COVER STORY
The French Were Right

By Paul Starobin, National Journal
Friday, Nov. 7, 2003

Let's just say this at the start, since this is the beginning, not the
end, of the discussion about how to grapple with the post-9/11 world
(and because it's the grown-up, big-man thing to do): The French were
right. Let's say it again: The French -- yes, those "cheese-eatin'
surrender monkeys," as their detractors in the United States so
pungently called them -- were right.

Jacques Chirac and his camp, shaped by the Algerian war and their own
recent lessons in fighting terrorism, correctly predicted the
consequences of invading Iraq.
"Be careful!" That was the exclamation-point warning French President
Jacques Rene Chirac sent to "my American friends" in a March 16
interview on CNN, just before the Pentagon began its invasion of Iraq.
"Think twice before you do something which is not necessary and may be
very dangerous," Chirac advised. And this was not some last-minute
heads-up, but the culmination of a full-brief argument that the French
advanced against the perils of a U.S.-led intervention, pressed over
months at the United Nations in New York and at meetings in Paris,
Prague, and Washington. There were, of course, other war critics in
Europe and elsewhere, but nobody presented the arguments more
insistently or comprehensively than did the French, God bless 'em.

But the Americans, or at least the Bush administration, paid no heed to
the French warnings, which were not simply that war was a bad idea, but
that an invasion's consequences could be harmful to Western interests
and to the larger war on terror. And now the administration is finding
itself in an increasingly unhappy situation in Iraq, with its
130,000-strong contingent there the target of a sophisticated and lethal
guerrilla campaign waged by foreign Islamic fighters and Saddam Hussein
loyalists. Back home, a majority of the American public is opposed to
Congress's backing of the president's request for $87 billion for
military and reconstruction needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile,
the White House strains to explain the failure, so far, to find weapons
of mass destruction, whose supposed presence in the country, after all,
was a prime rationale for the war. Even avid war proponents concede that
the United States is in for "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a recently leaked memo. America, in
short, is at risk of getting trapped in a hell of its own making. Leave
it to a philosopher on the Seine to anticipate this sort of predicament.
The Left Bank existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called his 1944 play, on
the suffering that human beings tend to visit on themselves, No Exit.

In blame-game Washington, critics are asking how the administration got
into this mess, and why its forecasts of the war's aftermath were so
mistaken. But perhaps the most helpful question is not "Why the
Administration Was Wrong," but rather, "How the French Managed to Get It
Right." To ask how the Bush camp got offtrack is to pose a car-wreck
type of question, and all such inquiries tend to be disfigured by
partisan, factional enmity. But to ask why the French were right is to
put the matter in a more positive, constructive vein. And the question
has a ripe urgency, worth pursuing not as a matter of assigning
historical bragging rights but as an aid to a necessary rethinking of
the Iraq campaign that the administration, albeit in a fitful, truculent
mood, has in any event already begun, with its recent plea for help from
the United Nations and other countries, France included, and its
stepped-up efforts to put more Iraqis in charge of security.

Hold on. Were the French really right? After all, Iraq is not a finished
matter. What looks like a mess today may yet get sorted out. Most
supporters of the war continue to believe it was justified, despite the
problems it has caused. Nevertheless, at this juncture, it is plain that
the French, and in particular Chirac and his advisers, had a certain
analytical purchase on the situation that the Bush administration
lacked.

The French made three basic claims -- all countered, in varying degrees
of intensity, by the administration. The first was that the threat posed
by Saddam was not imminent, and that's borne out by all available
evidence, not least the latest report by Bush-appointed arms inspector
David Kay, in which he stated that no weapons of mass destruction had
been found. The second claim was that democracy-building in Iraq was
going to be a lengthy, difficult, bloody process -- with the Iraqi
population very likely to view the Americans as occupiers, not
liberators. Quite apart from the spate of attacks on U.S. soldiers by
various fanatics, this claim is borne out by polls showing that a
majority of Iraqis would like the United States to leave. And third, the
French correctly predicted that the Muslim world would perceive a
U.S.-led intervention lacking the explicit blessing of the United
Nations as illegitimate -- and thus would incite even greater anger
toward America.

"A war in Iraq could trigger more frustration, bitterness, in the Arab
world and beyond, in the Muslim world," Jean-David Levitte, French
ambassador to the U.S., warned in remarks on February 7 at the U.S.
Institute of Peace in Washington. Touche. "Hostility toward America has
reached shocking levels," an administration-appointed panel, headed by a
former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Edward Djerejian, recently reported on
post-invasion attitudes in the Muslim world.

Still seething over the French prewar position on Iraq, administration
officials are hardly of a mind to bestow awards on the French for
prescience. The Democrats, many of whom supported the war, would have no
political gain in citing the unpopular French as role models for their
thinking, even if the statements now made by the party's leaders in
Congress and its presidential candidates so closely resemble prewar
French comments. ("The war was an unnecessary war," retired Gen. Wesley
Clark pronounced, a la Chirac, on October 9.)

As for the administration, even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a
relative moderate, still gets huffy at the mention of the French. "We
were right, they were wrong, and I am here," a Powell aide, in an
interview with The New York Times, quoted his boss as saying at a
September meeting with Iraqi officials in Baghdad.

U.S. media presentations of the French arguments have been on a similar
plane. The "cheese-eatin'" tag (would that be Brie or Roquefort?)
derives from an eight-year-old episode of the animated television show
The Simpsons, in which a reluctant teacher of French greets his
elementary-school charges with the rousing salutation "Bonjour, ye
cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys!" It fell to a pop-culturally informed
conservative polemicist, National Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to
revive and popularize the insult in the prewar name-calling. The New
York Post is still calling the French "weasels."

From the tenor of the discussion, in Washington and the hinterlands, you
might think that the Elysee Palace opposes by reflex whatever the White
House says. But the French are only selectively stubborn. France was the
only country, other than the United States, to conduct air strikes
against the Taliban in Afghanistan, with their Mirage jets and Super
Etenard fighters hitting more than 30 targets during Operation Anaconda
in March 2002. The French enthusiastically backed the Afghanistan war,
breaking with Washington only on the Iraq question.

No more persuasive is the widely voiced (in the U.S.) argument that the
French were defending wide-reaching and profitable commercial
relationships with Saddam's regime. The truth is that France enjoyed
minor economic ties with Saddam. Under the United Nations' now-defunct
Oil for Food program with Saddam's Iraq, the French were only the
13th-largest participant. The U.S. under that program bought more than
50 percent of Iraq's total oil exports, the French 8 percent.

So the answer to the question of why the French were right has to begin
with an admission that their intransigence cannot be dismissed as a
knee-jerk impulse or narrowly self-interested plank. Au contraire. What
divided the two longtime allies -- each of which has been a beacon for
liberal Western values over the past two centuries -- was a deep
analytical chasm. An understanding of how the French got to the place
they got to and stubbornly clung to, even as relations with Washington
badly deteriorated, requires a probe of the substance and roots of the
French position.

That may not sound like much fun. Even though they deny it, the French
are already gloating that their much-maligned prewar forecast has proved
to be on target. But here's the good news -- and it really is very good
news. One big reason the French were right is that they were thinking
along the lines that Americans are generally apt to think -- that is, in
a cautious, pragmatic way, informed by their own particular
trial-and-error experience, in this case as an occupier forced out of
Algeria and as a front-line battler, long before 9/11, against global
Islamic terrorist groups.

The Bush administration, by contrast, approached Iraq the way the French
are often thought to approach large world problems -- with a grandiose
sweep of the theoretical hand, a tack exemplified by the big-ideas
neoconservative crowd, whose own thinking, ironically, draws on European
political philosophy. So as the administration rethinks Iraq, the way
back to a sound position may lie at home, in the great but neglected
tradition of American Pragmatism. And then everyone can forget about the
French.

The Prism: Algeria
A pragmatic approach starts with memory -- with the ability to distill
lessons from analogous past experiences. That can be a tricky business.
American critics of the war, particularly those on the left, cited
Vietnam as a cautionary parallel. Perhaps that is apt, since the Vietnam
conflict did involve a clash of civilizations, and the U.S. never fully
understood the alien social and political milieu in which its forces
were operating.

But Vietnam is not a Muslim or Middle Eastern country, and it was a Cold
War theater, in which both the Soviet Union and China assisted anti-U.S.
guerrilla bands. There is only one Western country with an intimate,
bloody, and recent experience of what it is like to be an occupying
power in an Arab land, facing an Islamic insurgency. That country is
France, which granted independence to Algeria in 1963 after failing to
subdue an eight-year-long rebellion by cold-blooded assassins who didn't
blanch at bombing Algiers nightclubs frequented by French teenagers.

The memory remains etched into the French political consciousness. No
event since the Second World War is a heavier or more painful burden for
France than is the Algerian uprising. Algeria, on the southern shore of
the Mediterranean Sea, had a much closer connection to France than
Vietnam ever did to the United States. During the 132 years of French
rule, starting in the 1830s, Algeria was, in legal, constitutional
terms, an annexed section of France, not a colony. The Algerian
uprising, with its demand for independence, destroyed the fourth French
Republic by precipitating a coup attempt by the French military against
civilian political leaders viewed as feckless. It also established
itself as the central prism through which the French political elite
came to view the Muslim world in general and the forces of Arab
nationalism and Islamic militancy in particular.

And even more than that, Algeria forced France to re-examine its
political, economic, and cultural relations with the entire non-Western
portion of humanity. Algeria contained the lesson of a classic
"failure," the British historian Alistair Horne wrote in A Savage War of
Peace, his definitive 1977 account of the conflict; he called it "the
failure either to meet, or even comprehend, the aspirations of the Third
World."

The Islamic world, as the most immediately problematic for the French,
received France's priority attention. In the United States, it was only
with 9/11 that beginning a dialogue with the Muslim community came to
seem urgent, but the French, because of Algeria, had embarked on this
road decades before. "The U.S. is still a bit virginal in its
relationship with the Islamic part of the world," notes Simon Serfaty, a
Frenchman born 60 years ago in colonial Morocco, who is an analyst at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The
French know this part of the world better."

The Algerian uprising certainly made a powerful impression on a young
man destined for France's highest political office: Jacques Chirac.
Conscripted in 1956, at the age of 23, to serve as an officer in the
French army, Chirac commanded a platoon in an isolated mountainous
region of Algeria. The mission was to keep order. But order proved
impossible to keep, with the local population protective of the
fellaghas, the armed resistance fighters from the Fronte de Liberation
Nationale (FLN). Chirac himself was not wounded in engagements with the
guerrillas, but some of his men were, and some were killed. In a speech
to the French Military Academy in 1996, he called his time there the
most important formative experience of his life.

According to an old friend and adviser, Algeria principally taught
Chirac that occupation, even under the best of intentions, is impossible
when popular sentiments have turned against the occupier: "His
experience is that despite all the goodwill, when you are an occupier,
when you are seen [by the local people] as an occupier, the people will
want you to get out." And if Chirac was convinced of anything, according
to this source, it was that the Americans would ultimately be viewed not
as liberators in Iraq but as occupiers. He foresaw a kind of
re-enactment of the Algerian tragedy, the source adds, a "vicious
circle" in which increasingly violent acts against the occupier are met
with an increasingly harsh response -- a cycle that inevitably sours
local people against the occupation.

As the French side tells it, this perspective was at the heart of a
disagreement between Chirac and Bush at a private talk late last
November in Prague, where U.S. and European leaders were gathered to
discuss enlarging NATO. (Although the pair talked on the telephone, this
was their main exchange before the war started six months later.)
According to a senior French official who reviewed a French handwritten
transcript of the meeting, Chirac talked not about the risks of the
major combat phase of a military campaign, which the French expected to
go quickly, but about the perils of the postwar phase, in particular the
dangers of underestimating the force of Arab nationalism and the
prevalence of violence in a country that had never known democracy.
According to the French source, Bush replied that he expected postwar
armed resistance from elements connected to Saddam's Baathist regime -- 
but thought it unlikely that the population as a whole would come to see
the U.S. as occupiers. And Chirac, according to the source, told Bush
that history would decide who was right. The White House recently
declined to comment on the meeting.

Seven months after Saddam's toppling, the struggle for the "hearts and
minds" of the Iraqi people goes on. But a survey of Iraqi public
opinion, done in August for the American Enterprise Institute by
pollster John Zogby, tends to confirm Chirac's instinct. Yes, the poll
found that on the whole, Iraqis were very glad to be rid of Saddam; 70
percent said they expected Iraq to be "much better" or "somewhat better"
in five years. That was the finding the administration and AEI
highlighted. But asked whether America and Britain should help make sure
a representative government is set up in Iraq or just let Iraqis work
this out themselves, 60 percent responded "Iraqis alone." Asked whether
the U.S. over the next five years would help or hurt Iraq, 36 percent
said "help" and 50 percent said "hurt." In an interview on the poll's
results, Zogby said: "The results are not good, from the perspective of
the Bush administration. Something is not working, and there is plenty
of polling evidence to show that something is not working." He
continued: "The Americans misread the situation. They honestly thought
the Iraqis were going to be welcoming them."

Traumatic experiences can be distorting, but the French fixation on
Algeria, if that's what it is, seems appropriate. The uprising was not
just a defeat for an aging, corrupt imperial power. It was also an
awakening experience for such coming-of-age insurgents as Yasir Arafat
and a forerunner of Islamic militants' decision to use terror to achieve
broad political objectives. The conflict introduced the French to the
same kind of deadly enemy that U.S. forces now find themselves battling
in the streets of Baghdad. Better late than never, the Pentagon in
September arranged for senior Special Forces officers a screening of The
Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film showing how crack French paratroopers
rolled up terrorist cells in the Algerian capital, in one of France's
few clear-cut victories in that war. The message is twofold. On the one
hand, the paratroopers forced the FLN to abandon the campaign in the
capital. But the insurgency itself was not extinguished -- and
eventually, it was the unremitting toll of French casualties and a
public backlash in France against the army's harsh tactics against the
Algerian population that caused the French to cut and run.

If an Iraqi version of the Algerian drama were to continue playing out,
then the final act would be an abrupt, poorly planned pullout by a
politically pressured Washington. Noting the growing domestic outcry
over U.S. casualties in Iraq -- which, at 379 killed as of November 4,
are quite small according to the historical standards of armed
conflict -- the French believe this may well happen, despite Bush's vow
to stay the course until Iraq is stable and democratic. And the result,
Paris worries, would be a giant mess on Europe's doorstep. At this
stage, "the worst-case scenario for us would be for [the U.S.] to
leave," Levitte said in a recent interview at his Georgetown quarters.
"If you want to build democracy in Iraq, you must be prepared to pay a
price."

From Appeasement To Afghanistan
So the French are not virgins when it comes to occupations. Nor are they
virgins when it comes to countering international terrorism. They left
Algeria feeling humiliated and somewhat cowed. In their first stab at
constructing a policy to deal with the strange new threat of Islamic
terrorism, the French adopted a policy of appeasement -- an approach
that included tacit permission for globally oriented terrorist groups to
use French soil as a base, so long as the groups did not make France
itself a target. Not surprisingly, France became a haven for
international terrorists. But several decades later, Paris possessed
counter-terrorism capabilities, oriented toward preventing attacks,
second to none in the Western world in effectiveness. And French Mirages
were dropping bombs on Afghanistan.

Behind this turnaround is a story of how the French learned what works
in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. Along with Algeria, this
learning experience powerfully shaped the French perspective on the
post-9/11 world, and it helps explain why the French felt so strongly
that Iraq was a secondary priority in the struggle against terrorism.

One of the few in Washington who has done a careful parsing of the
French experience in counter-terrorism is an unassuming former Rand
analyst, Jeremy Shapiro, who these days hangs his hat at the Brookings
Institution as a research associate in the think tank's center on the
United States and France. A 1989 Harvard graduate who's fluent in
French, Shapiro has cultivated contacts among counter-terrorist experts
at law enforcement agencies in both Paris and Washington. For obscure
policy journals, he's been writing such pieces as "The U.S. Can Learn
From the French in the War Against Terrorism."

In an interview at his cramped Brookings quarters, Shapiro right away
warmed to the topic. "The French were among the first to note that
terrorism was a global movement," he said. But before they came to this
realization, they floundered. In the 1980s, a wave of bombings struck
Paris targets, including department stores and subways. Not only were
the French unable to prevent these attacks, they were also clueless
about the perpetrators and motives. At first they thought that domestic
neo-Nazi militants were behind an assault on a synagogue in a wealthy
section of Paris. Only belatedly did they realize that responsibility
lay with terrorists from the Middle East.

The French had descended to this low point through their adoption of
what Shapiro calls the "sanctuary doctrine" -- a morally repugnant
effort to isolate France from international terrorism by taking a
neutral stance toward global terrorist groups. The idea was to give the
terrorists no reason to attack France. (Better they hit someone else.)

It didn't work. Other countries actively battling terrorism, such as
Spain and Israel, were understandably outraged that France was
sheltering their enemies. Some splinter terrorist bands failed to
recognize France as a "sanctuary" and targeted French interests anyway.
And amid the Paris attacks, the French public demanded a get-tough
approach.

As a result, French counter-terrorism policy evolved to its current
emphasis on suppression and prevention. The key to this policy is what
Shapiro calls the "Alan Greenspan" choice. In effect, France decided to
de-politicize the anti-terrorism battle. "The French treat terrorism
like we treat central banking -- as too serious to be left to the
politicians," Shapiro says. At the heart of the French system is a group
of Paris-based magistrates with sweeping investigative powers of the
sort that a John Ashcroft would die for. Through the expertise
accumulated over numerous investigations, the magistrates managed to
burrow deeply into the roots of global Islamic terrorist networks and
thus gain information on attacks even as they were being plotted.

The results are impressive -- and have helped protect not just the
French but Americans, too. Shapiro's textbook example is the
apprehension of terrorist Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested at the
U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999 with a trunk full of explosives he
planned to use to attack Los Angeles International Airport. Even though
he had few connections to France, French anti-terrorism officials had
been tracking Ressam for more than three years and had repeatedly warned
Canadian authorities of his plans to attack North American targets. The
French provided the FBI with a full dossier on Ressam, helped U.S.
officials identify his associates, and sent an expert to testify at
Ressam's trial, at which he was convicted.

In this context, the French response to 9/11 represented a final
repudiation of the sanctuary doctrine. The notion that France could
somehow hide from terrorism was replaced by a newfound sense of
solidarity, all the more startling given the anti-Americanism that had
long been a staple of French politics. "We Are All Americans" -- "Nous
Sommes Tous Americains" -- the front page of Le Monde declared on
September 13, 2001. And with Levitte at the helm of the U.N. Security
Council (his assignment before he took up residence in Washington as the
French ambassador), that body, for the first time in its history,
declared that an act of terrorism was equivalent to an act of war. It
was with that legal predicate that France joined the U.S. in the
campaign to topple the Taliban.

Iraq: A Question Of Legitimacy
Unity, of course, proved short-lived, as the real possibility of a war
in Iraq came into focus in the fall of 2002. France's clear priority was
a continued focus on Al Qaeda and related networks -- and the pursuit of
what they viewed as unfinished business in the campaign against Taliban
and other Islamic fighters regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
French citizens were themselves directly under attack -- a Qaeda bomb
had killed 11 French engineers at the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. "This
is the main threat," Levitte said in a briefing at the European
Institute, a Washington think tank, on January 29. Based on its own
knowledge of Al Qaeda and related Islamic networks, the French saw
nothing to connect Saddam's regime with Osama bin Laden and company. In
December 2002, French authorities arrested a dozen North African Arabs
who had links to Al Qaeda and were plotting to attack targets in Paris.
French authorities suspected links between Al Qaeda and Chechen rebels,
but not between Al Qaeda and Baghdad, French officials stated publicly
at that time.

Still, the French did not rule out the use of force in Iraq. Rather,
French opposition to a U.S.-initiated strike on Iraq centered on the
question of legitimacy. On whose authority, they asked, could military
force justifiably be used? This is an old tug-of-war between the two
countries, going back to the early days of the Cold War, but Iraq
elevated this disagreement to a new level of antagonism. The French
reject the idea of American Exceptionalism -- a venerable fixture of the
U.S. political psyche and staple of presidential speeches. American
Exceptionalism is the notion that the United States has a unique
crusader role to play in advancing freedom in the world, and can
accomplish this mission not only because of its immense military power
but also because of the compelling example it has set in creating a
dynamic, democratic society at home.

The French, who after their anti-monarchical revolution in the 18th
century staked a similar claim to a liberal, torch-bearing
Exceptionalism, don't accept any of this. They insist that legitimacy,
particularly with respect to the use of force, resides exclusively in
the institutions of the "international community," namely the U.N.
Security Council. "I am totally against unilateralism in the modern
world," Chirac told The New York Times in a September 8, 2002,
interview.

To a grated-on U.S. ear, this may sound like nothing more than the usual
French rant against the United States as the world's hyperpuissance, or
hyperpower. And, of course, the French, in arguing for a decisive role
for the U.N. Security Council, are seeking to preserve an important role
for themselves as one of the five permanent, veto-wielding members of
that body. Nonetheless, it is also possible to believe that the French
have a better practical fix on how the world sees America -- and
multilateral institutions such as the U.N. -- than the Americans
themselves have. American Exceptionalism works only when foreigners buy
into it. If they don't, then the U.S. insistence on having its way truly
does amount to bullying. And in this regard, world public opinion,
loudly and clearly, seems to be saying, "I'll take the U.N." For
example, in Iraq itself, while a majority of Iraqis in Zogby's recent
poll said they thought the U.S. would "hurt," not "help," Iraq over the
next five years, the same question about the U.N. drew an opposite
response, with 50 percent saying it would "help" Iraq and just 19
percent saying "hurt."

Polling in the broader Muslim world underscores what, to advocates of
American Exceptionalism, can only seem contradictory. On the one hand,
the U.S. intervention in Iraq significantly inflamed Muslim opinion. A
June survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
found that anti-American attitudes had spread from the Middle East to
Islamic countries such as Indonesia, where favorable ratings for the
U.S. had plunged from 61 percent to 15 percent over the course of 12
months. The survey also found that majorities in leading Muslim
countries were worried about the U.S. as a potential military threat.
Yet the Pew team also found that large majorities in most Islamic
countries aspired to Western-style democracy. The Muslim world seems to
like the product the U.S. is selling -- but not the salesman. They'd
prefer to get the product from another store, and they seem to think the
U.N. is that store.

All of which, of course, is what the French have been arguing -- at a
higher decibel level than anyone else. "The French sometimes say out
loud what others are thinking," says Charles William Maynes, president
of the Eurasia Foundation in Washington. And this has long driven
Washington nuts. Maynes remembers from his days as a Foreign Service
officer for the State Department in the 1960s that it was "very
difficult to get a rational discussion" within the department about
France or India. "I decided that that was because they were democratic
countries that had an independent policy and their own view of the
world."

Pragmatism, Anyone?
Let's review. The French got it right in Iraq for three basic reasons.
First, the French, by virtue of their own experience, had the best of
all prisms with which to view the Iraq showdown: Algeria. Second, the
French, because of the improvements they had made in their
counter-terrorism efforts, were in a position to make their own
independent determination of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and related
groups versus the threat posed by Saddam's regime. And third, the French
possessed good antennae; they had a clear reading of world, and in
particular Muslim, public opinion on whether a U.S.-led intervention
would be viewed as legitimate. They were better listeners than the
Americans were.

In its exasperation with the French, Washington says it is Paris that
has become lost in languid abstractions. "It's easy to toss out nice
theories about sovereignty, and occupation, and liberation, and all
that," Colin Powell complained to reporters on his plane last month
after a round of inconclusive talks with the French on an expanded U.N.
role in Iraq.

But he's picking on the French for the wrong reason. The Bush camp had
run up against Jacques Chirac -- a stubborn 70-year-old man. Not even
his friends regard him as a conceptual thinker or grand strategist. He's
prone not to airy theorizing but to condescension. On the Iraq matter,
he revealed his sense of superiority over Bush, a man 14 years his
junior who entered the White House without a track record in foreign
affairs. (Chirac has a higher estimation of Bush's father, a
multilateralist who fought in World War II and headed the CIA before
becoming president.) That final "Be careful!" warning was preceded by a
vintage -- which is to say, patronizing -- Chirac pronouncement:
"Personally, I have some experience of international political life."

It's very hard to know what to do about something if you haven't been
there before. That's when the temptation to adopt a guiding theoretical
framework to make sense of an unfamiliar and threatening landscape can
become seductive. It may be too early for a conclusive verdict on the
biggest of the big ideas that the neocons around Bush have offered -- 
the idea that a regime change in Iraq can spur a democratic
transformation of the authoritarian political culture of the entire Arab
Middle East. But that idea most certainly belongs in the category of
untested hypothesis.

The neocons are not experts on the Middle East. One of their prime
intellectual influences is an abstruse political philosopher, Leo
Strauss, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose students at the
University of Chicago included Paul Wolfowitz, now serving as Bush's
deputy secretary of Defense and the administration's leading proponent
of using Iraq as a laboratory for democratic nation building in the
region. Straussians tend to believe in the ability of intellectual
elites -- modern-day philosopher-kings -- to discern truths unavailable
to lesser minds. "It's a European style of getting the peasants to do
what 'we' say," said James Pinkerton, a critic of the Iraq intervention
who worked in the Bush I White House.

Even if America can't tap a particular memory to deal with the post-9/11
world, it does have available to it that old and poignant tradition of
American pragmatism. And it is a poignant tradition. Modern American
Pragmatism, as the American critic Louis Menand tells the story in his
Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Metaphysical Club, was hatched after
the Civil War as a kind of antidote to overly ideological and moralistic
views of the world. The pragmatists came to their new lights as a result
of their own hard, tragic experiences. Of Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of
the movement's charter thinkers, Menand writes: "He had gone off to
fight because of his moral beliefs, which he held with singular fervor.
The war did more than make him lose those beliefs. It made him lose his
belief in beliefs. It impressed on his mind, in the most graphic and
indelible way, a certain idea about the limits of ideas."

There is a danger in this line of thinking -- the risk that an excess of
pragmatism will spill over into cynicism and a paralyzing pessimism. But
there's danger, too, in an excess of theory, spilling over into
recklessness. "The limits of ideas" -- now there's an intriguing
concept. How un-what-we-think-of-as-French. How ripe for America to
re-explore.