THE WANDERER, June 26, 2003
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Why We Fought
Rush Limbaugh is gloating again. It turns out that
the looting of Baghdad's great museum was much less
serious than first reported; all but a handful of the
thousands of treasures believed missing were preserved or
have been recovered. For Limbaugh this is further
confutation of the war's opponents and further
confirmation of the righteousness of the war.
This is a curious argument. The Bush administration
did nothing to protect the museum; it didn't deny the
early reports, but dismissed them as unimportant. And
Limbaugh's first reaction to those reports was to mock
the value of the treasures that were thought lost and
destroyed. Whatever the outcome, his crassness is a
matter of record. He was willing to defend the
administration even if the worst was true.
Such responses illustrate the difference between a
visceral right-winger and a genuine conservative. The
former, typified by NATIONAL REVIEW and THE WEEKLY
STANDARD,is an apologist for war. The true conservative,
though he may accept war as a tragic necessity at times,
regards it with foreboding and a sense of loss, never
with enthusiasm. All political enthusiasm is against his
grain. His patriotism doesn't preclude skepticism about
his rulers; even the most venerable institutions, he
knows, are bound to be administered by men flawed by
original sin.
Right-wingers are still defending the Iraq war, even
though its chief rationale -- Iraq's supposed weapons of
mass destruction -- have failed to surface. They have two
answers to this. One is that the weapons may have been
hidden or removed from Iraq (some insist, with President
Bush, that they will eventually be found); the other is
that the mass graves of Saddam Hussein's victims justify
the war by themselves. Of course this second reason was
never actually given as a reason for going to war. We
were constantly reminded that Hussein was a remarkably
vicious tyrant, from whom the Iraqi people deserved to be
liberated; but the war was supposed to be defending the
United States against an external and imminent threat, as
part of a war on terrorism.
It all began with the 9/11 attacks. These quickly
led to all sorts of wild charges against Iraq -- that it
was harboring terrorists, sharing WMDs with them, and so
forth. Skepticism about these charges was shouted down.
The drive for war took on a life of its own --
spearheaded by the "neoconservatives" who had sought to
destroy Iraq long before 9/11 -- and the doubtfulness and
even irrelevance of many of the charges didn't seem to
matter. Nor do they seem to matter now. The war's
apologists will keep coming up with new justifications
for what has already been done.
What outrages provoked the Mexican War in 1845? Who
cares? The United States gained immense stretches of
territory, which later came to seem sufficient
justification, though this was never given as a reason
for going to war at the time. The Civil War was fought
over the principle of secession -- though it's now
justified for destroying slavery, which Lincoln disavowed
any intention of doing at the outset. Pearl Harbor
ignited an anti-Japanese fervor that brought the U.S.
into World War II -- though the German persecution of
Jews is now used to justify it. That was barely mentioned
at the time; the war began over the German-Soviet
invasion of Poland, and ended with Poland being turned
over to the Soviets, who joined their new allies in
condemning German aggression.
When the dust settles, the losers often turn out to
have been the aggressors, even if this requires some
careful editing of history by the victors. President Bush
is already calling critics of the Iraq war "historical
revisionists," but he is the one who has some explaining
to do. If those weapons don't turn up soon, it will be
hard to argue that Iraq was even contemplating
aggression. Opponents of the war doubted this all along.
How have they been proved wrong?
Our "Secret" Constitution
Abraham Lincoln has a new defender, who reveals
perhaps more than he intends to. George P. Fletcher, of
Columbia Law School, has published a book with the
provocative title OUR SECRET CONSTITUTION: HOW LINCOLN
REDEFINED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, arguing that the Civil War
destroyed the original U.S. Constitution and virtually
replaced it with a new one, never officially
acknowledged, but no less real for that.
For Fletcher, the key part of this new Constitution
is the 14th Amendment, which has enabled the federal
judiciary to pursue a radical egalitarian and
centralizing agenda at the expense of the powers formerly
reserved to the states. Of course Lincoln himself was
long dead when the 14th was ratified (very dubiously, by
the way, but let that pass); still, its adoption was a
direct result of the Civil War, which, Fletcher rightly
sees, overthrew the original Constitution.
And good riddance to that old thing, says Fletcher.
It was an "elitist," reactionary arrangement, leaving far
too much power to the separate states. In effect, and
almost explicitly, he concedes that in the constitutional
debate that led to the war, Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln,
had the Constitution on his side. But for Fletcher, to
paraphrase Marx, the key thing was not to understand the
Constitution, but to change it.
Lincoln might not be grateful for this defense. He
always insisted that the purpose of the war was to "save
the Constitution" against the secessionists. He flatly
denied that he was violating it; he had to deny it, if he
wanted Northern public opinion to support his war on the
South. He even doubted that he had the authority to issue
the Emancipation Proclamation; and he did so reluctantly,
not in the name of human liberty but only as an executive
war measure. By today's standards, Lincoln was a strict
constructionist.
Fletcher thus joins several of Lincoln's recent
defenders in applauding him for paving the way for a
radically new kind of federal government. Garry Wills has
argued that Lincoln "changed America" with the Gettysburg
Address, which placed equality, rather than
constitutional liberty, at the core of American national
values; James MacPherson credits Lincoln with achieving a
"second American Revolution" by destroying the Southern
social order and centralizing power. The whole country,
not just the South, would shortly be revolutionized.
After Roe v. Wade, a further application of the 14th
Amendment, it should hardly be necessary to point this
out.
Of course the very notion of a "secret" Constitution
-- unknown to the public, imposed and capriciously
interpreted by a judicial elite, unratified by the people
themselves -- is hard to square with Fletcher's own
professed concern for democracy. Surely Lincoln himself
would have had severe qualms about it; he thought the
relatively restrained judiciary of his own day had
already become a menace to self-government.
Lincoln's real legacy is a tragic one. Setting aside
a terrible war, he never intended, foresaw, or even
dreamed of the enormous forces he was releasing. The
present size and scope of the federal government would
astound and appall him. He would hardly covet the credit
Fletcher gives him for it. Yet Fletcher is right in one
crucial respect: Lincoln made it all possible. The Union
he ultimately "saved" bears no resemblance to the one the
Framers designed and bequeathed.
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