The making of a hawk

So yes, some things are as precious as life itself, such as our way of life. The beacons of freedom, justice, equality and human tolerance turn out to be not as inextinguishable as most of us in America grew up thinking. They can be put out, and they're put out in different places all over the world. And when this darkness encroaches too far, we must risk our lives, even our sons' lives, to push it back. America is a light to the world -- even to the ex-Taliban fighters and madrassa students who dream of coming here to live and prosper -- because each generation has been willing to fight to keep it alive, or in the case of many of my generation, to fight their government when they saw it had gone grievously wrong.

When it comes to destroying Osama bin Laden and his holy band of civilian-slaughterers, I'm an ardent Jacksonian. President Bush has it right: pursue them to the ends of the earth, until they're captured or dispatched to their feverishly awaited Paradise. I'm a Wilsonian when it comes to rebuilding Afghanistan and working actively with other countries in the region like Iran, India and Pakistan to promote peace and democracy. (And so far Bush's team seems to have it right here as well. Memo to right-wingers who still oppose nation-building: Check out the American eagle on the presidential seal -- it clutches arrows in one of its talons and an olive branch in the other.) And I'm a Jeffersonian when it comes to vigilantly defending civil liberties at home, which from Cicero's day to our own always come under threat in wartime. Here I part sharp company with the administration.

As Mead observes, the interplay between America's four schools of foreign policy thinking has made the country strong throughout our history. It is this supple give and take that has bestowed the "special providence" on our country that, Otto von Bismark remarked, God reserved "for fools, drunks and the United States of America." Yes, we might have ended up like the French during World War II without the Jacksonians' warrior spirit, but the republic might have completely shattered during Vietnam or slid into a nuclear war if the Jeffersonians had not finally forced the government out of it. There are surely many other Americans like me, who while firmly in one camp, continue to draw guidance from the others.

To his credit, for instance, New York Times columnist William Safire tempers his Jacksonianism with a principled commitment to Jeffersonian liberties. His opposition to Bush's assault on the rule of law since Sept. 11 has been among the most eloquent and impassioned from the press. Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan has also broken ranks with his political comrades on some issues since the war began, endorsing the Bush administration's modified Wilsonianism as it "has improvised an imaginative if precarious series of bilateral and trilateral alliances, each designed to solve a particular problem" arising out of the fight with terrorism. Sullivan has also acutely recognized the "theocon" element of the Republican base represented by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as a growing problem for the GOP since Sept. 11. "It is hard to fight a war against politico-religious extremism if you are winking at milder versions in your own political coalition," he noted in a smart essay on "The War and the Right" in the New Republic. "In a war with terrorist theocracy, America's political secularism -- allied with its civil religiosity -- seems one of the Constitution's sterling achievements, and not one that many Americans would want unraveled any time soon."

As the war in Afghanistan draws to an end -- hopefully with the imminent capture or demise of the al-Qaida leadership -- America faces its next global decision. Should we follow through on President Bush's ambitious call for an all-out war on terrorism, in particular seeking to destroy once and for all Saddam's regime? Or will this Jacksonian impulse to escalate the war cost too much blood and sorrow for an already extended Fortress America?

Mead would counsel that the Iraq debate should occur within a broader and long overdue national discussion about the global role of America. Ever since the decline of the British Empire following World War II, the U.S. has served, in Col. House's phrase, as "the gyroscope of world order." But many Americans have not fully appreciated the costs of running a global system, says Mead -- although it came home for us on Sept. 11. "Blackhawk Down," the new movie based on Mark Bowden's bestseller, surely raises the same question for the American public: When is it appropriate for the U.S. to use its troops? Certainly, Somalia teaches us, not when our soldiers are being used as nation-builders in a country gripped by warlords and chaos. Or does it? Afghanistan appeared to many skeptics to be the same dark alley. And yet in this case the majority of the country, after 20 years of fighting and tyranny, turned out to be more than ready to be relieved of its agony, even under the shuddering impact of American bombs.

Serving as the world's only superpower need not be the thicket of a thousand piercing thorns that Mead and other Jeffersonians fear. In truth, the U.S. has been very discriminating about where it has intervened in the past decade or so. As Mead acknowledges, the Pentagon itself has become a bastion of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian thinking, the two schools most reluctant to stick their noses in the world's business. The only clear example of an intervention debacle during these years has, in fact, been Somalia.

But even as I write these words, the drums of war are growing loud again, sounding out "Baghdad." And my first response to them comes from my Jeffersonian past: not again, not another war; when will Americans finally get to lay down their military burden, why should it be up to us to relieve the world of one more evil dictator, is he really the horseman of the apocalypse the war drummers say he is? The drums quieted briefly as America celebrated Peace on Earth. But they're beating again, and Americans will soon have to decide whether to heed them.

Coming soon: Part 2, Iraq

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