This essay is part of the ongoing American Security Project series, Iraq: Lessons Learned [1]. Read more essays in this series here [2].
By The Honorable Gary Hart [3]
October 24, 2007
The Founders of the United States knew what they were doing when they created a Republic. From their extensive knowledge of Athens and Rome, they knew a republic to be based on the sovereignty of the people, to involve civic duty, to demand resistance to the corruption of special interests, and to require a sense of the commonwealth. Equally important, they knew that, throughout history, a republic could not also be an empire.
Had we been more aware of our history and the culture of the republic, we could have avoided the temptations of empire the invasion of Iraq represented. Despite grand rhetoric about bringing democracy to the Middle East, it was clear from the outset that the architects of the Iraq invasion had in mind to make an American-friendly Iraq our political and military base in the region. And from that base we would bring contentious neighbors such as Iran and Syria to heel, promote our political and economic institutions and values throughout the region, and go a long way toward protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies.
As our European allies could have
told us from their largely bitter experiences in the business of colonialism, it is not always so easy. There is, first of all, the requirement that the post-invasion government of the host nation remain friendly, that it tolerate a long-term American military presence and civilian oversight of its administration, and that it acquiesce in the use of its territory as an American fiefdom. The Iraqis had almost three decades of this experience with the British and it had not worked out well for either party.
As happened in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War a century earlier, it has taken a five year occupation of a hostile nation to remind ourselves of the price of empire and the reason why our Founders were so adamant that we were and should remain a republic. In the long history of nations, one might observe that learning this lesson once every hundred years or so is acceptable, if it weren’t for the costs and consequences: more than 30,000 American casualties, the transformation of Iraq into a recruiting and training ground for terrorists, and the incalculable damage to American relations in the Islamic world and elsewhere.
Were the theory of winning a “war on terrorism” by invading every nation that harbored terrorists to be taken seriously, we would have been required to invade quite a lot of nations, including some very friendly to us. It is not so easy, and one suspects that those who concocted the grand imperial scheme for Iraq were never serious about this. Instead, they had other agendas they did not trust the American people enough to reveal.
We will have our hands full for quite some time trying to tame a tribal society in Afghanistan enough to keep al Qaeda at bay and the Taliban in its caves. The sooner we abandon the naïve and dangerous imperial venture in Iraq, the sooner we can get on with it, and the sooner we can remind ourselves that we are not and never should be an imperial power and that we salute the flag of a republic.
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Senator Gary Hart is the Chairman of the American Security Project. He served the State of Colorado in the United States Senate and was a member of the Committee on Armed Services during his tenure. Senator Hart was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984. He was co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the Twenty First Century, otherwise known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, an effort which warned of the danger of attacks on the U.S. homeland. He also co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations task force on homeland security, which released a major report entitled “America – Still Unprepared, Still in Danger.” He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Oxford University and is the author of The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons (2006).