READER'S WRITE

GOP ADOPTS FDR'S VISION FOR AMERICA'S PLACE IN THE WORLD

War in Iraq would further democracy, end Saddam’s slaughter

By Ric Medrow

Amid all the clamor of debate over Iraq, we often lose sight of the perspective of history. This is a war that, before the debacle of Vietnam, Democrats would have supported. Lest we be blinded by the recent memories and supposed lessons of the last war, we would do well to remember the lessons of all of twentieth century history.

The liberal tradition of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy is forward looking and optimistic. It is a proud tradition that extols America’s virtues and defends the oppressed. It is a tradition uncomfortable with war but ready to fight to end the bloodshed of evil dictators.

Looking back to the debate leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, one sees a series of debates and arguments that is stunningly reminiscent of today’s debate over Iraq.

FDR had fought for years for greater American involvement in the European conflict. While war between dictatorship and Democracy raged, Americans were reluctant to enter the conflict. Republicans like Senator Robert Taft worried that America was being dragged into war by an “imperial president.”

According to historian Alonzo Hamby, Taft believed before Pearl Harbor that war would tear American society apart and ruin our economy, which had not yet recovered from the Depression. After Pearl Harbor many Republicans believed that the United States should make war only on Japan, which had attacked us, and ignore the Germans who hadn’t. FDR pointed out that the two powers were inextricably linked in the same Axis of Evil, which the Nazis would confirm several days later by declaring war on the United States.

Taft went so far as to write to his wife in the summer of 1940 that: “I am very pessimistic about the future of our country. We are certainly being dragged towards war and bankruptcy and socialism all at once.” On the floor of the Senate, he said: “War is even worse than a German victory.” Replace the words socialism with fascism and German with Iraqi and the rhetoric is starkly similar to what we hear from some Democrats today.

FDR was, of course, not a Socialist. And German victory would have meant final completion of the Final Solution. More than 13 million Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, Gypsies and others were slaughtered before the first concentration camp was liberated by a platoon of American black soldiers.

Nearly the same thing is happening in Iraq today. Hitler needed an enemy to unite his people and he found one in the Jews. Saddam doesn’t need to create an enemy. But he seems to find them anyway. Saddam took power at gunpoint and he hasn’t stopped killing since. All of Saddam’s enemies have been targets for Saddam. In their turn, the Israelis, Kurds, Shiites, Iranians and Kuwaitis have been slaughtered. The Swamp Arabs were killed to a man, woman and child. Saddam did to the Swamp Arabs what Hitler intended for the Jews. He completed his mission of genocide. He has tortured children and forced parents to watch. He has made tomorrow’s victims eat their last meal off of today’s corpses. So many people does Saddam slaughter that he needs a warehouse full of butchers’ hooks on which to hang the victims of his torture at the Abu Ghaib prison. More than a million innocent people have died at the hands of Saddam and his Baath Party. How do we know all of this? It has all been carefully reported by John F. Burns in the New York Times, hardly a bastion of conservatism. America, too, is Saddam’s enemy. Do we expect somehow that we will be spared his depredations?

I sympathize with the protesters who do not like the killing that war will bring. But the killing will not end until the murderer is removed from power.

I find the French and German objections to war on moral and historical grounds to be sickening. I lived for two years in Europe – in Zurich and Prague. I was stunned when I first arrived in Switzerland to see the ubiquitous Swastika graffiti painted on the rail stations and bridges. What was, perhaps, even more surprising was that it wasn’t just the angry young who engaged in such hatred. One couldn’t attend a party in Zurich without hearing complaints about the Jews, the Gypsies, the Turks and the other auslanders – the hated foreigners. The streets of central Europe are still alive with the shouts of “Auslander raus! Outlander out!” Germany still refuses citizenship to people who do not have German blood, even people who were born in Germany and speak only German.

The European coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a different one than we see reported on FOX and CNN. On European television, Palestinian homes are destroyed by the Israeli government daily. But the carnage wrought by Palestinian homicide bombers goes unreported.

The French showed their true colors in their national elections last year when Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front finished second in the French presidential election. Remember, the Nazis never finished better than second in German elections in the 1930s. And this is not an anomaly. With Le Pen’s dire warnings of the threat to French life from North African immigration, he pushed his share of the presidential vote up from 0.74% in 1974 to 14% in 1988 and 15% in 1995.

The Europeans simply haven’t learned the lessons of the 1930s, about appeasement of evil dictators but, perhaps more importantly, about human rights and the rights of minorities.

The FDR tradition stands in stark contrast. Just prior to Pearl Harbor, 25 percent of Americans supported American intervention in Europe. About 25 percent were opposed, while 50 percent supported some kind of compromise. In spite of the polls, FDR dragged America slowly toward war. He believed that America must do whatever it could to bring the blessings of its values and traditions to the rest of the world. He believed that Four Freedoms – speech, worship, from want and from fear – should be guaranteed to all people in the world.

It is an optimistic and activist vision that Democrats shared by presidents from Wilson to Kennedy. But it is a tradition that we Republicans have inherited. From the Roosevelt of the Right, Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush – the vision thing for America’s place in the world is now articulated most forcefully by Republicans.

Surely, the business of UN resolutions will be decided based upon the nitty-gritty of weapons of mass destruction, weapons inspections and our bilateral relationships with countries like Mexico, Pakistan and Cameroon.

But anyone who watched George W. Bush well up with tears at Ground Zero knows that such things matter little to him. People matter. Children matter. It is what Bush means when he talks about Compassionate Conservatism. Call him simple if you wish. But he is simple in the tradition of great American presidents – a tradition the Democrats once called their own.

Medrow ran unsuccessfully against Frank Pallone as the Republican nominee for Congress in the sixth district, garnering 31 percent of the vote. He is an adjunct professor of history at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn.