Freedom Is Just a Bonus

The liberation of Iraq is now essentially complete, but there remains much work to do. Saddam Hussein was by no means the world’s last remaining dictator. Nor are the Iraqis the only oppressed people yearning to be free.

So will President Bush, after giving U.S. troops a well-earned breather, return them to the task of completing the United States’ mission, outlined in his National Security Strategy, to “extend the benefits of freedom across the globe”?

And if so, where should the U.S. turn next? Irritated with the recalcitrance of “Old Europe,” the administration might be tempted to train its sights on the unctuous and cynical Jacques Chirac of France. But France is a large nation, well armed with nuclear weapons. So for the moment, regime change is probably out of the question. However, if President Bush is serious about extending the benefits of freedom, there is no shortage of smaller, nonnuclear states waiting to be liberated.

For example, what about Burma, renamed Myanmar by a military junta that relies on murder, rape, torture, forced labor and child conscription to maintain its grip on power? The pathetic Burmese army surely will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. With Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace laureate, waiting in the wings to lead her benighted country to democracy, Burma is ripe for liberation.

Or why not Zimbabwe? Robert Mugabe is a megalomaniacal kleptocrat and seemingly hellbent on bringing ruination to his country. The State Department’s report on Mugabe’s human rights record is scathing. The mismanaged economy is in free fall. Don’t Zimbabweans deserve better? Who could doubt that a couple of carrier battle groups and a mechanized division could make short work of Mugabe and his henchmen?

And what about Cuba? With the world distracted by Iraq, the sclerotic dictator presiding over a police state 90 miles from our borders has launched a major crackdown on dissidents. Perhaps the time has come for Bush to finish the job that John Kennedy botched at the Bay of Pigs. Don’t we have an obligation to the Cuban people, to make up for past failures, much as the current war enables us to make amends to the Kurds and Shiites we betrayed in 1991?

The reality, of course, is that none of these operations will occur any time soon. The liberation theology that the Bush administration’s neoconservatives and evangelicals have concocted somehow doesn’t apply to the people of Burma or Zimbabwe or Cuba. It does not do so because that theology is largely a pretext.

Its purpose is to justify the use of U.S. military muscle not on behalf of the oppressed but in pursuit of substantive American strategic, political and economic interests. That is, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 is about freeing Iraqis to precisely the same degree as the Anglo-American invasion of Europe in 1944 was about freeing those imprisoned in Hitler’s death camps. In each instance military action resulted in liberation that was incidental, welcome and even admirable, but that was no more than a byproduct all the same.

Hence the priority that the Bush administration assigns to liberating Iraq -- the hub of an oil-rich region that also spawns anti-American terrorism -- while averting its eyes from Burma and Zimbabwe. Viewed from Washington, those places don’t count for much. As for Iraq’s neighbors, let’s just say that for Syrians and Saudis, the day of liberation may be approaching.

So let us celebrate an American feat of arms, this latest addition to a growing list of armed interventions undertaken since the end of the Cold War. Let us rejoice in the end of an oppressive regime and the possibility of a better life for Iraqis. But let us take care not to breathe too deeply the intoxicating vapors given off by the rhetoric devised to justify the use of force to advance U.S. interests.

The rest of the world knows what’s going on. It serves no purpose and may even be counterproductive for us to deceive ourselves.