Lessons From Fidel

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It’s hard to imagine today that Fidel Castro was once a preeminent concern of American foreign policy. But the longer he clung to power, the less important he seemed to become — another failing pretender to the title of “revolutionary.”

It’s a reminder that only the truth lasts. Communism has always and everywhere been a lie, a cover for the age-old lust for absolute power. The boatloads of desperate refugees, eager to share in what Cuban-Americans were building for themselves in America, told the real story.

Democracy and capitalism may not be perfect, but they are based on realistic views of human nature and the way the world works. While other systems crumble, accountable forms of government and market systems of economics make steady inroads.

Foreign policy “realists” now tell us that efforts to implant governments that are reasonably accountable to their people in the Middle East will amount to little more than a doomed sacrifice of American blood and treasure. Like the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam war, Iraq and Afghanistan are said to be examples of imperial overreach.

Maybe they are right. But what needs to be kept in mind is that these are essentially battles in a longer-term war to contain and ultimately defeat the latest “ism” — in this case, Islamic extremism. There has never been a war in which America didn’t make serious mistakes and lose some battles.

The Bay of Pigs, widely considered a disaster for America at the time, was in retrospect Fidel Castro’s high water mark. The Vietnam war, 20-fold more costly than Iraq or Afghanistan, helped buffer Southeast Asia from the temptations of communism — and now Vietnam itself is turning towards freer markets and perhaps even a degree of political liberalization. The Soviet Union itself is gone.

Iraq could descend — one might say descend further — into a hellish war of all against all. But Saddam Hussein’s regime was a war against all but the handful who had the guns. American diplomacy is always dressed in the hope that the blessings of liberty can be extended to all. But it also has a hard-headed side: the need to show the forces of disorder that America is willing to pay a price to defend its own soil and freedom.

No, as far as we know, Saddam wasn’t responsible for Sept. 11. But he was plenty bad enough — and he was the target at the core of the Middle East’s disorders that the decision-makers, not unreasonably, thought we could hit.

Some tough decisions need to be made now. The generals are signaling that either they need more forces and different rules of engagement, or a full-fledged civil war will ensue. The politicians in Washington, fully aware of quavering public opinion, are looking for a way out. Israel is once again front and center, reminding everybody of the broader stakes at issue in the Middle East.

As Margaret Thatcher put it to the first President Bush, this is no time to go wobbly. We may not get a democracy in Iraq, but neither should we cut and run. What is bothering many, perhaps most, Americans about the war in Iraq is not that we are taking casualties but that the Bush administration isn’t serious about winning — or at least producing an outcome consistent with the long-term goal of containing Middle East extremism.

Critics say a policy of containment would have been preferable from the start. But containment only works if the velvet glove is seen to contain a hand of steel. Hitler had no reason to think the democracies would stand up to him. The Kremlin, on the other hand, could see, in the use of the atomic bomb on Japan, the “quagmires” in Korea and Vietnam, and the Cuban missile crisis, that Americans believed freedom was worth defending.

As a result, we managed to contain communism until its fires of extremism had gone out. We may not have gotten democracy in Russia, but what we did get seems far preferable. And who any longer cared about Fidel Castro’s pretensions to “revolution?”

Some day we will be wondering why we cared so much about the nutty Osama bin Laden — but only if we give teeth to containment of the forces of disorder that he represents. And a big part of realism lies in understanding that one doesn’t always get to pick the perfect fight in which to illustrate one’s resolve.

Mr. Bray is a freelance columnist who lives in the Detroit area.


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