THE WANDERER, DECEMBER 22, 2005

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

Democracy in Iraq 

     At least since World War I, American foreign policy 
has been based on the assumption that democracy is the 
best guarantor of world peace. But the Treaty of 
Versailles did more to provoke an even worse war -- the 
worst in human history -- than to prevent it.

     Both wars came about despite the best efforts of 
Popes Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII to promote peace 
among the great nation-states.

     John Paul II was likewise unable to prevent two 
American wars against Iraq. In fact, American Catholics 
of the neoconservative faction flew to Rome in hopes of 
explaining to him why the war was justified and 
necessary. They don't seem to have succeeded in raising 
the Holy Father's consciousness, or that of his 
Successor, but the war came anyway.

     It has turned out to be something other than the 
"cakewalk" its promoters expected. As I write, the new 
Iraqi government is about to hold the elections President 
Bush sees as the antidote to terrorism, though I find his 
reasoning hard to follow.

     Does he really think a handful of fanatics flew 
planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 
frustration because they didn't have the vote?

     My sense is that their fury at the United States 
government would hardly have been assuaged by possession 
of the ballot; my own discontents with U.S. foreign 
policy, admittedly somewhat less intense, finds little 
relief in my right to cast one of the many millions of 
votes that, as they assure me, is the essential exercise 
of my liberty and my control of our rulers.

     Since roughly half of the eligible voters don't show 
up on election day in this country, I gather that a lot 
of Americans share my heretical doubts about the efficacy 
of democracy. I expect that many Iraqis will soon be 
disillusioned too, supposing that they have any illusions 
to begin with.

     Elections or no elections, some observers whose 
judgment I value expect civil war between Sunnis and 
Shi'ites to erupt in the near future.

     Waiving the big question of whether American 
military intervention was justified in the first place, 
liberty consists much less in the right to vote than in 
more specific personal freedoms -- such traditions as 
property rights, immunity from arbitrary arrest, habeas 
corpus, freedom of speech and press, and other things 
that may take centuries to develop.

     These are things the champions of majority rule seem 
hardly to appreciate, and indeed it isn't easy to imagine 
them originating under rulers like our own.

     Would the idea of habeas corpus ever have occurred 
to Dick Cheney, or for that matter Abraham Lincoln? We 
actually owe most of our real liberties, the ones we 
exercise daily rather than at four-year intervals, to 
Christianity, to English common law, and to men whose 
names we don't even remember.

     Unless I'm badly mistaken, very few of them have 
been acquired, or strengthened, by invading countries 
across the oceans.


Tookie's Reward

     If Stanley "Tookie" Williams gets the Nobel Prize 
for Peace, it will have to be posthumous. He was finally 
executed when California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (a 
title I'll never get used to) rejected his appeal, and 
public pressure, for clemency.

     Williams was an amply convicted murderer, often 
called the "founder" of the notorious Crips gang. In his 
later years, when he had more leisure, he also became the 
author of children's books inculcating edifying warnings 
against gang violence.

     His supporters variously argued that he had repented 
and redeemed his crimes or insisted, with the author 
himself, that he was innocent of the egregiously cruel 
killings he'd been charged with.

     Despite his services to peace and literature, I 
found it difficult to extend much sympathy to him. I 
don't think he should have been put to death, but not 
because I thought he was innocent; I believe capital 
punishment is wrong for several reasons, no matter how 
horrible the criminal is.

     Chief among these reasons is that I don't think the 
state should have such power. It has nothing to do with 
desert or remorse; a man who causes such suffering as 
Williams did deserves worse than he got. He may have 
deserved torture, but we don't want the state to inflict 
that either -- not for the criminal's sake, but for our 
own. The ultimate Judge may impose eternal torment, but 
we leave that to Him. 

     Opposing capital punishment, as the last two popes 
have done, does not mean sentimentalizing the criminal or 
minimizing his crime. It means finding a way to punish 
him and protect society from him without debasing 
ourselves.


Eugene McCarthy RIP

     Gene McCarthy, dead at 89, was the liberal I loved. 
I was thrilled when his dramatic 1968 New Hampshire 
primary challenge caused Lyndon Johnson to retire from 
the office he'd coveted all his life; but McCarthy wasn't 
a dramatic man. Without exalting Communism in the least, 
he simply saw the futility of the Vietnam War and called 
for withdrawal when few politicians dared to. The radical 
Left, in fact, regarded him as inadequate or worse.

     I met him a couple of times, years later, and found 
him just as congenial as I'd hoped. Once in Baton Rouge, 
where we were scheduled to debate (I've forgotten the 
topic), I enjoyed a long breakfast alone with him and, of 
course, got him to reminisce about the year of his glory.

     He showed neither vanity nor bitterness as he 
recalled how Robert Kennedy had jumped into the 
presidential race as soon as McCarthy had shown Johnson's 
vulnerability.

     Bobby had the magical Kennedy name, the Kennedy 
organization, and, not least, the Kennedy money, not to 
mention the Kennedy ethics; on the fateful day of the 
California primary his troops had flooded Orange County 
with leaflets claiming that McCarthy had a plan to bus 
blacks there from Watts (this was three years after the 
Watts riots).

     Needless to say, McCarthy had never even dreamed of 
such a thing, but he told me the story without rancor, as 
a funny illustration of liberalism, Camelot-style. The 
Kennedys had all the power, but McCarthy had all the 
class. Anyway, Bobby won the primary but was murdered 
during the victory celebration that night.

     Our debate didn't come off, because the event turned 
into an adoring, cheering McCarthy rally. The crowd still 
remembered 1968, and I was cheering as fervently as the 
audience.

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                                        --- Joseph Sobran

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