Chicago Sun Times
June 2, 2005
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST >
Over the last two years, I have found increasing
numbers of conservatives deeply concerned by U.S. military intervention in Iraq.
They voted for and admire President Bush, but were profoundly disturbed by his
second inaugural address pledging to spread democracy worldwide. Now, there is
an important new book that eloquently puts in perspective their alarms about
America's course in the post-Cold War world.
Sands of Empire by Robert W. Merry, a respected
Washington journalist, warns of the United States as the ''Crusader State''
transporting American exceptionalism around the world. The book, to be published
this month, contends this crusade threatens ''the American Republic, the
greatest civic achievement in the history of mankind.''
This is no anti-Bush political screed seeking Democratic gain
and Republican loss in Iraq's casualty lists. Merry over the years has been an
objective journalist but considers himself a conservative and is said by friends
to be a Republican who voted for Bush. What worries Merry is that Bush mixes the
moralism of Woodrow Wilson and the exceptionalism of Theodore Roosevelt to
produce fatal U.S. global ambitions.
Merry, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is president and
publisher of Congressional Quarterly -- which seeks cool objectivity rather than
passionate advocacy. He is neither foreign policy expert nor political
philosopher. His last book, the well-reviewed Taking on the World: Joseph
and Stewart Alsop, was a reporter's work. Sands of Empire
uses others' reporting and scholarship and melds it into a cogent argument.
He begins by presenting opposing concepts of Progress (with a
capital P) as an eternal verity in the West against cyclic theories of
civilization. The Progress ideal, Merry contends, was behind two seminal works
following the Cold War. The End of History, an essay by political
scientist Francis Fukuyama, asserted the universal triumph of Western democratic
capitalism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's book, The Lexus and
the Olive Tree, heralded the triumph of globalization.
Against these visions of Progress came Harvard political
scientist Samuel P. Huntington's much criticized 1993 essay, ''The Clash of
Civilizations.'' It portrayed history as not having ended and globalization as
not having triumphed. This, Merry writes, showed the West in conflict not just
with Islamist ''evil-doers'' but with Islam itself.
Two American presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, failed
to perceive the nature of this conflict -- leading to what Merry paints as
blundering, arrogant interventionism. ''Moralistic impulses'' by Clinton led to
favoring the Muslims in the Balkans with a bombing campaign. Merry accuses
Bush's Iraqi intervention of ''taking his military into the heart of Islam and
planting his country's flag into the soil of a foreign culture based on flimsy
perceptions of a national threat.''
Merry is hard on neo-conservatives generally and fellow
journalist William Kristol in particular. He accuses Kristol of ''agitations on
behalf of American hegemony and the export of Western democracy throughout the
world.''
Merry is not a liberal who denies the United States is at war
beyond Iraq, and in fact describes our position as hazardous. ''The West is in
decline,'' he writes. Masked though that decline is by U.S. economic and
military power, he adds, ''no longer can 'the West' dictate the course of world
events as in days of yore.''
Merry knows neo-conservatives want the government to target
Syria and Iran. He says attempted destabilization of the Iranian theocracy would
be a ''disaster,'' thwarting the country's internal impulses toward democracy.
''America has neither the troop strength nor the will to carry out any reckless
plan to take on nations such as Syria and Iran.''
Merry's closely argued thesis does not fit either Republican or
Democratic talking points. His calls for Western unity and protection of
unpopular regimes in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan from Islamist insurgents do not
fit any American political agenda. But his thesis is worth consideration when he
concludes that America, in assuming its ''heady new role as Crusader State . . .
would no longer be the nation our founders created and that has thrived so
brilliantly and wonderfully upon the earth for the past 200 years.''
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