12-14-05, 9:04 am

It's one thing to say the emperor has no clothes. It is another thing to say that the emperor has no mind or thinks that we have no mind. George Bush is on the hustings defending the occupation of Iraq. And George Bush is determined to prove that George Santayana was wrong when he said (a paraphrase) that those who learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it. The following remarks are from our President 92 years after Charles Beard wrote An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

'The eight years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the election of a constitutional government were a time of disorder and upheaval. There were uprisings, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings…. There were tensions between the mercantile North and the agricultural South that threatened to break apart our young republic…. Our founders faced many difficult challenges – they made mistakes…. They learned from their experiences and adjusted their approach…. It took years of debate and compromise before we ratified the Constitution and inaugurated our first president. It took a four year civil war, and a century of struggle after that before the promise of our Declaration was extended to all Americans.'

'A century of struggle?' Uprisings, disorder – what is GW doing—reading Charles Beard, Howard Zinn, maybe even Herbert Aptheker? Before the stock market crashes, we should get to the punch line. 'It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq.'

Iraq and the American Revolution? During the Vietnam War, many anti-war activists compared Vietnam’s struggle rightly to the American Revolution – an anti-colonial war in which the revolutionaries fought to defeat a foreign occupying power and its local supporters (British Empire loyalists or Tories during the American Revolution, the South Vietnamese government and army during the Vietnam War).

But Iraq today is occupied by a foreign power, the U.S. Its people did not make a revolution to free themselves from Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party.

The major threat to the American revolution from 1783 to the 1789 (the inauguration of George Washington and the beginnings of the French revolution) came from the machinations of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world, but one that was no longer occupying the colonies. The revolution and the constitution established the principle of separation of church and state in what was overwhelmingly a Protestant Christian nation (although many of the leaders of the revolution were deists, believers in what was a non-sectarian God, and Tom Paine was of course an atheist).
Religion was not a serious factor dividing the people and the separation of Church and state was a political act to make sure that it would never do that and help to foment a counter-revolution. Slavery was a central issue dividing the slave and free states. (It is interesting that Bush mentions the Civil War of the 1860s and alludes to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in a positive way, even though the congressional leaders of his party today and the constituencies he routinely panders to in his legislation and Supreme Court appointments have absolutely no sympathy with the latter and limited sympathy with the former.) At a GOP convention today, Jefferson Davis would be welcomed much more warmly than Abraham Lincoln and I doubt that Frederick Douglass, a founder of the party 150 years ago, would even be seated as a delegate. Swift Boaters would come forward to call him a high living ex-slave.

But what does this have to do with 'the progress of freedom and democracy' in Iraq? A foreign power is occupying Iraq. The level of violence being carried out on a daily basis against the U.S. and Iraqi government forces and civilians in the middle is quantitatively and qualitatively greater than anything that the American republic experienced in the 1780s. There is no revolutionary symbol and leader in Iraq like George Washington to unite the people.

The foreign power lurking in the background – Iran – has its supporters among the Shiite Muslim majority, not among the minority of old Empire loyalists. If there are James Madisons and Alexander Hamiltons writing a constitution they are doing it largely at the behest of the army of occupation, which spends most of its time occupying little but defending itself against the guerillas and terrorists who attack it. This means that Bush must think that James Madison has something to do with Ahmad Chalabi. What set of checks and balances, what Bill of Rights is emerging from a devastated country in which ex-Ba’athists and clerical politicians fight other ex-Ba’athists and clerically based terrorists at the behest of an army of occupation? Finally, who in his right or not so right mind would take seriously any defense of the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq based Bush’s presentation of what in my youth would be called a 'liberal interpretation of U.S. history.'

Before I am accused of not being in my right mind for saying that Bush or his speech writers are using a liberal interpretation of U.S. history (which might get them in more trouble with those they pander to than anything they do in Iraq) let me say that I see one glimmer of truth in GW’s generally bizarre analogy.

The American Revolution was helped enormously by the French revolution, which occupied (no pun intended) the British Empire and, in effect, took the heat off the new U.S. Republic. The Iraqi people will be helped enormously by the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the establishment of UN and other international aid policies to direct the reconstruction of the country and its establishment of its independence and sovereignty. To do that we will have to fight GW’s administration and get rid of it, not only to help the Iraqis have a chance to achieve a stable and secure life, but much more importantly to defend our own democratic political, economic and social rights from an administration which has shown nothing but contempt for them.

Then we might learn from the American Revolution and go back to the thinking or another GW (George Washington, not George Bush) who, slaveholder and exploiter that he was, advised in his Farewell Address against 'entangling alliances' and policies of military interventionism that would threaten the existence of the Republic for which he had fought so bravely and effectively.



--Reach Norman Markowitz at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.