we'll look back on today as the time the United States felt anxiety about China and wonder as China fragments and becomes unstable where that idea came from.

Since Marty Lipset's book came at a time of peak prosperity on the United States,its analysis of American Exceptionalism has a permanence that runs through today. He does note that neoconservatives are almost all dead and that references to a younger generation ignores the fact that neoconservatives were anti-communist leftists who sometimes were socialists or very liberal in domestic economic policies. He cites Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol and Pat Moynihan but warns against accepting others because the term became a derogatory name used by the Left to demonize others who were not from this class of person. In fact, he would not accept calling the George W. advisers neo-conservatives at all. Point well-taken.

Throughout Lipset's book, he cites decades of polling numbers that show Americans since 1960 have shown a steady distrust of our political institutions. He cites with approval Jimmy Carter's suggestion that this lack of faith in our political institutions threatens our democracy. One poll blew me away since we are talking of the 1990s compared to today and yes, only 8% of Americans then and now approved of the way Congress has been performing. So two years of amazing progressive legislation,so what? Lipset does a superb job of examing the history of this distrust of government as one of the negatives of American exceptionalism.

If you want to know why America has and is the most violent country in the developed world,he shows you. Also, he goes at great length on why Americans lack the social welfare system the Europeans and Canadians do and traces this back to the 19th century and Europe's social conscience--the feeling that governments have an affirmative responsibility to their citizens. Our own history, Lipset argues, works against this concept.

Lipset traces the history of American exceptionalism through DeTocqueville and even Edmund Burke's speech before the British parliament on why Americans are different. On America's religiousity, Lipset is a very acute observer. He notes that we have been conditioned by Christian sects, not churches that really had once been state churches, so that we believe humanity is perfectable and individually we accept an absolutism in morality, which explains things like the temperance league and prohibition. He also sees this as creating problems in foreign policy because we must cast an adversary as "evil". He walks through all the evils we fought in our wars such as "catholic absolutism" in the Mexican War. So it's natural that George W would talk about the "Axis of Evil". The flip side of this is that America and to a lesser degree Great Britain recognize conscientious objection to wars because we believe individuals should determine their own actions by their own conscience. This then accounts for our anti-war movement adopting the same type of absolutism as those waging war.

He takes this moral absolutism into the constant rhetoric we hear today about the unemployed being lazy or the poor don't want to work. in fact, if you read his book, the negatives of American exceptionalism, which he maintains are a comparative sociological fact, are seen in the hyper-rhetoric of the teabaggers. He also points to the progressive period starting with Theodore Roosevelt and lasting through FDR and slightly beyond as a rare interlude in American history, not something that one could expect again. And he is armed with decades of polls that precede Ronald Reagan and run up to Bill Clinton that seem to demonstrate an older pattern of American behavior was returning in terms of values and attitudes about a whole host of social issues.

I don't know whether Lipset is reassuring because America has always been this way or alarming because we can not transcend ourselves to solve our current problems. You get the sense that we have fossilized the notion of American Exceptionalism in the same way the Right has erected our Consitution as an idol and not a living document. And how much of Lipset's analysis would account for the intense reaction of the whites to the demographic changes in our society?

Lipset's career really started with academic studies about why socialism never took root in the United States. He was trying to answer the question that puzzled Marx and Engels and flummoxed European socialists for ever. This led naturally to his study of American Exceptionalism. With this book he makes a genuine contribution to our own self-understanding.

The other thing I want to find out is how and when the George W. Bush Administration started using the term "Empire" to refer to the United States. For years, the Left has used this to refer to almost all our foreign policy but I have never heard an American official ever use this term referring to our efforts abroad. I would humbly suggest alot of what currently is going on probably derives from this "imperial moment" as a Bush diplomat said to the British before the invasion of Iraq. The whole issue of American corporations sitting on $3 trillion and not creating jobs here but abroad. You can argue it's because American corporations have become more efficient and don't need to create jobs but I think there is more to it.

And one other oddball thing I would like to know is why "Fast Eddie" Rendell, when he was Governor of Pennsylvania, believed he could sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Dubai.

This week we get to hear President Obama try to speak to Congress without being heckled. Already the rough outlines of his speech have been tried out and circulated. He's going from his stabilize the economy mode to his expansion mode. I hope he cribs from his Geek speeches where he talks about the future technological advances we need to make in order to survive as a prosperous country. The competitiveness language leads me cold and conjures up corporate America's desire to have under paid workers. As Lipset also pointed out in his book, study after study has demonstrated that the American worker is literally the most productive on the planet. Don't believe otherwise. Hopefully, Obama can find the inspiring language for what he calls the new Sputnik moment.

What's interesting is that while he'll talk about curbing some government spending, he will speak about new government spending on education, technology and infrastructure. That's going to be interesting as the new House doesn't believe in science because we're already exceptional, doesn't believe in education because it's secular and doesn't believe in infrastructure because union workers might get paid.

What is rumored is that Obama will not advocate the findings of the Catfood Commission. He will advocate lowering and reforming corporate taxes--which will be treated by his own supporters as a sell-out and a mark he is a corporatist. In fact, the corporate tax code does need reforming and flattened so companies pay some taxes.

Stay tuned. The joke going around is that the next act of the new House is to reverse all vasectomies.