What started out as a trickle has turned into a black plastic river-one thousand body bags, as of last Tuesday, to hold the remains of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. What's more, Army spokespeople have begun admitting that U.S. forces do not control large parts of the country cryptically referred to as
o-go zones.""
We support a former Baathist assassin as president, while a Shi'ite cleric, whose father was murdered by Saddam Hussein, is our most implacable foe. If this comes as a shock to any of us here in Madison, then we should visit Memorial Library and check out UW icon William Appleman Williams.
Williams, who died fourteen years ago, was a World War II veteran, a UW graduate and a history professor here at Madison from 1957-'68. He was a diplomatic and intellectual historian, but not in any manner dry. In a word, he was rad-a moral warning light in that thermonuclear pissing contest called the Cold War.
Williams was rejected by our establishment. Tellingly, just as we admired Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, the Russians admired Williams. But the angry students who protested in Madison and elsewhere against the Vietnam War of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon found in Williams' teach-ins an answer to the contradictions of Cold War America.
Williams became a great '60s icon by pointing out that American diplomacy is tragic. It has the power born of success (victory in 1945), yet has too often produced only terror: the idea that democracy can be served to the oppressed on the point of a bayonet, the fantasy that peace lies in a nuclear warhead, or the dream of a global monopoly on violence.
Williams said that American power would ultimately prove impotent because of its ""ideological definition of the world."" Our ideology blinds our leaders. They cannot see that the open markets that are good for this country might be bad for others. Consequently, the coercive means we use to pursue our idealistic ends subvert those ends, automatically engendering resistance. Therefore, the Viet Cong and the Mahdi Army are two heads of the same dragon.
Today, American diplomacy remains tragic. Iraq exemplifies what Williams called the ""terror of terrors,"" the notion that democracy grows from bullets. The tragedy is plain to see in the thousand body bags and the uncounted dead Iraqis.
Likewise, American power remains impotent. As journalist Naomi Klein has shown, the current administration did indeed have a plan for post-war Iraq. Namely, convert Iraq into a free-market economy. Instead, we put thousand of Iraqis out of work, radicalized them and our continued efforts only fuel the fire that is Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
What Williams really teaches us is that the problems of this country do not all lie beyond our borders. But since we define domestic prosperity in terms of the frontier, we constantly look to open up the markets of the world. Ironically, we've come to gauge the health of our democracy by our commitment to an elite-dominated, secretive national security state that is authoritarian in character.
Williams demonstrated that those two tendencies point us away from the racism in our national heart, the rusting steel mills in Ohio and all the problems found here at home. Those tendencies falsely project all our problems onto the outside world.
In Williams, UW Madison has a hero. He was the best sort of intellectual-a man who questioned the executioners when others were cheerleading.
He shows us that we need to abandon the open door ideology that has recently produced those thousand body bags and the broken idea that our prosperity lies in the slums of Baghdad. Reading Williams can help us gain the intellectual resources to consider that our ideology can be militaristic or democratic but not both, and help us build the moral courage to abandon the one to save the other.
