Many misgivings over more US involvement in Iraq

Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE

Friendly critics of America have remarked on the propensity for optimism of its people and of their leaders. Americans are forward-looking, expectant of ever-greater improvement in all things. Some have attributed the economic successes of America and the continuing vigour of its productivity and innovation to this spirit of positivism; a core belief that all good things are still possible.

But there is another side to looking always forward. It is a willingness to live as if there were no history.

On one hand is the sympathetic disappointment of Adlai Stevenson, former US ambassador to the UN, who remarked: "Americans act as if they haven't read the notes from the last meeting."

On the other are the proud jingoists of both parties who claim - no, demand, as a sign of patriotism - that there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, that America lives beyond history.

Many countries appeal to the deity in their symbols but none more than the US. The song America the Beautiful concludes with these lines: "America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea."

As America looks steadily forward, it can ignore its own history. The systematic degradation of its native peoples in the white settlement of the country scarcely impacts consciousness.

Even slavery and 100 years of segregation barely register.

This allows Americans to see themselves perpetually as the "good guys" bringing to the rest of the world the fruits of democracy. By force of arms, if necessary.

Unfortunately for Americans who have found themselves lately in the hostile neighbourhoods of the Middle East, not every group shares the American penchant for the ahistoric.

The looking backward and settling of old scores was for hundreds of years the style of Europe, where successive states have tried to dominate the others from Spain to England to France to Germany and Russia.

This backward orientation culminated finally in the two world wars. Only since Maastricht (1992) have Europeans decided that joining together (at least economically) works better than butchering each other.

It turns out that the Great War resulted also in the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and, as a consequence, Europeans divided up the spoils into spheres of influence, even drawing the boundaries of what the dominant Europeans called nations with no regard for ethnic or religious adherence of the resulting populations.

Then along came 9/11. For many Americans, that attack came as a complete surprise, even though the leadership of two administrations had been warned that something of the sort was coming but did little to prevent it.

Instead, the Bush administration invaded Iraq, a secular country that had nothing to do with the Islamist al-Qaeda terrorists. By doing so and removing a dictator and his regime, the Americans tipped over the stability of the Middle East, which had contained the centuries-old conflict of Shia and Sunni. Unlike the make-believe domino theory of the 1960s, which held that the fall of one nation (Vietnam) to communist rule would lead to the successive loss of Laos, Cambodia and then the Philippines, the dominoes of today are actually falling. A so-called Arab Spring with ordinary Muslim citizens' hopes for a better and freer life has quickly given way to the opportunism of Islamic extremists (Iraq, Syria, Libya) and the return of dictatorship (Egypt.) With these choices - extremism or dictatorship - facing the ordinary Muslim citizen, what choices do the US and its allies have?

As one American who does read history, I'm disturbed by the parallels to Vietnam. There, too, a regime the US helped install was soon pushed aside and soon enough a civil war became an American war. There, too, US involvement began with sending in of "advisers".

As Obama announces the 300 advisers he's sending to Iraq but claims there will be no US boots on the ground, I can't help thinking I've seen this movie and I don't like how it ends.