Just Who Is Sleepwalking Through History?
Byrd gave his speech just as Secretary of State Colin Powell was presenting America's case to the U.N. Security Council, and Byrd clearly meant to give the Bush administration pause in its effort to gain international backing for military action against Saddam Hussein.
Taft gave his speech the month Nazi forces invaded Belgium, Holland and France; it was meant as a clarion call to those opposing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts to aid America's friends. (Such isolationist sentiment in Congress, fortified by mass anti-war protests, forced FDR to rely on executive power to aid Britain as it fought on alone.)
In both cases, the opposing senators argued that the executive branch was moving America towards dictatorship, violating the norms of democratic policy -- flouting international law and taking unnecessary measures that would actually harm national security.
No threat: What President Bush wants, Byrd argues, is to "attack a nation that is not imminently threatening" but may be sometime in the future. An attack on Iraq would be completely "unprovoked" and is completely "not necessary at this time." Moral pressure alone is having what he calls a "good result in Iraq."
Similarly, Taft told the Senate that Hitler and the Nazis were not a threat to the United States. (Acknowledging that Hitler might well defeat Britain and rule Europe by "ruthless force," Taft still felt that such an "alternative seems preferable to present participation in a European war.")
Anti-democratic imperialism: If America moved to war, said Taft, the result would be "more likely to destroy American democracy" than to defeat Hitler. FDR, he feared, would "involve the United States in a war" and try to make it impossible for Congress to "refuse to declare war." Intervention was inherently flawed, Taft argued, because if the United States wished to "protect the small democracies," it would have to "maintain a police force perpetually" in Europe. And that, he warned, would be "imperialism."
Dealing with Saddam Hussein, Byrd argues, "is no simple attempt to defang a villain." Rather, it is a "turning point in U.S. foreign policy" and even of "the recent history of the world." What the president is doing, he suggested, is nothing less than embarking upon "the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way," the doctrine of "preemption."
Byrd and his fellows eschew the administration for avoiding diplomacy, for refusing to face questions about the war's aftermath and even for contemplating becoming an "occupying power." Or, as Taft argued in a 1942 letter, America was about to establish a "world order" based on "policing of the entire world."
Lawbreakers: Then there's the flouting of international law, which Taft said, "seems to have lost [its] importance." Today, Byrd insists that the Bush administration is contravening "international law," with the unfortunate result that "U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation."
NO two eras are precisely the same. But the similarities are striking. Taft and his fellow isolationists persisted in viewing the threat to peace as coming only from their own president and nation. They denied the efficacy of viewing the Nazi regime as inherently evil. As the young historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1941, isolationist Republicans had "harassed, sabotaged and obstructed the attempts of the Administration to work for the destruction of Nazism."
Today, Sen. Byrd has not a word about Saddam Hussein's dangerous behavior. No, it is the Bush administration that has engaged in "reckless and arrogant" policies, especially that of an "extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign-policy debacle," one symbolized by pronouncements Byrd deems "outrageous." The president is wrong to engage in such acts as "labeling whole countries as evil."
By not protesting, Byrd concluded, the Senate and the country are "sleepwalking through history."
Yet, as Sen. John McCain pointed out in a Senate speech delivered two days after Byrd, containment of Iraq has failed: A policy that "tolerates Saddam Hussein's threat by allowing him the means to achieve his ends is . . . an intellectual failure to come to grips with a grave and growing danger."
We know what happened in the 1940s: The United States was forced to accept its responsibilities and answer the Nazi assault with a full-fledged war, destruction of the enemy and the institution of democratization in Europe.
The naysayers like Taft were proved wrong. Yet today their successors, like Sen. Robert Byrd, work to obstruct the efforts of the Bush administration to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein. Just who is sleepwalking through history?
This article first appeared in the New York Post and is reprinted with the permission of the author.