- We Americans came not from a revolution
but from an evolution.
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- That is in large part why our so-called
revolution produced success while most throughout history did not. We
came as much from the Magna Carta as from our own doings, as much from
British common law and parliamentary development as from the Declaration
of Independence and Continental Congress.
-
- Unlike the true revolution on the other
side of the Atlantic that led to Napoleon's dictatorship and strife and
conflict all across Europe, our evolution founded the greatest country
the world has ever seen. That was true in every element of power and
in the uniqueness that makes us great, our constant striving for "a
more perfect union" and, as we do so, our open arms for the other
peoples of the world "yearning to be free."
-
- As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America
is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America
will cease to be great."
-
- In January 2001, with the inauguration
of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good;
America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country
continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all
great powers before it, without exception.
-
- >From the Kyoto accords to the International
Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners
to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance
to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming,
from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant
to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of
fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.
-
- Unprecedented interpretations of the
Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful
and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism
of this administration.
-
- Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order
never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind
and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make
it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this
nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain
around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical
irresponsibility.
-
- This administration has expanded government
- creation of the Homeland Security Department alone puts it in the record
books - and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze
and corruption to Washington (difficult to do, to be sure). And it has
done the impossible in war-waging: put in motion a conflict in Iraq that
in terms of colossal incompetence, civilian and military, and unbridled
arrogance portends to top the Vietnam era, a truly radical feat.
-
- In Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We
Fight, Richard Perle, head theoretician for the neo-Jacobins who masquerade
under the title "neoconservatives," claims that America was
changed forever by 9/11. He tells us that those attacks are responsible
for all this radicalism. The Jacobins were members of a radical political
club during the French Revolution that instituted brutal repression in
what became known as the "reign of terror."
-
- Mr. Perle says that we may think we can
go back, but we cannot. "We are not the same people we were before,"
he says emphatically, as if he were our king. If he's correct, then our
country is as spent as was Rome, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and
a host of other great powers before each toppled from the mountain.
-
- Mr. Perle is not correct.
-
- First, it was Mr. Perle and people such
as he who put us where we are today, not the terrorists of 9/11. A somnolent
Congress assisted - a Congress that, as Democratic Sen. Robert C. Byrd
of West Virginia said as the Senate failed to debate in the run-up to
the Iraq war, was "ominously, ominously, dreadfully silent."
-
- Second, people such as Mr. Perle do not
represent the bulk of Americans, who are anything but radical. Instead,
they represent the Robespierres and Napoleons of this world, the neo-Jacobins
of today. Robespierre was a leader of the reign of terror.
-
- We can turn back; moreover, we must if
the world is to continue on a trajectory of more freedom and more prosperity
for increasing numbers of people. Without American leadership - the good
America - the world cannot progress.
-
- If we are in some way the indispensable
nation that a few Americans have said we are, then that is why. And it
is no arrogance of power to say it; rather, it is to admit abiding reverence
for the way the world works.
-
- Such awesome responsibility generates
not the swaggering ineptitude of which we have witnessed so much of late,
but the abject humility that should flood us when we confront such unprecedented
responsibility. I imagine the feeling to be something akin to what Gen.
Dwight D. Eisenhower felt moments before the invasion of Normandy began
June 6, 1944.
-
- Congress can awaken and discover that
the Constitution is correct, that Congress is in fact a separate and equal
branch of government. The American people will find a way to deal with
the remainder of the radicals, whether at the ballot box, in the courts
or in the Senate.
-
- We can halt the precipitate slide in
our standing around the world, convince the majority of the Islamic world
that we can and must co-exist - and eventually prosper together - and
at the same time confront, confound and defeat the small element in Islam's
midst that lives to murder innocents, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike.
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- All we need do, in reality, is return
to our roots. Never in our almost 800-year history since the Magna Carta
have we been radicals.
-
- Originally Published April 23, 2006
- Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore
Sun
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- Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson,
a visiting professor of government at the College of William and Mary
in Virginia, was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
from 2002 to 2005. His e-mail is wilkerlb@aol.com.
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