Ted Widmer: JFK's prescient call for freedom in the Middle East
[Ted Widmer is the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and recently edited the Library of America's two-volume "American Speeches." ]
FIFTY YEARS AGO this month [in 1957], a young senator from Massachusetts with his eye on the White House took a big gamble. On the Senate floor, before his astonished colleagues, John F. Kennedy gave a controversial speech that questioned nearly all of the assumptions of American foreign policy and delved deeply into a hot-button topic that no one wanted to talk about. He was instantly denounced by the White House, the State Department, American allies, and the press. But the speech eventually won him admirers around the world, and brought him that much closer to his party's nomination for president.
The immediate subject of Kennedy's speech was the war that France had been fighting for three years against insurgents in Algeria -- a war that was revealing a pattern of entrenched guerrilla conflict that would become all too familiar. But he went beyond that topic to address the larger question of how America could effectively promote change in the Middle East.
Most politicians, then as now, preferred to stick close to safe and popular utterances. Kennedy went straight into the hornet's nest of Arab discontent with the West in a speech that anticipated many of the problems faced today. It rejected the tired "us vs. them" structure of Cold War thinking; it criticized the military option as a clumsy tool of foreign policy, and it suggested that real advocates of "freedom" were just as likely to be opposed to Western intervention as they were to Communist takeovers.
At first glance, Algeria was not even an American problem. France had been fighting its ugly war to keep Algeria within what was left of the French empire, committing more than 400,000 soldiers to subdue a restive Islamic population. Both sides were capable of great violence, including torture, assassination, and roadside bombs -- which the French routinely denounced as terrorism. (Pentagon strategists recently rediscovered the harrowing 1966 film "The Battle of Algiers," which recalls that conflict's uncomfortable similarities to Iraq.)
But Kennedy had traveled widely, taking trips to Indochina, to the Middle East, and behind the Iron Curtain. And to a surprising degree, this child of privilege was growing concerned about the huge economic disparities in the world and the particular quandary of former colonial peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Arab countries. That was not an issue most Cold Warriors concerned themselves with. But it was a growing problem all the same, and Kennedy was disenchanted with the complacent answers coming from the Eisenhower Administration and its high priest of platitudes, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
When Kennedy rose to deliver the speech, on July 2, 1957, he began with a ringing statement. "The most powerful single force in the world today," he said, "is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent." Hardly anyone would disagree with that. But he continued with a provocative thought -- that "imperialism" was the chief foe of freedom, and that the Western form of imperialism was very nearly as bad as the Soviet version. By emphasizing America's desire to spread freedom in the Middle East, he couldn't have sounded more like today's neoconservative architects of the Iraq war. By stressing the impossibility of spreading freedom through force, he couldn't have sounded more different....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
FIFTY YEARS AGO this month [in 1957], a young senator from Massachusetts with his eye on the White House took a big gamble. On the Senate floor, before his astonished colleagues, John F. Kennedy gave a controversial speech that questioned nearly all of the assumptions of American foreign policy and delved deeply into a hot-button topic that no one wanted to talk about. He was instantly denounced by the White House, the State Department, American allies, and the press. But the speech eventually won him admirers around the world, and brought him that much closer to his party's nomination for president.
The immediate subject of Kennedy's speech was the war that France had been fighting for three years against insurgents in Algeria -- a war that was revealing a pattern of entrenched guerrilla conflict that would become all too familiar. But he went beyond that topic to address the larger question of how America could effectively promote change in the Middle East.
Most politicians, then as now, preferred to stick close to safe and popular utterances. Kennedy went straight into the hornet's nest of Arab discontent with the West in a speech that anticipated many of the problems faced today. It rejected the tired "us vs. them" structure of Cold War thinking; it criticized the military option as a clumsy tool of foreign policy, and it suggested that real advocates of "freedom" were just as likely to be opposed to Western intervention as they were to Communist takeovers.
At first glance, Algeria was not even an American problem. France had been fighting its ugly war to keep Algeria within what was left of the French empire, committing more than 400,000 soldiers to subdue a restive Islamic population. Both sides were capable of great violence, including torture, assassination, and roadside bombs -- which the French routinely denounced as terrorism. (Pentagon strategists recently rediscovered the harrowing 1966 film "The Battle of Algiers," which recalls that conflict's uncomfortable similarities to Iraq.)
But Kennedy had traveled widely, taking trips to Indochina, to the Middle East, and behind the Iron Curtain. And to a surprising degree, this child of privilege was growing concerned about the huge economic disparities in the world and the particular quandary of former colonial peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Arab countries. That was not an issue most Cold Warriors concerned themselves with. But it was a growing problem all the same, and Kennedy was disenchanted with the complacent answers coming from the Eisenhower Administration and its high priest of platitudes, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
When Kennedy rose to deliver the speech, on July 2, 1957, he began with a ringing statement. "The most powerful single force in the world today," he said, "is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent." Hardly anyone would disagree with that. But he continued with a provocative thought -- that "imperialism" was the chief foe of freedom, and that the Western form of imperialism was very nearly as bad as the Soviet version. By emphasizing America's desire to spread freedom in the Middle East, he couldn't have sounded more like today's neoconservative architects of the Iraq war. By stressing the impossibility of spreading freedom through force, he couldn't have sounded more different....