WASHINGTON - To
understand the impact in the United States of the photos
of US military personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners, it is
necessary to recall what then-secretary of state Elihu
Root said in 1899, as the country first emerged as a
global power in the Spanish-American War.
The
American soldier, he said, is "different from all other
soldiers of all other countries since the world began.
He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law
and order and of peace and happiness", Root declared,
capturing the spirit of historical inevitability and
"national greatness", as president Theodore Roosevelt
called it, that swept the country as it routed the
forces of a decadent Spanish empire from the Caribbean
and the Pacific.
It was "Manifest Destiny II",
and just as, in its first incarnation, the original 13
states that hugged the Atlantic seaboard in the 18th
century expanded to the shores of the Pacific, annexing
large parts of Mexico and wiping out most of the native
indigenous population in the process, so the expansion
at the turn of the 20th century was seen as the
necessary fulfillment of providence - to spread the
blessings of American civilization, as described by Root
and Roosevelt, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.
The relative ease with which this was
accomplished naturally contributed to the notion that
the US was an "exceptional" country, one singled out by
divine providence for a higher purpose, a moral mission
that dates back to the 17th century Puritans who
colonized Massachusetts and whose "Calvinist cast of
mind saw America as the redeemer nation" that would
build "a city on a hill" for all the world to follow,
according to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger.
This notion is a constant throughout US history.
"I believe that God planted in us the vision of
liberty," declared president Woodrow Wilson as
Washington entered World War I. "I cannot be deprived of
the hope that we are chosen, and prominently chosen, to
show the nations of the world how they shall walk in the
paths of liberty," he added.
The continuing
growth of US global power, particularly its defeat of
Nazi Germany, confirmed the country's moral
exceptionalism, as did the collapse of Soviet communism
just 15 years ago. It is in this context that Francis
Fukuyama's The End of History thesis - that after
8,000 years of social development, humankind had
discovered that liberal, democratic capitalism,
preferably of the US variety, was the answer - could
become a best seller.
It was likewise in this
context that other neo-conservative thinkers, notably
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, revived Roosevelt's
idea of "national greatness" with an explicitly moral
underpinning.
On the eve of founding the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) - whose charter
would be signed by many top officials of the future Bush
administration - they alluded explicitly both to
Roosevelt and US exceptionalism by arguing for a
"neo-Reaganite foreign policy [that] would be good for
conservatives, good for America and good for the world".
It was time, they wrote in 1997, for Washington
to turn its back on the 170-year-old admonition of an
earlier president, John Quincy Adams, that America
should not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy".
The unacceptable alternative, Kristol and Kagan
argued, "is to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and
pillaging to their hearts' content, as Americans stand
by and watch". Given the US's enormous power and "the
understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental
national interests are almost always in harmony", the
two wrote, failure to slay the monsters "becomes in
practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor".
The notion that the US's "moral goals and
fundamental national interests" are virtually identical
is often dismissed by people outside the US who believe
that US elites are motivated primarily by greed and
power - in the case of Iraq perhaps, by oil - just like
the colonial powers of Europe.
To some extent,
of course, this is true, but, as noted by Owen Harries,
an astute Australian observer who edited the US journal
National Interest for many years, European pretensions
of a moral or civilizing mission were "episodic and not
deeply rooted - usually limited to when their power was
at its zenith and usually clearly recognizable as a
rationalization for what they were doing for other
reasons. In the case of the United States, it has been
constant and central".
Thus, moral
exceptionalism can be traced all the way back to the
very first settlers who established a "city upon a hill"
to serve as a beacon for the rest of the world, to
president Thomas Jefferson's description of the US as an
"empire of liberty" as opposed to European empires of
territory, straight through Manifest Destinies I and II,
World Wars I and II and the Cold War.
"Since
America's emergence as a world power roughly a century
ago, we have made many errors," wrote Elliott Abrams, a
PNAC charter signatory and currently the top Middle East
aide to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, back
in 2000.
"But we have been the greatest force
for good among the nations of the earth. A diminution of
American power or influence bodes ill for our country,
our friends and our principles," he added.
This
indeed is why it is so important, in the view of US
"exceptionalists", that Washington retain its freedom of
action and not be accountable to multilateral
organizations, like the United Nations, or even to
international law.
Moral exceptionalism dictates
unilateralism. If the US, after all, is morally superior
to other nations, such as China or France, then tying it
to the decisions of the UN Security Council, for
example, would in itself be immoral, as pointed out by
Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative columnist for
the Washington Post.
"By what moral calculus,"
he asked on the eve of last year's Iraq invasion, "does
an American intervention to liberate 25 million people
forfeit legitimacy because it lacks the blessing of the
butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the Quai
d'Orsay"?
As the vanguard of that moral
superiority, the US soldier, "different from all other
soldiers from all other countries since the world
began", has always been expected to embody the country's
extraordinary goodness.
That some people in
uniform have not always been able to match this
expectation does not appear to have lowered the bar of
expectation - when they fail, the failure is all the
more shocking. That is why the photos from Abu Ghraib
have been so upsetting. They put into question the whole
notion of US exceptionalism, just as similar photos of
the victims of the My Lai massacre, of US troops setting
fire to peasants' huts with their Zippo lighters, and of
a terrified young girl burned by napalm running naked
down a highway, helped turn the nation against the
Vietnam War and military intervention 35 years ago.
And that is why those who defend the war are
insisting, contrary to mounting evidence, that the
abuses depicted there are an aberration committed by
just a handful of rogue elements.
"America is a
force for good," said Representative Duncan Hunter, the
chairman of the political body that oversees the
military, the House Armed Services Committee, as the
photo scandal swirled around Washington last week.
Or, as Krauthammer himself wrote on Friday, the
perpetrators of the abuses "do not reflect the ethos of
the US military, which has performed with remarkable
grace and courage in Iraq, or of US society".
"Our troops are changing the world and building
a future for the people of Iraq - sacrificing more than
most of us can know for the survival and success of
liberty," House Speaker Tom DeLay insisted. "Operation
Iraqi Freedom, whatever flaws it may have, has been an
absolute good."
