Dear IR Wonk,

I noticed that Condoleezza Rice and England’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spent a week earlier this year on a trip to some of some of the sites of the civil rights movement in Rice’s hometown in Alabama. Rice said the following:

"At one point, not that long ago, the promise of democracy seemed distant here in Alabama and throughout the American South. But when impatient patriots in this country finally demanded their freedom and their rights, what once seemed impossible suddenly became inevitable. So it was in America. So it was in much of the world. And so it will be in the Middle East." (USA Today)

My question is: what does the civil rights movement have to do with the Iraq war?

Jackie, Cambridge, Ma.

Dear Reader,

The implied connection that Condoleezza Rice lays out- between the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and the Iraq War- fit into a set of larger ideological trends dominant in the Bush Administration’s world view. The neoconservative movement, the wing of the administration’s foreign policy of which Rice is considered to be a part, has long had a friendly relationship with civil rights. Figures like former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz come from a unique strand of Republicanism, one that stands in sharp contrast to both foreign policy isolationists and the elements of the party which were on the losing side of the African-American struggle during the heyday of the civil rights movement.

Neoconservatism, while used today to refer to Bush administration foreign policy, traditionally referred to former Democrats “who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Neoconservatives took a hard line policy on foreign affairs but were quite moderate on domestic issues, from anti-poverty programs to black rights. An exemplar case of this ideological combination was the Democratic Senator from Washington, Henry “Scoop” Jackson. While a foe of Joe McCarthy, a supporter of the New Deal, and an ardent defender of black civil rights, Jackson at the same time opposed détente as overly conciliatory and was one of the Democrats most supportive of the Vietnam War.

The experience of Paul Wolfowitz, once an aid on national security to Senator Jackson and a major intellectual architect of the Iraq war, and now the President of the World Bank, reveals the connections between the Vietnam war and today’s Iraq, wars both grounded in ideological internationalism. For critics of the Iraq war, Vietnam represents the pinnacle of the United States military stretched beyond ethical limits. The protest of this war- an iconic element of “the sixties,” is often held hand in hand with protests for civil rights. Historical recollection, exemplified by TV documentaries, place images of Robert Kennedy’s assassination next to that of Martin Luther King Jr., and picture the freedom rides to the background of chants of “LBJ, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?”

As intrinsically as civil rights and Vietnam are linked in the popular imagination, the two were not necessarily linked at the time. Wolfowitz himself straddled this divide as a student at Cornell, where, according to Cornell Magazine, he and another student, inspired by a mentor, political philosopher Allan Bloom, went down to Washington to hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

A defender of civil rights, Wolfowitz was at the same time an ardent supporter of the war in Vietnam. The future Deputy Secretary of Defense was a member of the "Committee for Critical Support of the U.S. in Vietnam" which staged counter-rallies to popular anti-Vietnam protests on campus. (A former classmate, speaking later, remarked on the (limited) influence of the committee which only “consisted of Paul and me, plus another fellow”) in the face of thousands protesting Vietnam. See the article in Cornell Magazine here.

Condoleezza Rice may place Vietnam, Iraq, and the Civil Rights Movement as part of the effort to “create a balance of power in the world that favors freedom.” Yet there is an important difference between progress in human rights that comes with the force of the gun, and that which comes from a popular, nonviolent movement. Certainly, civil rights fall into the latter category. And, while war is certainly more complicated, as it is made up of ideological battles that occur between, rather than within, states, there is no moral equivalency between violent war and the struggle for African American rights.

Rather than to suggest that there can not be virtuous war, or even that we are in a fully knowledgeable position to make such judgments about war, such comparisons should be avoided if only to preserve the meaning and importance of the civil rights movement itself. In a day when the struggle for African American rights has become the popular consensus (the saga over Trent Lott’s remarks implicitly endorsing Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential run can tell us that), civil rights are increasingly used to popularize all kinds of causes. Politicians from every stripe call us to the words of Martin Luther King, while authors do the same, from Jeff Sachs, who cites Martin Luther King as an inspiration in The End to Poverty, to Samuel Huntington, who cites King as a building block in uniting secular and religious America, in Who Are We?. The more American public figures compare their cause- however justified- to American civil rights, the more we devalue, the more we take for granted, everything the struggle for black equality truly meant.

Sincerely,

The IR Wonk