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The Arrogance of Power Revisited
By Jackson Lears

We are confronting one of the most serious constitutional crises in our history. In the name of an undeclared "war on terror," our government has deceived us into a disastrous imperial adventure, insisting on its right to torture, to spy on its own citizens without warrants, and to disregard any legislation it deems inconvenient. The mainstream media treat alarm about such policies as if it were the product of paranoia, implying that these dangerous departures from American tradition are perfectly legitimate—if controversial—political moves. An imperial presidency could hardly ask for a more compliant response from the makers of "responsible opinion.” George W. Bush, convinced that he is commander in chief of a righteous crusade, has dared critics to let him get away with an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. So far he has succeeded. Seldom has a president so flagrantly displayed the insolence of office.

Under these circumstances, revisiting J. William Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power is a bracing experience. Its title alone begins to suggest why. The senior Senator from Arkansas and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published the book in 1966, just as Lyndon Johnson was beginning his massive buildup of American forces in Vietnam. There is no doubt that Fulbright's sense of the impending disaster in Vietnam was a major motivation for the book, but it is about far more than that war alone. The Arrogance of Power dissects the muddled thinking behind America's global interventionism—the illusion of righteous omnipotence, the confusion of power and virtue. The self-regarding moralism that led to the debacle in Vietnam (along with other Cold War misadventures) has now been resurrected by the Bush administration. Fulbright's dissection of American imperial hubris is astonishingly relevant.

At this historical moment, when policymakers and pundits alike seem determined to forget our recent history as well as our most venerable traditions, The Arrogance of Power provides a powerful antidote to public amnesia. The book is prescient about the future of American foreign policy, wise about its present, knowledgeable about its past. It deserves a fortieth anniversary celebration. This is not to suggest, of course, that its author is above criticism. Fulbright's worldview was limited in certain important ways. Raised in the racist mores of his region, he opposed most of the key legislation that advanced the struggle for black equality, claiming he had to bow to the will of his constituents. This claim was disingenuous: he did not make it with respect to foreign policy. In that realm he had his own agenda.

In fact, Fulbright's outlook on world affairs was animated from the outset by a tolerant, cosmopolitan sensibility. The founder, in 1946, of the Fulbright Scholarship program, he believed in "international cooperation," an archaic ideal we have been encouraged to associate with sentimental one-worldism. For Fulbright international cooperation was not a utopian sentiment but a pragmatic necessity, whether it involved cultural exchange or joint ventures in flood control. Fulbright's faith in internationalism as an ideal was tempered by his Burkean conservative distrust of grand abstractions and by his attachment to American republican tradition. Like the framers of the Constitution, Fulbright feared the corrupting combination of standing armies, military adventure, and concentrated executive power. Like the founders, he knew how easily a republic could degenerate into an empire, and he resisted that degeneration with energy and eloquence.

In our current political climate, Fulbright seems a figure from the distant past. He feared that the strong would always crush the weak if we did not regulate competition in foreign affairs as well as in our domestic economy. To begin to address the worldwide disparity between rich and poor nations, he proposed moving from a notion of foreign aid as charity to a model based on international justice. Like progressive taxation, which accepted the redistribution of wealth to the less affluent as "the right of citizens," progressive foreign aid would embody what Fulbright defined as the dominant trend in American domestic policy for over fifty years—"the virtual displacement of private philanthropy by public responsibility" How archaic these ideas sound today. Surrounded by the sanctimonious bullies and tough-guy technocrats who dominate contemporary discourse, Fulbright might as well be cast in marble. We cannot allow his perspective to disappear from policy debate. If we are to have any hope of reviving alternatives to unilateralist militarism in foreign affairs, we need to reflect on the values and ideas he articulated in The Arrogance of Power.

Fulbright's core argument was familiar but essential: power corrupts the way people and nations think. Throughout the book, he often treated nations as individuals—a useful, if sometimes problematic, rhetorical device. In the case of the post-World War II United States, he wrote, "the idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to have dazzled us, giving rise to what I call the arrogance of power, or what the French, perhaps more aptly, call 'le vertige de puissance; by which they mean a kind of dizziness or giddiness inspired by the possession of great power." This malady spread beyond the White House, infecting the American body politic and threatening the rest of the world. In postwar America, dizzy wielders of power packed nuclear weapons and transmuted their giddiness into implacable zeal.

As Fulbright understood, what sustained the American arrogance of power was the religious fervor that animated it, making intoxication seem like exalted aspiration. The book opened with an extended critique of secular providentialism (though Fulbright did not use that term)—the belief that the United States has a divinely ordained role to play in the sacred drama of world history. Traditional ideas of Providence acknowledged the human inability to decipher God's plan for the universe; secular providentialists put God in the service of human striving. With breathtaking assurance, they claimed to have the divine plan all figured out, assuming that certain superior nations (and individuals) could actually know they were instruments of God's purpose. This creed inspired mid-nineteenth century nationalists to bray of America's "manifest destiny"; it led Julia Ward Howe and other Northerners to confuse the Union armies in the Civil War with "the armies of the Lord"; it animated the imperialist antics of Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Beveridge at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the Wilsonian crusade to make the world safe for democracy; and it sustained the decades-long confrontation with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And, not incidentally, when Fulbright was writing The Arrogance of Power, providentialist rhetoric was already being deployed to justify the anticommunist crusade in Vietnam.

Fulbright challenged providentialist assumptions from the outset. "America is the most fortunate of nations," he wrote, implying that our preeminent position in the world was a product of luck rather than divine will. Yet America was losing its perspective on what was within its capacity to control and what was beyond it. Providential ideas reinforced the illusion of omnipotence. As Fulbright observed, in words that should be written in gold over the door to the Oval Office,

Fulbright knew that this God-intoxicated mentality had been a staple of colonialism for centuries, and that an American version of it had been justifying overseas intervention since at least the Spanish-American War. In 1898, he observed, "according to President McKinley, the Lord told him it was America's duty 'to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died: Isn't it interesting that the voice was the voice of the Lord but that the words were those of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Admiral Mahan?" From the 189os to the present, advocates of American empire have repeatedly wrapped national ambition in the rhetoric of moral regeneration. Fulbright detested the bullying sanctimony of this tradition, and he detected alternatives to it in the American past.

There were, he believed, two main American traditions of thinking about the national destiny, two fundamentally different sensibilities. The one that embodied the arrogance of power was expressed in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which appointed the United States the moral policeman of the Western Hemisphere. The other, more humane tradition animated Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, which magnanimously interpreted the Civil War as a national expiation for the sin of slavery, rather than a triumph of Northern virtue over Southern perfidy. In Fulbright's view, the architects of American foreign policy in the 196os were stuck in the self-righteous tradition of the Roosevelt Corollary; they needed to reconnect with the more generous and self-critical examples of governance from their own past. Virtue unleashed was at best an annoyance, at worst a holy terror. "I am not prepared to argue that mankind is suffering from an excess of virtue but I think the world has endured all it can of the crusades of high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race,” Fulbright wrote. For starters, not everyone had the same notion of regeneration: American emissaries of virtue could find themselves in the same position as the boy scouts who, when asked by their scoutmaster why it took three of them to help an old lady across the street, explained that "she didn't want to go.”

Of course, the stakes could be more serious. Like Edmund Burke, Fulbright was appalled by the messianic spirit at work in the world of politics. He found it not only in committed and bloodthirsty revolutionaries—Robespierre, Stalin, Mao—but also in American presidents: Woodrow Wilson pledging "Force without stint or limit" against Germany in 1918; Franklin Roosevelt insisting on unconditional surrender in World War II. Instead of uncompromising righteousness he proposed what he emphatically identified as a "conservative policy" inspired by Burke, Castlereagh, and Metternich: "they believed in the preservation of indissoluble links between the past and the future, because they profoundly mistrusted abstract ideas, and because they did not think themselves or any men other qualified to play God.” Fulbright shared the European conservatives' historicism—which was not a simpleminded belief that one could extract discrete lessons from history, but a recognition that the power of the past pressed inescapably into the future, shaping policy decisions in ways that messianic utopians could only dimly understand. A sense of history tempered grandiose delusions.

Great nations, like great individuals, acknowledged their own fallibility. They admitted mistakes. This issue became crucial for Fulbright as he watched the American presence increase in Vietnam, and heard critics of the war accused of giving "aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.” On the contrary, wrote Fulbright, criticism was "an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals of national adulation.” Refusal to acquiesce in mistaken military adventures, whether in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Vietnam, was neither a failure to "support our troops nor a symptom of national weakness. It was a sign of national maturity and magnanimity.

Magnanimity, for Fulbright, was the key criterion of genuine national greatness. He summoned the examples of Winston Churchill, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, and Charles de Gaulle to testify that great power was often most effectively exercised through renunciation rather than assertion. And perhaps the most effective renunciation was the open acknowledgment of error. As Kennan, another early critic of the Vietnam War, testified at Fulbrights' Senate hearings on the war in 1966: "there is more respect to be won...by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than in the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unsound objectives." Fulbright joined Kennan in arguing that the possession of unlimited power demanded the cultivation of unprecedented restraint.

Truly great nations were confident of their own power, Fulbright insisted; they did not need to prove their toughness. Leaders who held this belief knew that preemptive war, which the Goldwaterite Right was urging against China at the time Fulbright wrote, was profoundly at odds with the fundamental traditions of the republic. As the Senator succinctly pointed out, "a preemptive war in defense of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend" In 1966, preemptive (or worse, preventive) war was a right-wing fantasy; now, with the assertion of the "Bush Doctrine" in 2002, it is official government policy. In the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, we are seeing Fulbright's forebodings fulfilled: a barbarous strategy conducted in the name of a civilizing mission, recoiling against the self-proclaimed civilizer, reducing his moral claims to destructive rant.

Besides criticizing the corruption of our public discourse, Fulbright identified more specific threats to our Constitution. The steady drift of power from the legislative to the executive branch, which began during World War II, had accelerated in the postwar decades. By 1962, when President Kennedy took the nation to the nuclear brink during the Cuban missile crisis, Congressional oversight of foreign policy had become a dead letter: Fulbright and other relevant Congressmen were merely briefed on decisions that had already been made. The passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (which even Fulbright supported, to his everlasting regret) and the subsequent escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War made it clear, as Fulbright wrote, that "the Senate's constitutional powers of advice and consent have atrophied into what is widely regarded as, though never asserted to be, a duty to give prompt consent with a minimum of advice.” The urgent problem the Senate faced was finding ways to discharge its constitutionally mandated duty of advice and consent "in an era of permanent crisis.”

In those days, the permanent crisis was the Cold War. For decades, the continuing contest with the Soviet Union gave presidents carte blanche to meddle in other nations' affairs and even court nuclear catastrophe, as Kennedy did in Cuba. The Cold War was a standing order for global military intervention. No wonder that, when it finally ended, neoconservative militarists yearned for that era of stark dualistic simplicities, and embraced the "war on terror" as an opportunity to revive them. For Fulbright, those simplicities were precisely the problem. When the United States provided military aid to Pakistan in 1961, the rationale was that the Pakistanis needed weapons to defend themselves against Russian and Chinese communists; instead Pakistan used the American military hardware against India in the 1965 war over Kashmir. "The mistake the United States made was the common one of assuming that its preoccupations were everyone's preoccupations," Fulbright wrote. The obsession with confronting communism reduced most foreign aid to military assistance, often to inappropriate recipients at inopportune times. Cold War blinders also prevented American policymakers from seeing the central importance of anticolonial nationalism in the Third World, or the dangers of the United States acquiring a reputation as a rearguard defender of decaying imperial regimes.

At the same time, the tendency to define the national interest as global and virtually limitless led to a neglect of the fundamental source of the nation's security—the welfare of its own citizens. The Cold War undermined the quest for social justice at home; there was simply no way we could fight a war on poverty and a war on the Vietcong at the same time. "There is something unseemly about a nation conducting a foreign policy that involves it in the affairs of most of the nations of the world while its own domestic needs are neglected or postponed, just as there is something unseemly about an individual carrying all the burdens of the Community Chest and the PTA while his children run wild and his household is in disarray," Fulbright mused. "There is something fishy about this behavior, something hidden and unhealthful."

Fulbright's choice of a therapeutic idiom was revealing. What troubled him the most about the Cold War was its psychological impact, broadly conceived—its effect on the way American policymakers thought about their nation and its role in the world. The belief that we were locked in an apocalyptic struggle with a demonic foe allowed policymakers to demand unanimous support for debatable policy choices, and to cloak the arrogance of power in robes of righteousness. The Cold War was not the first time in American history that such forms of political manipulation had come together: American policymakers had rarely been able to emulate Castlereagh and Metternich, who extended "astonishingly generous" peace terms to the defeated and helpless French at the Congress of Vienna in 1815; in contrast, Americans had always had a weakness for the uncompromising morality of terms like "total victory" and "unconditional surrender." In the Cold War, that moralism was underwritten by unprecedented power.

Echoing Henry Adams, W. F. Ogburn, and other theorists of "cultural lag," Fulbright deplored the disparity between our mastery of the physical world and our understanding of human relations—between technology and culture. "The result of this disparity has been the development of an enormous gap between our facility with tools and our facility with ideas, between our control of the physical world and our control of ourselves," he wrote. Fulbright argued that it was just this situation that gave rise to the arrogance of power, and that nurtured the psychological need that some nations have to win every argument, no matter how trivial—to demonstrate repeatedly that no one can challenge their supremacy.

Fulbright's psychological emphasis had its limitations. Equating nations with individuals, he assigned personal character traits to complex political entities. Neglecting the messy details of politics and economics (coalitions and compromises, resources and markets), he assumed that most wars were fought over abstractions, "rooted in certain unfathomable drives of human nature." Indeed, he wrote, "the causes and consequences of war may have more to do with pathology than with politics, more to do with the irrational pressures of pride and pain than with rational calculations of advantage and profit.” This sort of psychologism occasionally tempted Fulbright into triviality. He described China, for example, as an adolescent among nations: "to say the least, maladjusted, rebellious against the whole world.” And while his psychological emphasis illuminated key patterns in American foreign policy, it also allowed him to neglect the role of economic interests in shaping some of those patterns. Apparently the idea did not occur to him that "irrational pressures" and "rational calculations" could complement each other's influence in the formation of foreign policy—as they did in the Caribbean and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, or as they would in Iraq at the turn of the twenty-first.

Unlike apologists for American intervention abroad, Fulbright did not ignore economics altogether. He was a sophisticated enough student of diplomatic history to realize that the exalted rhetoric of empire could conceal its sordid material foundations, sometimes even from the rhetoricians themselves. "Not once, as far as I know, has the United States regarded itself as intervening in a Latin American country for selfish or unworthy motives, —a view not necessarily shared, however, by the beneficiaries," he noted. Fulbright's reluctance to discuss those "selfish and unworthy motives" stemmed no doubt from several sources: his unwillingness to be associated with what might sound like a Marxist argument; his commitment to maintaining the respect of the foreign policy establishment (the book was originally the Christian Herter lectures at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies); and his awareness of the particular demands of the historical moment.

What was on Fulbright's mind in 1966 —what was on many thoughtful Americans' minds—was the escalating war in Vietnam. Few recent American wars are as resistant to a narrow economic interpretation. No doubt the desire for access to raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities in Southeast Asia was a subsidiary justification for war, but the overriding preoccupations of the policy-makers were ideological and geopolitical: the containment of communist aggression. Fulbright was shrewd enough to see that this apparently reasonable outlook was a product of the larger pathology that he called the arrogance of power. Earlier than anyone else of his political stature, he grasped the fundamental and sobering truth: American leaders, blinkered by Cold War assumptions and intoxicated by their own moralizing hubris, had sent American soldiers on a fool's errand—to support a colonial regime in its doomed effort to suppress a popular nationalist movement.

In 1966, almost alone among his contemporaries in American elected office, Fulbright understood that in Vietnam it was better to support nationalism than to oppose communism. The two ideologies had been joined at the hip in that country for decades, in the struggle against French colonialism and its South Vietnamese inheritors. The United States had foolishly gone to war against communism in "the only country in the world in which freedom from colonial rule came under communist leadership,' Fulbright pointed out. This historical fact had immediate implications for contemporary policy: it meant that the Vietcong had the support of a huge portion of the South Vietnamese population, and that conceding the Vietcong a role in the government of South Vietnam was not "turning tail and running" (a familiar taunt among right-wing critics), but pragmatically acknowledging the force of historical circumstance.

Ho Chi Minh and his supporters were likely to win, Fulbright argued, noting that "wars of national liberation depend for their success more on the weakness of the regime under attack than on the strength of support from outside.” This was a rebuke to the reigning assumption that North Vietnam's assault on the South was the latest campaign in the march of international communism, with the full backing of the Chinese and the Russians. Fulbright was not opposed to intervention in the event of genuine communist aggression, which he believed had occurred in Korea in 1950. But South Vietnam was not South Korea: "Unlike the Republic of Korea, South Vietnam has an army which fights without notable success and a weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people.” Support for such a regime assumed precisely what had to be called into question: "the ability of the United States or any other Western nation to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life.” Only arrogant self-delusion could justify this agenda. Small wonder that by 1966 the task of accomplishing it was already enveloped in pointless slaughter. The volume of bombs dropped on jungles and villages was already being compared to the bombing of German cities during World War II; the counterinsurgency program was already killing more innocent villagers than Vietcong guerillas.

In the face of this mounting catastrophe, apologists for the war had little to offer except bogus analogies with World War II. These analogies were what passed for a sense of history in interventionist circles—a search for specific lessons based on a spurious one-to-one correspondence between disparate events in the past and present. Despite official claims, it was soon apparent that South Vietnam in 1964 was not Poland in 1939, Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, and Ngc Dinh Diem was not Winston Churchill. Then as now, these analogies would have been farcical had they not been so destructive. They were meant to stop thought, not start it—as, for example, when the Johnson administration invoked the specter of "another Munich" to characterize the consequences of negotiating with the Vietcong. Fulbright put his finger on the problem. "The treatment of slight and superficial resemblances as if they were full-blooded analogies—as instances, as it were, of history repeating itself—is a substitute for thinking and a misuse of history," he wrote. Rather than trying to understand the Vietnam conflict in the light of its own history, as r decades-long struggle between anticolonial nationalists and their French overlords, apologists for American involvement constructed pseudoanalogies with the war against fascism. The Vietnam War from this one-eyed perspective, became another heroic set piece in the continuing resistance to totalitarian tyranny.

Without substantive prowar arguments to engage, critics were forced to demystify the mystifications of the war-makers. "There is kind of voodoo about American foreign policy. Certain drums have to be beaten regularly to ward off evil spirits," Fulbright observed "Certain words must never be uttered except in derision—the word `appeasement'. . . comes as near as any word can to summarizing everything that is regarded by American policymakers as stupid, wicked, and disastrous.” Like "isolationism," it was meant to recall the war against fascism, the mere mention of which would end serious discussion. Yet as Fulbright pointed out, Churchill himself main-tamed that "appeasement may be good or bad according to the circumstances . . . Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”

Even if no policymakers ever came to grips with Churchill's wisdom, the futility of American policy soon became impossible to ignore. Fulbright's views gradually acquired legitimacy, largely through the pressure of circumstance. By 1968, when polls indicated that a (bare) majority of Americans had turned against the war, more than a few wondered how this disaster came about. The idea that we had been mistakenly fighting indigenous nationalism (which happened to be communist) rather than imported communism (which happened to be nationalist) provided a powerful explanation for the failure of the interventionist enterprise in Vietnam. It also had the merit of being true. In universities, the mainstream press, and even some of the corridors of government power, Fulbright was celebrated as something of a seer. His skeptical outlook spread during the early 1970s, as revelations of government mendacity multiplied and provoked a broader revaluation of imperial hubris. Eventually, the waste of life in Vietnam led many Americans of all ages and social backgrounds, even many members of Congress, to question the equation of power and virtue that had sustained a foreign policy of global intervention since World War II.

But that sort of self-questioning did not survive for long. Almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, the American Right began to construct a revanchist narrative of American defeat. Practically every prominent ideologue who claimed to be "conservative"—Pat Buchanan, Norman Podhoretz, George Will, Ronald Reagan—contributed at one time or another to this emergent account. Like the tale told by German rightists in 1919, this was a story of a stab in the back. According to this fantastic account, the war effort was not thwarted on the battlefield, but on the home front, by the antiwar movement and their allies in the "liberal media.” To our shame, we Americans simply lacked the "political will" to back our boys to victory. So, after years of inadequate support, we finally packed them up and sent them home. A "noble cause"—in Reagan's phrase—was undone by fainthearted liberals.

The revanchist narrative made its way slowly to mainstream debate. At first it surfaced mainly in commercial entertainment, from The Deer Hunter to Rambo. But soon it began to seep into public discourse and policy discussion as well. Reagan set the tone that supported this narrative. When he announced in 1984 that it was "morning in America," he implied that, once again, assertions about the moral grandeur of America's world mission could be uttered without fear of evoking skepticism. Power and virtue were remarried in the resurgent rhetoric of redemption. Still there was that worrisome "Vietnam syndrome"—a vestigial reluctance to commit American troops to military action overseas—that allegedly required repudiation. The first Gulf War promised to exorcise the demon, but failed to do so—at least to the satisfaction of the Republican operatives and policy intellectuals who began calling themselves "neoconservatives" and (a smaller group) "Vulcans."

The Vulcans were led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, both members of the Ford administration who had endured the humiliating spectacle of the last Americans leaving Saigon. When they took over foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration, as reliable witnesses have testified, they were resolved from the outset to invade Iraq and unseat Saddam Hussein. There were many motives for this mission but one was undoubtedly the urge to root out the Vietnam syndrome once and for all, to erase the memory of that humiliating defeat by doing it right, this time. The post-9/11 atmosphere gave them the opportunity to construct a new narrative, one that—like its Cold War predecessor—once again justified military intervention abroad as a combination of self-defense and sanctified mission. The political success of this narrative required systematic lying, not only about the present (the nonexistent threat of weapons of mass destruction, the nonexistent connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda), but also about the past—especially the Vietnam War.

The story of the stab in the back suited the Bush administration's purposes perfectly: it vindicated the purity and rationality of American war aims in Vietnam, resurrecting the fantasy that the Special Forces' counterinsurgency strategy was on the verge of carrying the day when the nation, its morality weakened by cowardly critics, lost its nerve. The revanchist account of the Vietnam War, by now pervading the punditocracy, provided a crucial subtext for backing the Iraq War: failure to "support our troops" could have calamitous consequences.

The rewriting of recent history served broader purposes as well. A more accurate public understanding of the Vietnam War might have raised fundamental questions about the administration's justifications for the Iraq War. The desperate attempts to manufacture a threat, the constant talk about "winning hearts and minds" through a "clear and hold" strategy, above all the messianic dream of democratizing an entire region through American military force—all of these rhetorical moves have been deployed by the Bush administration, as they had been three decades before by Johnson and Nixon, to sanitize a bloody mess of a war. Under the impact of the unfolding catastrophe in Vietnam, phrases like "winning hearts and minds" became corrosive self-parody—as they deserve to be today.

The resurgent revanchist narrative forbids the remembrance of failure, making the recovery of our recent past all the more urgent. Revisiting The Arrogance of Power helps us to situate our contemporary crisis in the unsparing light of history, to see the Bush plan to democratize the Middle East as a revival of deeply rooted American delusions. Rereading Fulbright reminds us that 9/11 did not in fact "change everything," that the events of that day gave policymakers a chance to resurrect the messianic dreams of their predecessors. Indeed the architects of our current foreign policy remain imprisoned by the same arrogance that trapped us in Vietnam forty years ago.

The Iraq War and the Vietnam War have far more in common with each other than either does with World War II, the good war that American interventionists want repeatedly to be seen refighting. Once again, apologists for invasion and occupation resurrect the phony parallels—now stretched beyond credibility but (incredibly) still treated as if they are real: Saddam Hussein is like Hitler; critics of the war are like the isolationists of the 193os; the occupation of Iraq will be like the occupation of Germany or Japan. An impalpable enemy acquires palpable form in the misleading coinage, "Islamofascism.” The analogies with World War II are as strained and unconvincing as ever, and yet they are evoked with such mindless regularity that one suspects they are meant to serve the same purpose now that they served in the 196os—to distract public attention from the blundering arrogance of our policy. Of course there are differences in setting and significance between the two wars. Economic interests matter far more in Iraq than they did in Vietnam. The importance of access to oil, however resolutely ignored in public debate, is in fact central to the Iraq War. This economic motive makes the present war potentially more calamitous in its consequences than the war in Vietnam, which for all its carnage remained confined in its geopolitical effects. Yet the two wars reveal a startling continuity in the worldview of American leaders—the same grandiosity, the same proud ignorance of foreign conditions and customs, the same confusion of power with virtue. Nothing has changed; nothing has been learned. Fulbright! You should be living at this hour.

from Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Summer 2006, Volume XXVI, Number 1, pp. 31-46.

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