Doesn’t it Seem Like We’ve Been Here Before?

To date, Vietnam has been the antiwar left’s favorite analogy for Iraq. “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,” Senator Kennedy declared in April.Paul Krugman fueled the comparison by saying Iraq was worse than Vietnam. Thus did Fallujah come to be viewed as a new Tet Offensive or, perhaps, a slower, more grueling American Dien Bien Phu. But John B. Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic and an avowed opponent of the war, presents what he thinks is an apter and more instructive analogy in his new book, “The Folly of Empire” (Scribner, 245 pages, $24). The year is 1898, the country is the Philippines, and the characters to watch are Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.As in Iraq, the American experience in the Philippines was one of quick and surprisingly easy victory followed by bloody postwar insurrection and weariness of imperial responsibility at home. Even the timelines are uncannily similar, Mr. Judis shows: Back then, war was formally declared in April 1898 and the enemy, Spain, was routed by the end of June. By December, however, revolutionaries had begun targeting American forces, and a guerrilla war ensued.McKinley’s war, which lasted nearly four years and consumed much of his successor Roosevelt’s energies, roiled American opinion much as Iraq does today. War was a major campaign issue, and intellectuals duked it out on the sidelines. Mr. Judis likens the pro-war clique known as the Lafayette Square group – which included Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan – to today’s neocons, while opponents in the academy gathered to voice their opposition to the war.He doesn’t make the comparison, but the members of the American Anti-Imperialist League were the Howard Deaniacs of the day, with Andrew Carnegie as George Soros and Mark Twain as a slimmer and cleverer Michael Moore. (The analogy can be taken too far, obviously, which Mr. Judis avoids). From Harvard, philosopher William James said annexing the Philippines would end “the one sacred thing in the world” (Philippine self-determination, apparently).What concerns Mr. Judis most is to show the sobering effect the war seems to have had upon Theodore Roosevelt, and the emboldening effect it had upon Woodrow Wilson’s multilateralism and anti-imperialism. Roosevelt, Mr. Judis reminds us, recanted his early enthusiasm for war and expressed regret at the acquisition of new territories. “I am bound to say that in the physical sense I don’t see where they are of any value or use,” he wrote Secretary of War William Howard Taft in 1907 – a far cry from the Rough Rider most conservatives know and love.Wilson, meanwhile, initially wavered on the question of the Philippines, first warming to American actions there but then growing firmer in his convictions against them. In 1904, he told a New Jersey audience that Americans had shown the Filipinos “the way to liberty without plundering them or making them our tools for a selfish end.” But he changed his tune before long and began decrying imperialism in the years leading up to his presidency. By the time of the failed American intervention in the Mexican Revolution at Veracruz in 1914, Wilson was the leading voice worldwide for collective security and national self-determination.Mr. Judis is an unabashed Wilsonian, a supporter of collective security arrangements like the United Nations. He praises George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton for their multilateral deference, and all but declares the 1990s the golden age of world affairs. He basks in the humbling of Roosevelt and his ambitions for “national greatness” in the aftermath of the Philip pine War. He wants President Bush to learn from Iraq the lessons the two presidents learned from the Philippines: to see, as Roosevelt did, that remaking a country in our own image is exceedingly difficult.Mr. Judis is surely correct to point out that the United States has a mixed track record. Most of our successful interventions, prominently those in Germany and Japan, took place with multilateral support – a fact he is at pains to emphasize. He wants President Bush to take collective security and international organizations like the United Nations more seriously, AND decries the rejection of the Kyoto treaty and the International Criminal Court as needlessly disdainful of goodwill overseas.Surely the Bush administration could take some lessons on diplomacy, whatever the merits of the international projects of the moment happen to be. But it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the Iraq-Philippine similarities that don’t lend themselves as easily to Mr. Judis’s argument.By the time war broke out in the Philippines, Japanese imperialism with its “Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” had already gone on the march. The Japanese had wrested Taiwan from Chinese hands in 1895,and would go on to conquer Korea in 1905. The emperor had designs on Manila; so did the Germans. Mr. Judis doesn’t say it explicitly, but he suggests the war over the Philippines was the United States’s first “war of choice.” It may have seemed as much at the time, but in retrospect the Allies were no doubt glad that Japanese expansionism had been artificially curbed a few decades earlier than it otherwise would have been.Likewise, absent American action, Iraq may well have ended up aiding a nuclear and terrorist equivalent to the advancing Japanese armies. Yes, the Bush administration’s rationale – that Ba’athist Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction – turned out to be deeply flawed. But no one denies Saddam intended to acquire them, nor that he had cordial relations with Al Qaeda, however perfunctory they were, and with North Korea. Better to end his treachery than allow him to arrive at obvious conclusions about whom his natural allies were.A foreign policy that adheres only to Mr. Judis’s Wilsonian precepts dooms a country to aimlessness, ineffectuality, and the predatorship of whomever the fascist Germanys and imperial Japans happen to be at the moment. Collective security withers without unilateral muscle, as it did during the 1990s, the decade Mr. Judis points to with such hope. Whether the Bush administration finds the proper middle ground between the unreformed Roosevelt Mr. Judis detests and the mature Woodrow Wilson he loves remains to be seen. But Mr. Judis has done a valuable service in reminding us that we have been in – and through – this “quagmire” before.

Doesn’t it Seem Like We’ve Been Here Before?

Doesn’t it Seem Like We’ve Been Here Before?

More from the New York Sun

A Muddled ‘Real Ivanov’ Strains for Modern Resonance

Did Eve Arden Live the Life Sylvia Plath Desired?

Washington Slow To Tackle a Brewing Crisis, as America’s Most Powerful Mideast Allies, Turkey and Israel, Lock Horns

Hasan Piker’s Mockery of Charlie Kirk Updates Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ for the Podcast Era

WNBA Rejects Draft Bid From Former NBA Players, Calling Intentions a ‘Publicity Stunt’

Roni Ben-Hur’s Stylish Latin Jazz Entente

Finding the Altalena

The Rent Freeze Case Moves to Manhattan

More from the New York Sun

A Muddled ‘Real Ivanov’ Strains for Modern Resonance

Did Eve Arden Live the Life Sylvia Plath Desired?

Washington Slow To Tackle a Brewing Crisis, as America’s Most Powerful Mideast Allies, Turkey and Israel, Lock Horns

Hasan Piker’s Mockery of Charlie Kirk Updates Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ for the Podcast Era

WNBA Rejects Draft Bid From Former NBA Players, Calling Intentions a ‘Publicity Stunt’

Roni Ben-Hur’s Stylish Latin Jazz Entente

Finding the Altalena

The Rent Freeze Case Moves to Manhattan