VETERANS DAY: Don’t forget why the U.S. joined the great war
The Great War ended 100 years ago today. It remains hard to understand even what the principals thought they were fighting for while killing off a staggering share of Europe’s young men in a four-year fit of collective insanity that transformed Western history and culture.
It was known as “the war to end all wars,” a descriptor first embodying enthusiastic idealism, later tragic irony. The United States finally joined to, President Woodrow Wilson said, “make the world safe for democracy.”
He advocated a democratic world based on human rights and self-determination, recovering meaning from the slaughter in the collapse of authoritarian empires into new, hopefully democratic, nations.
When Wilson arrived in France for the 1919 peace conference, a reporter traveling with him wrote: “Here and there along the way, peasant families kneel beside the tracks to pray for him and his mission.”
We reasonably detect hypocrisy in Wilson’s proclamations: As the first Southern president since Reconstruction, he championed white supremacy. Knowing so much of America’s sins, we’re ready to be cynical and forget its also irreplaceable historic role promoting human rights.
America’s example and the force with which it has at times promoted democracy has strengthened its spread worldwide, in recent decades in parts of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, where it had not been realized.
But again, today, we are an uncertain trumpet.
If the world’s most powerful nation doesn’t stand consistently and unabashedly for the imperatives of democracy and the inherent rights of the individual, these irreducible predicates of decent lives lose in a world filled with incumbent and aspiring dictators.
Many want to believe President Donald Trump is the problem, and a post-Trump world will inevitably be much better. But it was not Trump but President Barack Obama who, after inspiring the Arab Spring, put America behind the murderous Saudi war against Yemen, abandoned Syrian rebels who trusted in us, made not a peep as Russia invaded Syria to crush that rebellion, and wouldn’t take sides between new Egyptian democracy and U.S.-paid military thugs overthrowing it.
Both administrations reflected the cynicism and failure of imagination that also plagued America and the larger Western world after the Great War. Indifferent leadership of both parties has interchangeably betrayed our values and the world’s people.
As the first and only nation founded on ideals rather than national identity, we need again a change in orientation to the world far more profound than voting Trump out.
The recent murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi embodies the collapse of American moral authority. After supporting Saudi murder of Yemenis for three years under two supposedly opposite administrations, we finally draw a line when Saudis murder a U.S. resident in a public place?
“Our values are more important than money and jobs,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham opined in October. “America’s moral voice is more important to the world than anything.” Can we agree at least on this across the divide?
Democracy, human rights and self-determination are not small matters. What is more important to humanity, beyond basic subsistence and health?
It’s way past time to recognize our friendly dictators and occupiers are, finally, murderers. They need force, and ultimately murder, to keep humans from claiming the natural rights we asserted in the words that gave us life as a nation, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
On the 100th anniversary of the four-year disaster that birthed the modern world, we need to rededicate ourselves so that our nation, and world, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”