Grow Antennae,
Not Horns
(The American President: Part II)
By Mohammad Ashraf
Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
Nobody remembers the third President of the United
States of America, Thomas Jefferson, (1801-1809)
for greeting the ambassadors in his pajamas; history
remembers him for drafting the Declaration of
Independence, for establishing the principle of
religious freedom, and for separating the church
from the state. These three sterling gifts of
his outshine America’s all moon- landings
and all military might. Historians, however, also
look towards him for a different reason: a Presidential
trendsetter. They refer to his two-term Presidency
as Jeffersonian Model.
Perhaps the most versatile of the founding fathers,
Jefferson is also remembered for his unwavering
faith in the capacity of the people to govern
themselves through representative institutions,
and in his own ability to use the presidential
executive powers as defined in the constitution
to the fullest extent. And there is a whole list
of the succeeding Presidents who have gladly followed
his action-oriented model of Presidency. Andrew
Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, F.
D. Roosevelt and our current President are just
a few names in that list.
Presidents who have exercised restraint and have
adhered to the denoted Executive Powers in the
Constitution are known to have followed a different
presidential pattern: the Madisonian model, set
by the fourth President, James Madison (1809-1817).
William Taft, Martin Van Buren, Jimmy Carter and
the senior Bush are said to be a part of that
list. Presidents following the Jeffersonian model
have been more popular and more consequential
than the presidents of the Madisonian model. Americans
love to see the man they elect in somewhat John
Wayne’s role, a Super Cop, a James Bond.
It is, however, interesting to note what John
Quincy Adams, (1825-1829), as Secretary of State,
on the forty-eighth’s anniversary of independence
said, with regard to America’s role in the
world politics.
“America does not go abroad in search of
monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to
the freedom and independence of all. She is the
champion and vindicator only of her own. She will
recommend the general cause by the countenance
of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her
own example. She well knows that by once enlisting
under banners other than her own, were they even
the banners of foreign independence; she would
involve herself beyond the power of extrication,
in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual
avarice, envy, ambition, which assumed the colors
and usurped the standards of freedom. …she
might become the dictatress of the world. She
would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit”.
These words spoken on 4th of July in 1821 sum
up graphically America’s dilemma as of today.
Entangled in the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq
in the search of monsters, America virtually has
landed itself in a situation in which it finds
“herself beyond the power of extrication”.
Hunts for ‘Monsters’ abroad and the
desire to champion the cause of democracy for
foreign peoples whose culture, politics, and society
America did not understand, has actually landed
America in a slippery and bottomless pit that
has very few way outs. In the words of the writer
of, ‘Imperial Hubris’, America is
inflicting defeat on itself by venturing abroad
to perform such impossible jobs as, “nation-building
in Iraq and Afghanistan; regime change in Liberia,
Burma, Haiti, and Zimbabwe; and westernizing and
secularizing the most strongly held beliefs of
the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims - from their
concept of war, to charitable giving, to school
curricula - Secretary Adams’s words, his
warning really, seem more appropriate and needed
in 2003 (in 2007 as well) than they did in 1821”.
Success becomes a by-gone word in conflicts in
which people begin to fight, what Adams calls,
“wars of interest and intrigue, of individual
avarice, envy, and ambition”. Add to it
the sectarian hatred and personal vendetta, if
you may. Developments in Afghanistan and Iraq
have all the above and much more.
Though the Jews were being butchered in Europe,
yet America took three years to decide to jump
into the Second World War, and that too after
it was attacked directly; America couldn’t
save Cambodia from itself; America didn’t
do much to save the 800,000 Rwandans; America
waited for four years while ethnic cleaning remained
the main business of the Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia;
Congo waited for ever for the Americans to come
for their help; Pakistan, a close ally of America
had to fight three wars with India on Kashmir
dispute in the hope that America would directly
intervene and help settle this crisis; America
never sent any troops to Southern Sudan during
the period of its civil war that lasted for two
decades and that claimed more than a million lives;
the Afghan people who had fought America’s
proxy war in Afghanistan and had defeated the
Soviets waited for the Americans to come and stop
the warlords who had inflicted a civil war on
them. Philip Gourevitch in his article, “Just
Watching”, published in The New Yorker,
June 12, 2006, cites these examples, stating :
“… it has never been the American
way to venture abroad to stop mass slaughter by
force”. Why then no restraint was exercised
when it came to invading Afghanistan and Iraq?
Who precisely prodded the President to do so?
James Monroe, (1817-1825), the 5th president once
was seen chasing his Secretary of the Treasury
in the middle of a heated argument “out
of the White House with a pair of fire tongs”,
reports Cormac O Brien, in his lively book, Secret
Lives of the US Presidents. The American people
regret for not seeing such a scene though in the
words of Bob Woodward, Secretary of State, Colin
Powell had emphatically told the President repeatedly
not to pay any serious attention to what some
of his advisers were telling him with regard to
the invasion of Iraq. In his new book, “State
of Denial”, he reveals that at the urging
of Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld, “the
most frequent outside visitor and Iraq adviser
to President Bush has been former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, who, haunted still by the
loss in Vietnam, emerges as a hidden and potent
voice”. The current World Bank Chief, Paul
Wolfowitz, had been another important person who
like many others wanted the invasion of Iraq take
place, “now”, rather than later. The
president magnanimously takes the blame on himself
when he says, “Mistakes have been made in
the past, and the responsibility rests with me”.
Why should this responsibility not rest with these
pundits and advisers, and especially with Henry
Kissinger whom Oriana Fallaci, somewhat harshly,
calls, “unshakable as a rock”, “indestructible
as a cancer”? and, “beside whom James
Bond becomes a flavorless creation”. Was
he really a “mental wet nurse” to
President Bush as he was to President Ford?
Oriana Fallaci while interviewing Henry Kissinger
in 1972 asked him a blunt question, “You
are not a pacifist, are you?” He was honest
in his reply, “No. I really don’t
think I’m…I don’t agree with
any pacifists”. The legendary Secretary
of State had never been against the Vietnam war….how
could he be against the invasion of Iraq or against
any impending attack on Iran or Syria in the near
future? In the words of Bob Woodward, “For
Kissinger, Iraq was the Vietnam sequel”.
He reports on page 408, in early September 2005,
Mike Gerson went to see Kissinger in New York
City and asked him, “Why did you support
the Iraq War?” “Because Afghanistan
wasn’t enough”. In the conflict with
radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate
us, “And we need to humiliate them”.
In the process of humiliating “radical Muslims”,
they ended up humiliating the entire lot of 1.3
billion Muslims. Slogans like they hate us for
our progress, are envious of our democracy; their
Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad prod them for
violence; they are endemically evil; it is a clash
between the East and the West, it is clash of
Civilizations etc. Less than fourteen hundred
Al-Queda members who had engineered the 9/11 tragedy,
today have succeeded in dragging a Super Power
into an endless war, and this is exactly what
Osama and his deputies might have planned. Thucydides
like Kissinger never believed that “the
United States, and its policies and actions, are
bin Laden’s only indispensable allies”.
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