Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
more just? Geography, distance, our own horrendous experience in the jungles of the Phil-
ippines in another irregular war six decades previously at the turn of the twentieth century
were the last things in people's minds when we entered Vietnam.
Vietnam is an analogy that thrives following national trauma. For realism is not exciting.
It is respected only after the seeming lack of it has made a situation demonstrably worse.
Indeed, just look at Iraq, with almost five thousand American dead (and with over thirty
thousand seriously wounded) and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, at a cost
of over a trillion dollars. Even were Iraq to evolve into a semi-stable democracy and an
implicit ally of the United States, the cost has been so excessive that, as others have noted,
it is candidly difficult to see the ethical value in the achievement. Iraq undermined a key
element in the mind-set of some: that the projection of American power always had a moral
result. But others understood that the untamed use of power by any state, even a freedom-
loving democratic one like America, was not necessarily virtuous.
Concomitant with a new respect for realism came renewed interest in the seventeenth-
century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who extols the moral benefits of fear and sees violent
anarchy as the chief threat to society. For Hobbes, fear of violent death is the cornerstone of
enlightened self-interest. By establishing a state, men replace the fear of violent death—an
all-encompassing, mutual fear—with the fear that only those who break the law need face.
Such concepts are difficult to grasp for the urban middle class, who have long since lost any
which, unlike Rwanda and Bosnia in some respects, was not the result of a singularly or-
ganized death machine, but of the very breakdown of order, allowed many of us to imagine
man's original state. Hobbes thus became the philosopher of this second cycle of the Post
Cold War, just as Berlin had been of the first.
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And so this is where the Post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very to-
talitarianism that we fought against in the decades following World War II might, in quite a
few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things
worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say
this as someone who supported regime change.
In March 2004, I found myself in Camp Udari in the midst of the Kuwait desert. I had em-
bedded with a Marine battalion that, along with the rest of the 1st Marine Division, was
about to begin the overland journey to Baghdad and western Iraq, replacing the Army's
82nd Airborne Division there. It was a world of tents, pallets, shipping containers, and
chow halls. Vast lines of seven-ton trucks and Humvees stretched across the horizon, all
headed north. The epic scale of America's involvement in Iraq quickly became apparent.
A sandstorm had erupted. There was an icy wind. Rain threatened. Vehicles broke down.
And we hadn't even begun the several-hundred-kilometer journey to Baghdad that a few
