The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

"Making War to Keep Peace," Jeane J. Kirkpatrick’s last book in her long list of literary credits, was published posthumously this month. Kirkpatrick, the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, died on December 7, 2006 at age 80. She was an effective diplomat who fought totalitarianism using words as weapons.

Her fierce writings on dictatorships for Commentary Magazine in the late 1970s, caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan who nominated her to the UN ambassador post. She was a dominant figure in Reagan’s Cold War success.

Her posthumous book is a bold and revisionist assessment of American foreign policy since then. She writes in her introduction, "…the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989," allowed the United States and Western Europe to be free from a major military threat for the first time since Hitler marched into Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II."

That relative period of peace was interrupted by the Korean War and the Vietnam War and a few smaller skirmishes, but as Kirkpatrick writes, "Twelve years after the Wall tumbled down, on Sept. 11, 2001, a threat long simmering in the margins of global events violently thrust its threat on America’s soil and into the forefront of foreign policy."

In her opinion, this "coercive ideology wearing yet another face," should have been "the lesson learned and not learned from the past and is crucial if we are to chart a wise foreign policy course for the future of our nation."

Hopefully, one of the candidates seeking the Presidency in 2008 will have read Kirkpatrick’s book and put some of her ideas into a platform for that future. America’s interventions abroad — including the current Iraq war — have been, she said, "a troubled period of small successes, tragic failures and important lessons for the future."

She begins her book with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and equates President George H.W. Bush’s initial response to that of Harry Truman when North Korean forces attacked South Korea in 1950. Like Truman, Bush went to the United Nations and won support for a UN condemnation of the aggression and calling for an immediate, unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi troops.

History shows that didn’t happen and a coalition of forces was formed to make war to keep peace. With the speed of a modern army the coalition overwhelmed the Iraqis in 100 hours of combat.

Kirkpatrick explains why Bush decided to end the war leaving Saddam in power and his Republican Guard nearly intact and told the American people "Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated." Kirkpatrick indicates that Bush was reacting to the "lessons from Vietnam" and believed such an overwhelming defeat would cause Saddam’s own people to overthrow him. She notes that his military commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf disagreed and said publicly Bush did not finish the job and that he recommended continuing to pursue the Iraqi army. "We could have completely closed the door," Schwarzkopf said. But, Kirkpatrick said, "Bush’s position was firm."

Kirkpatrick had little praise for President Bill Clinton’s attempts at peacekeeping, especially concerning Somalia and Bosnia.

She devotes the last chapter to Afghanistan and Iraq. "When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, we were given ample reason to reassess the direction of foreign policy during the preceding years," she writes. "With disturbing clarity we could see that small groups, which were essentially anarchical and homeless in nature, had the will and the ever great means to attack a superpower — more so, even, than the nations who harbored or sponsored them."

George W. Bush had ample cause to invade Iraq without suggesting Saddam presented a terrorist threat, she wrote, concluding that Saddam had violated every cease fire agreement of the Gulf War. "Resolution 687 was as valid in 2003 as it was when signed in April 1991," she writes, and provided "the legal authority to use force to address Iraq’s breaches was and remains clear and is a matter of record."

She concludes by noting that it is a different matter entirely to commit military resources to keep the peace "where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms — or even want them."

(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Thursday Opinion page.)