By Carl M. Cannon, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 24, 2003

In the days after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush told Americans that it was important for them to resume the rhythms of their daily lives. Once, Bush urged his fellow citizens to drive to Disney World. On three occasions, the president encouraged Americans to go see a baseball game. Other national leaders echoed the president's ministrations. National Football League teams sat idle for one game, and then resumed their season with a patriotic fervor. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue called the White House to make sure he understood the administration's wishes. He did, and the commissioner then invoked the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had personally interceded to keep Major League Baseball operational during World War II.

In times of war, America's enemies sometimes mistake its pursuit of happiness for a love of materialism. But such pursuits are the very essence of freedom.

"At a certain point, playing our games will contribute to the healing process," Tagliabue said. "Our players recognize that."

David Letterman returned to the air on September 17 after a six-night hiatus to assure Americans that it was all right for them to cry -- and to laugh. Lettermen also praised New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for his courage. Giuliani was considered the most inspiring of the nation's elected officials, and he made a direct connection between Americans' pursuing happiness and asserting their freedom. The mayor found time between attending dozens of funerals to repeatedly urge New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike to keep coming to a wounded Manhattan -- and to go shopping or attend the theater.

Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Polling On The State Of The Nation · July 2003 National Journal Cover Story Comparing Bush To FDR · Book Review: "Democracy In America" Additional Information On The Web Description Of Cannon's Book, "The Pursuit of Happiness In Times Of War," By The University Of Virginia's Center For Politics · First Chapter Of Cannon's Book (PDF) · The Ad Council's "Campaign For Freedom" · First Lady Laura Bush's Nov. 8, 2001, Speech To The National Press Club · Nobel Peace Prize Winner Jose Ramos-Horta's Case For The Iraq War · Sen. Edward Kennedy's March 4, 2003, Speech Against The Iraq War · President Bush's July 4, 2001, Speech

"Go ahead and go about the everyday activities," Giuliani said. "If you go to a park and play with your children, do that. If you like to go out and spend money, I would encourage that. It's always a good thing."

In one sense, the nation's leaders were responding on a pragmatic level. During World War II, Roosevelt had asked Americans to make material sacrifices -- from giving up silk stockings to rationing gasoline -- for the war effort. At the same time, FDR believed that an awakening U.S. economy, based on agriculture and manufacturing, would support the two-front military campaign while simultaneously leading America out of the Depression. By contrast, Bush and Giuliani held office in a post-Information Age America, in which a service economy that was the pride of the world had been shown to have a vulnerable underbelly: It could be crippled by business executives too fearful to get on airplanes and too worried about the future to make capital investments; or by consumers in no mood to travel, go on vacation, or dine out.

In America, therefore, a call on the citizenry to go shopping or attend a musical could strike free people as a logical, if unsatisfying, way of demonstrating resolve. To an embittered holy warrior, however, such a response was further evidence of the decadence and vulnerability of a people characterized by frivolousness, materialism, and a national absorption with having a good time. "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola," an Afghan holy warrior named Maulana Inyadullah said while the World Trade Center still smoldered. "But we love death."

Such statements, with their implication that blind zealotry gives Muslim terrorists a tactical advantage in their global war, were designed to be chilling. And they were. But America's sworn enemies were misreading both Americans' historical resolve and the true significance of American materialism. They weren't the first to make this mistake. Famed World War II correspondent John Hersey, who covered the war in the Pacific for Life magazine, once asked a group of U.S. marines on Guadalcanal what motivated them while they were fighting. After a long silence, one of them muttered, "Jesus, what I'd give for a piece of blueberry pie." For a second, Hersey thought the marine was changing the subject -- or making fun of him. Until a second marine said quietly, "Personally, I prefer mince." A third whispered, "Make mine apple with a few raisins in it and lots of cinnamon -- you know, Southern-style." In a book he wrote later, Into the Valley: Marines at Guadalcanal, Hersey filled in the scene:

"Fighting for pie. Of course that is not exactly what they meant. Here, in a place where they had lived for several weeks mostly on captured Japanese rice, then finally had gone on to such delicacies as canned corned beef and Navy beans, where they were usually hungry and never given a treat -- here pie was their symbol of home.... For certain men, books are the thing; for others, music; for others, movies. But for all of them, these things are just badges of home. When they say they are fighting for these things, they mean that they are fighting for home -- 'to get the goddam thing over and get home.' Perhaps this sounds selfish.... But home seems to most marines a pretty good thing to be fighting for. Home is where the good things are -- the generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie."

An Enduring Notion
That this happiness depends on a willingness to wage war is one of life's paradoxes. But for Americans in the aftermath of September 11, it also became a truism. At a September 23, 2001, vigil at Yankee Stadium, U.S. Navy Adm. Robert Natter promised a victory "against a terrorist enemy to whom we say: You picked the wrong city, and you picked the wrong country." Adm. Natter is a warrior, but a 73-year-old African-American poet renowned for her gentle ways said much the same thing: "I can see in the acorn the oak tree," proclaimed Maya Angelou. "I see the growth, the rebuilding, the restoring. I see that is the American psyche. There is so much we can draw understanding from. One of the lessons is the development of courage. Because without courage, you can't practice any of the other virtues consistently."

Thus did a diverse cross section of Americans give rebuttal to the terrorists' assumptions about the United States. In such moments, the nation's leaders were giving expression to an idea that most Americans understand instinctively: namely, that chasing dreams, pursuing happiness, even achieving material success, are not embarrassing byproducts of American freedom; they are the essence of American freedom. This is an old concept. George Washington, in a 1769 letter to George Mason, went seamlessly from complaining about an odious British tax on Virginia planters to talking of armed insurrection. And by 1786, Washington was specifically linking American happiness to American prosperity.

"I shall always be happy to give and receive communications on improvements in farming, and the various branches of agriculture," Washington wrote. "This is, in my opinion, an object of infinite importance to the country; I consider it to be the proper source of American wealth and happiness."

To be sure, there are those who cannot reconcile Americans' love of materialism with a love of freedom. One impulse seems to them to be base, the other noble. How can a moral person serve both masters? And isn't the first of these concepts, the right to materialism, clearly subordinate in importance to freedom? Again, these are not new questions. More than 170 years before the attacks of 9/11, a Frenchman came to this country to attempt to unravel the riddle inside Thomas Jefferson's great triad. After observing the United States for nine months, less time than many of the September 11 suicide bombers from the deadly Qaeda cells spent here, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that high concepts of life and liberty were not at odds with the hedonistic-sounding "pursuit of happiness." Instead, he said, those concepts strengthened and complemented each other. Actually, Tocqueville suggested that one was hardly possible without the other. In Democracy in America, he wrote:

"An American occupies himself with his private interests as if he were alone in the world, and a moment later, he gives himself over to the public as if he had forgotten them. He sometimes appears animated by the most selfish cupidity and sometimes by the most lively patriotism. The human heart cannot be divided in this manner... and indeed, Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare; they are attached to the one by the other."

John Hersey's marines couldn't have said it any better.

A Reason For War
In the months leading to the second war in Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and British Prime Minister Tony Blair articulated their litany of reasons justifying the impending invasion: Saddam Hussein was hell-bent on adding to his supposed arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; Saddam had thumbed his nose at U.N. resolutions demanding that he get rid of them; Saddam had already committed acts of war against three of his neighbors -- Iran, Kuwait, and Israel -- and was determined to cleanse the Iraqi Kurds from large portions of his own country. In the process of committing those outrages, Saddam had used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian military units and, during the Persian Gulf War, fired conventional missiles at Israeli and Saudi civilian centers; Saddam was sworn to the destruction of Israel -- and, for that matter, the United States; Saddam was underwriting terrorists in the Middle East; finally, he'd brutalized the people of Iraq, people who themselves have an unalienable right to be free.

It was the last rationale that resonated most strongly with many Americans. And when Bush began emphasizing, perhaps a little late in the debate, his resolve that Iraqis, too, should realize the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, many of Bush's countrymen came along with him. This was a reason worth fighting for. "We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace," Bush told the American people in an Oval Office address on March 19, 2003, as the invasion began. "We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others, and we will prevail."

Halfway around the world, troops of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division gathered under a full moon and listened to their commander-in-chief. "To all the men and women of the United States armed forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you," Bush said, speaking directly to them. "The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military."

The U.S. military commanders in the field did what officers have done since the Revolutionary War, when Gen. Washington ordered the Declaration of Independence be read aloud to the troops of the Continental Army bivouacked in New York City: They roused the courage of their citizen-soldiers with an explanation of why they were fighting. "For decades, Saddam Hussein has tortured, imprisoned, raped, and murdered the Iraqi people," Maj. Gen. J.N. Mattis told the men of the 1st Marine Division. "The time has come to end his reign of terror. On your young shoulders rest the hopes of mankind."

In the Army units, the message was the same. "We are not going up there to fight the Iraqi people," Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, commanding officer of the 3rd Army Infantry Division, 3rd Battalion, told his troops in a version of remarks delivered all over Kuwait that night. "The Iraqi people are good people. They've just been put in a bad situation."

Just as the Civil War letters of Union soldiers show how Northern troops eventually came to see themselves as liberators, so too do the first-person words from the American troops in Iraq in 2003 serve to enlighten us as to the motivations of the soldiers themselves. In e-mails, letters, and the interviews they gave to "embedded" journalists, the same three points emerged time and time again: First, without claiming that Saddam was connected to Osama bin Laden, they sensed that the impending war stemmed indirectly from the events of 9/11. Second, and as a result, they saw their mission as one to defend America itself, and American freedom. Third, they asserted that they were going into Iraq to make life better for the people who lived there.

"I'm fighting for their freedom," Pfc. Crystal Heyer, of the 190th Military Police Company of the Georgia National Guard, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as her unit was being sent overseas. "I'm fighting so they can have a future."

Thousands of other American fighting men and women said much the same thing, and this message took root among the families of those serving in uniform. This was even true, remarkably, among many of the families of slain American soldiers. "He died doing a good deed and a good job," Donna Bellman said after learning that her son, Marine Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, was killed in action. "He believed he was helping to liberate people. He believed he was fighting for their freedom, for our freedom." This was not an atypical reaction.

On April 3, while at Camp Lejeune to pay his respects to the families of the soldiers and marines fighting in Iraq, Bush related a vignette that he believed summed it up:

"A man in one Iraqi village said this to one of our soldiers: 'I want my freedom. I don't want food or water. I just want my freedom.' America hears that man! We hear all Iraqis who yearn for liberty, and the people of Iraq have my pledge: Our fighting forces will press on until your entire country is free."

If Eleanor Roosevelt were still with us, she could have told Bush to expect such reactions, that they are human nature. As she often pointed out, it is hard to talk political theory to a man who is selling the furniture out of his house to feed his four children -- as Fadhil Murah was doing. The analogy between nations and individuals is inescapable: Just as a hungry, impoverished person can rarely be happy, neither can an impoverished, failing nation-state console itself with the thought that it has democratic elections. Conversely, just as richness is not enough to make a man happy, neither can wealth alone make a nation free and democratic. This is what the House of Saud discovered on 9/11, when 15 of the suicide hijackers who struck America turned out to be Saudis from middle-class backgrounds. This development, in turn, raised the issue of whether all people of the world want freedom. This is not an academic question: Inside that philosophical query lies the answer to whether war in Iraq and other wars to come are justified.

Moral Truths
If the rights Jefferson committed to paper in Philadelphia are truly "unalienable," the idea that flows naturally from this concept is that the human desire for them is universal. For most Americans -- and for most American political leaders -- this notion is axiomatic. "The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order -- the fixed star of freedom," President Ford said on July 2, 1976. "It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal."

Certainly, President Bush believes this.

"Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place," Bush said in a June 2002 commencement address to graduating West Point cadets. Bush has expounded on this outlook several times as president, in both set speeches and extemporaneous comments. "No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police," he said in his 2002 State of the Union address -- a line that is a pretty faithful modern translation of the observation made famous by Thomas Jefferson that no man is born wishing for a saddle on his back and spurs in his side. The yearning for freedom, Bush added in a celebrated interview with journalist Bob Woodward, is as basic as "mothers loving their children."

As the war in Iraq began, American political leaders of all stripes sounded the same theme. "Yes, we are fighting to preserve our national security," proclaimed House Speaker Dennis Hastert. "But we are also fighting to preserve the universal ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who wants Bush's job, also maintained that Jefferson's promise implied a duty on the part of Americans to export the ideas of liberal democracy -- including the rights of women -- into the heart of the Muslim world. "God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we declared our independence for don't end at America's borders," Lieberman said in a speech at Georgetown University.

Hastert and Lieberman both supported Bush on the war, but even Bush's most prominent anti-war critics have asserted that the principles of the Declaration of Independence extend beyond America's shores. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., possibly the most articulate of these critics, prefaced his seminal March 4, 2003, speech against the war in Iraq by noting, "Our nation was founded on the inalienable right of all of our citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," adding that it was each American's obligation to expand that promise to the rest of the world. Kennedy's own legislative efforts before and during the fighting in Iraq have been oriented toward winning minds in the Arab world.

Few of those opposed to the Iraq war questioned America's right to obliterate the Taliban; a sneak attack on the United States was hatched from Afghan soil with the tacit complicity of Kabul's government. But Bush goes much further. From his public speeches, his private comments, and his actions, it becomes apparent that Bush believes America's moral authority to interject itself into Iraq does not -- and need not -- come from the U.N. Security Council, because it derives from a much higher authority. It comes from the Declaration of Independence.

Bush did not cobble this philosophy together hastily or after the fact -- listen to him on July 4, 2001, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia 10 weeks before he suddenly found himself a wartime commander-in-chief:

Our Founders considered themselves heirs to principles that were timeless, and truths that were self-evident. When Jefferson sat down to write, he was trying, he said, to place before mankind "the common sense of the subject." The common sense of the subject was that we should be free.... Freedom, not by the good graces of government, but as the birthright of every individual. Equality, not as a theory of philosophers but by the design of our Creator. Natural rights, not for the few, not even for a fortunate many, but for all people, in all places, in all times.... Our greatest achievements have come when we have lived up to these ideals.... When Abraham Lincoln wondered whether civil war was preferable to permanent slavery, he knew where to seek guidance. Speaking in Independence Hall, he said, "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." The Declaration, Lincoln said, gave promise that in due time, the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men and all should have an equal chance.

Naive And Dangerous?
The notion, advanced subtly by anti-war critics, that Arab culture is unready for democracy also strikes Bush as fundamentally illiberal. The president has asserted that freedom is not only one of the "natural rights," but the most basic human yearning. He displays no patience for the idea that there is anything about Arab culture, or Islam, that is incompatible with this desire. "It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world -- or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim -- is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life," Bush said at a February 26, 2003, dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. "Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth."

Bush noted that apologists for the status quo have always been among us. "There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values," Bush said. "Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq, with its proud heritage, abundant resources, and skilled and educated people, is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom."

Here, it must be said that Bush was hardly alone in his views, although one wouldn't always know it by some of the news coverage he generated. Before and during the fighting in Iraq, Bush enjoyed widespread public support for the invasion. Both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize it. Abroad, many more of America's allies supported the president than opposed him. The list of prominent American political leaders who supported Bush and Blair included not just Joe Lieberman, but also John Edwards, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and Hillary Rodham Clinton (in other words, the Establishment Democrats with the most-realistic presidential ambitions), and nearly the entire Republican Party, including John McCain.

Some of the most prominent moral voices in the world also supported the invasion. These included renowned Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, and another Nobel laureate, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors Without Borders. "History has shown that the use of force is often the necessary price of liberation," proclaimed Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister of East Timor (and another Nobel Peace Prize winner). "If the anti-war movement dissuades the United States and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead."

This was a common reaction of those with firsthand experience living under tyranny. On Presidents' Day, when Washington was virtually closed down by a snowstorm, Bush met with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

"Let me talk to you about Iraq," Bush began when she entered the Oval Office.

"There is no need for that," replied Vike-Freiberga. "For 50 years, the democracies slept while we lived under repression and tyranny."

Nowhere in the world was this phenomenon appreciated more than in the badlands of northern Iraq, where all that has separated the Kurdish people from annihilation in the past dozen years was the U.S.-operated "no-fly" zone and the Kurdish guerrillas known as peshmerga ("those who face death"). Jeffrey Goldberg, the intrepid correspondent for The New Yorker, visited that inaccessible frontier on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and found himself besieged with requests for U.S. flags and pictures of George W. Bush. "It is virtually impossible," Goldberg wrote, "to find anyone in Kurdistan who is opposed to the war against Saddam's regime."

Yet it can also be said that Bush is floating a radical thought here. Although he doesn't say it just this way, his idea appears to be this encompassing: that the attacks of September 11, 2001, showed the civilized world that Earth is too small to have any dictatorships in it. Under this theory, it follows that Iraq is a beginning, not an end point. It is not a surprise that this belief would strike some people as a bit too grand, not to mention dangerous and naive besides. Tocqueville wrote, after visiting the United States, of this "irresistible revolution" of democracy. But he also complained of Americans' overbearing and brassy brand of jingoism, even if it was employed in the noble cause of freedom. "It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism," he wrote. "It wearies even those disposed to respect it."

But if the success of what Bush began calling "the battle of Iraq" doesn't hinge for most Americans on its putative legal justification under international law, it certainly will be judged on whether a decent society with a functioning government emerges in Iraq. This is as it should be. Bush persuaded Americans to go to war in Iraq, and he sent the troops. If chaos reigns in that country or Iraq does not embrace a democratic constitution guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to its citizens, then many Americans will have died in vain, and President Bush is the proper person to be held accountable.

Some days, Bush sounds as if he understands the complexities of bringing this about; some days, he doesn't. Speaking in Chicago on June 11, 2003, Bush said flatly, "Thanks to the bravery of our military, and to friends and allies, the regime of Saddam Hussein is no more.... Thanks to their bravery and their sacrifice, the world is more peaceful, America is more secure, and the Iraqi people are now free."

He tossed in an admonition about there still being "work to do in Iraq," but Bush's hopeful scenarios seemingly knew no bounds. In June 2003, he opined that "success in Iraq" could pave the way for a "truly democratic Palestinian state" -- even as Hamas-directed suicide bombers were turning Israel's civilian buses into slaughterhouses. Other days, Bush was more pensive, more appreciative of the subtleties involved. He said on a couple of occasions that he believed a representative government would materialize in Baghdad, adding that he hoped Iraqis realized the importance of the doctrine of separation of church and state -- and the need to adopt a constitution that protected the rights of minorities.

"I'm confident that a government will emerge," he said late in April 2003. "I dismiss the critics who say that democracy can't flourish in Iraq. It may not look like America. You know, Thomas Jefferson may not emerge... or a John Adams."

Or perhaps they will. Jeffrey Goldberg laughed with pleasure when apprised of Bush's remarks -- but he wasn't laughing at Bush.

"Oh, the Kurds know all about the Declaration of Independence," Goldberg said. "Some of them have read Founding Brothers. They'll tell you who among them reminds them of which Founding Father. Some of them like Adams; some prefer Jefferson."

Goldberg told of having dinner at the house of Barham Salih, the English-educated prime minister of one of the two rival Kurdish factions. It was Salih who had read Founding Brothers and who reminded the American journalist that even the Founding Fathers had quarreled among themselves, argued, and nurtured grudges. One of them (Aaron Burr) actually shot and killed another one (Alexander Hamilton), yet they had managed to produce this remarkable document and its timeless revolution. Excitedly, Salih opened Joseph Ellis's book and pointed to pages where Jefferson predicts that democracy will eventually replace tyranny everywhere. "This ball of liberty, I believe most piously," Jefferson predicted in a 1795 letter to a friend, "is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe."

Ellis also quotes briefly from the letter Jefferson wrote to Roger Weightman days before dying. A nostalgic Jefferson totes up the accomplishments of the "host of worthies" who met in Philadelphia. "All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man," he wrote with pride.

Fifty years earlier, Jefferson was saying, the patriots of 1776 had convinced the world that freedom and self-government were unalienable and undeniable -- and on his deathbed, Jefferson was predicting that this "palpable truth" would ultimately find its way to the far corners of the Earth.

The house of Barham Salih, in the town of Sulaimaniya, is just such a remote corner of the globe. And it's a dangerous place for the apostles of liberty. In an assassination attempt against him a year earlier, the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group had detonated a bomb in that dwelling that killed five of Salih's bodyguards.

But on this night, as he pointed intently into the pages of an American book, this Kurdish revolutionary remarked that the ball of liberty set in motion in Philadelphia in 1776 had indeed made its way to his time and to the remote reaches of his lands.

"It's even reached here!" he said. "So, you see, Jefferson was right."

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