Bush's "moral clarity"

Increasingly, the war talk emanating from Washington and in the media has taken on the tone of a moral crusade. Reminding us that Saddam Hussein had dumped poison gas and visited unspeakable tortures on Iraq's own people, President Bush exclaimed in his State of the Union address: "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning!" Writing in The Wall Street Journal of Jan. 20, 2003, Lawrence L. Kaplan (senior editor at the New Republic) and William Kristol (editor of the conservative Weekly Standard) explain that the president "intends to liberate Iraq by force, and create democracy in a land that for decades has known only dictatorships." It is all said to be the product of a new "moral clarity" in American foreign policy.

On its face, this is touching stuff: An America president spending the U.S. taxpayer's dollars and possibly some Americans' blood to liberate the downtrodden in Iraq. Yet, I have trouble imagining President George W. Bush and his entourage of veterans of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, lounging on the porch of the president's Crawford Ranch, all having a joint epiphany from which they emerged as newborn moral claritists. After all, many of these folk have fascinating resumés. Not too long ago they had pooh-poohed as naïve President Jimmy Carter's idea to let concern over human rights drive U.S. policy abroad. To them, then self-proclaimed "realists," only national interests mattered — oil, commerce, military bases and the like.

"Moral clarity" in U.S. foreign policy meant to President Carter that the U.S. should look askance at torturers of any stripe, even the friendly (to us), right-wing, military dictators in Chile and Argentina who routinely tortured political opponents and made them disappear without a trace and, of course, Saddam Hussein. In 1979, President Carter placed Saddam Hussein's Iraq on a list of terrorist nations, which prohibited the sale to Iraq of many U.S. made goods that could strengthen Iraq militarily.

Carter's "moral clarity" was dispatched to storage when the "realists" under presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. took over in 1981. Professor Jean Kirkpatrick, serving as President Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations, famously proposed a workable dichotomy of tyrants: the intolerable Marxist totalitarians on the left vs. the tolerable military dictators on the right. With the latter, thought the "realists," a humane society such as the United States could do business after all, both commercially and diplomatically, as long as their tyrannical ways served American national interests. Saddam Hussein, even then well known as a torturer and user of poison gas, was thought to be one such dictator.

Google, if you wish, George Shultz, Iraq, 1980s or Rumsfeld, to get a reading list on this era. In November of 1983, then Secretary of State George P. Shultz reportedly was told that Iraqi troops used chemical weapons almost daily in its then raging war with Iran. Whatever Mr. Shultz may have thought of that information, it did not stop the Reagan administration from subsequently dispatching as a special envoy to Iraq then private citizen Donald Rumsfeld, for the purpose of establishing full diplomatic relations with the well-known butcher and poisoner of Iraq. Shortly thereafter, Iraq was removed from the list of terrorist nations, and the butcher began to do a brisk business with American business firms. They sold him chemicals, high-tech equipment with dual civilian-military uses, and cluster bombs through a Chilean front. As the staunchly conservative Washington Times reported only recently (Oct. 1, 2002) "Iraq's bioweapons program, which President Bush wants to eradicate, got its start with the help from Uncle Sam two decades ago." According to government documents cited in the story, during the 1980s the U.S. Centers of Disease Control sold to Iraq "strains of all of the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene." Finally, under the "realist" policies of that era American taxpayers were made to guarantee some $4 billion of agricultural and other commercial loans, kindly extended by the "realist" U.S. administrations of the era to the butcher of Iraq.

Indeed, even after President Bush Sr. had described Saddam Hussein as "worse than Hitler" (before the onset of the first Gulf War), U.S. policy vis a vis Iraq continued to follow the moral principle of "realism." In their previously cited commentary, Kaplan and Kristol remind us that "once Kuwait was liberated, the Bush [Sr.] team redirected its energies toward insuring Iraq 'stability' — even if it had to be enforced by Saddam Hussein. He proceeded to slaughter thousands of Iraqi civilians who Mr. Bush [Sr.] had exhorted to revolt, but to whom the U.S. now turned a blind eye."

Against this backdrop, this little country economist from rural New Jersey may be forgiven for harboring some doubts on the "moral clarity" said to have befallen this motley crew of erstwhile "realists" (current Vice President and then Secretary of Defense Cheney included). There just has to be a better theory to explain their current thinking. If I had to bet, I would put my markers not on a new "moral clarity," but on a form of "realism" more concisely defined as real-estatism. I shall be happy to explain this much more plausible politico-economic theory in a subsequent commentary.

Uwe E. Reinhardt is a professor in the Wilson School.