Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Democracy in Iraq

(Reprinted from the issue of December 22, 2005)

At least since World War I, American foreign policy has been based on the assumption that democracy is the best guarantor of world peace. But the Treaty of Versailles did more to provoke an even worse war — the worst in human history — than to prevent it.

Both wars came about despite the best efforts of Popes Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII to promote peace among the great nation-states.

John Paul II was likewise unable to prevent two American wars against Iraq. In fact, American Catholics of the neoconservative faction flew to Rome in hopes of explaining to him why the war was justified and necessary. They don’t seem to have succeeded in raising the Holy Father’s consciousness, or that of his Successor, but the war came anyway.

It has turned out to be something other than the “cakewalk” its promoters expected. As I write, the new Iraqi government is about to hold the elections President Bush sees as the antidote to terrorism, though I find his reasoning hard to follow.

Does he really think a handful of fanatics flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in frustration because they didn’t have the vote?

My sense is that their fury at the United States government would hardly have been assuaged by possession of the ballot; my own discontents with U.S. foreign policy, admittedly somewhat less intense, finds little relief in my right to cast one of the many millions of votes that, as they assure me, is the essential exercise of my liberty and my control of our rulers.

Since roughly half of the eligible voters don’t show up on election day in this country, I gather that a lot of Americans share my heretical doubts about the efficacy of democracy. I expect that many Iraqis will soon be disillusioned too, supposing that they have any illusions to begin with.

Elections or no elections, some observers whose judgment I value expect civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites to erupt in the near future.

Waiving the big question of whether American military intervention was justified in the first place, liberty consists much less in the right to vote than in more specific personal freedoms — such traditions as property rights, immunity from arbitrary arrest, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and press, and other things that may take centuries to develop.

These are things the champions of majority rule seem hardly to appreciate, and indeed it isn’t easy to imagine them originating under rulers like our own.

Would the idea of habeas corpus ever have occurred to Dick Cheney, or for that matter Abraham Lincoln? We actually owe most of our real liberties, the ones we exercise daily rather than at four-year intervals, to Christianity, to English common law, and to men whose names we don’t even remember.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, very few of them have been acquired, or strengthened, by invading countries across the oceans.
 
Tookie’s Reward

If Stanley “Tookie” Williams gets the Nobel Prize for Peace, it will have to be posthumous. He was finally executed when California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (a title I’ll never get used to) rejected his appeal, and public pressure, for clemency.

Williams was an amply convicted murderer, often called the “founder” of the notorious Crips gang. In his later years, when he had more leisure, he also became the author of children’s books inculcating edifying warnings against gang violence.

His supporters variously argued that he had repented and redeemed his crimes or insisted, with the author himself, that he was innocent of the egregiously cruel killings he’d been charged with.

Despite his services to peace and literature, I found it difficult to extend much sympathy to him. I don’t think he should have been put to death, but not because I thought he was innocent; I believe capital punishment is wrong for several reasons, no matter how horrible the criminal is.

Chief among these reasons is that I don’t think the state should have such power. It has nothing to do with desert or remorse; a man who causes such suffering as Williams did deserves worse than he got. He may have deserved torture, but we don’t want the state to inflict that either — not for the criminal’s sake, but for our own. The ultimate Judge may impose eternal torment, but we leave that to Him.

Opposing capital punishment, as the last two popes have done, does not mean sentimentalizing the criminal or minimizing his crime. It means finding a way to punish him and protect society from him without debasing ourselves.
 
Eugene McCarthy RIP

Gene McCarthy, dead at 89, was the liberal I loved. I was thrilled when his dramatic 1968 New Hampshire primary challenge caused Lyndon Johnson to retire from the office he’d coveted all his life; but McCarthy wasn’t a dramatic man. Without exalting Communism in the least, he simply saw the futility of the Vietnam War and called for withdrawal when few politicians dared to. The radical Left, in fact, regarded him as inadequate or worse.

I met him a couple of times, years later, and found him just as congenial as I’d hoped. Once in Baton Rouge, where we were scheduled to debate (I’ve forgotten the topic), I enjoyed a long breakfast alone with him and, of course, got him to reminisce about the year of his glory.

He showed neither vanity nor bitterness as he recalled how Robert Kennedy had jumped into the presidential race as soon as McCarthy had shown Johnson’s vulnerability.

Bobby had the magical Kennedy name, the Kennedy organization, and, not least, the Kennedy money, not to mention the Kennedy ethics; on the fateful day of the California primary his troops had flooded Orange County with leaflets claiming that McCarthy had a plan to bus blacks there from Watts (this was three years after the Watts riots).

Needless to say, McCarthy had never even dreamed of such a thing, but he told me the story without rancor, as a funny illustration of liberalism, Camelot-style. The Kennedys had all the power, but McCarthy had all the class. Anyway, Bobby won the primary but was murdered during the victory celebration that night.

Our debate didn’t come off, because the event turned into an adoring, cheering McCarthy rally. The crowd still remembered 1968, and I was cheering as fervently as the audience.


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Joseph Sobran