How do you keep thousands of people, millions even, in line?
You can't, at least not without an organizing principle.
In the military it's called doing ones duty to ones country.
What's the organizing principle of France? I'm not sure. There was a France before there was democracy. Before democracy was monarchy. Before that were various geographic and ethnic principalities, provinces, regions, etc.
While it's nice to have an organizing principle that is humanitarian and enlightened, the history of the world shows that enlightenment and humanitarianism are icing on the cake. Underneath it all is the need for an organizing principle of some sort, good, bad, or indifferent.
With us, it's democracy. It's the one idea most of us can agree on in principle, theory, and in the abstract, no matter that our efforts fall short of the goal. Attainable goals aren't all that interesting anyway, are they.
So we go to war in Iraq based on the organizing principle that Saddam is a bad actor who won't cooperate with the international community of nations and acts as though he's hiding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) beyond our ability to find them. We go to war and find there are no WMD. Well, that's a shame, but we've gotten rid of the bad guy, so there.
As for democracy, Iraq is having trouble coming up with an organizing principle on which to base their new constitution in the making. It's like drafting a pre-nuptial agreement where two people, in Iraq's case three, find themselves in a bed not of their making and they don't want to be there together, but they're stuck. So they're going to slap together an agreement to cooperate in running a nation that each partner thinks should not include the others. This is not an easy task. So they argue over whether there should be a right to secede, or whether Islamic law should control, and whether women can emerge from a position of subservience to men and have rights.
Somewhat more democratic nations such as our own are not entirely happy about this because the Iraqis are not adopting our views. Well, what did we expect?
The organizing principle we want is different than the Iraqis want.
Before we became a democracy our organizing principle was the British divine right of kings. Parliament overthrew that beginning 1628, with the Petition of Right in favor of a parliamentary democracy. The organizing principle is that Parliament has the final say on how the country is to be set up and run, not the king. In the name of the rights of the people, Parliament is now sovereign in Britain. They don't have a written constitution, which saves them a lot of grief in trying to conform to it. They have an unwritten constitution and make it up as they go along, the same as we do, without seeming to get into quite as many constitutional crises, although they've certainly had their share.
In the U.S. we claim to be a constitutional democracy in which sovereignty resides in the people, an abstract bunch of people, but not in government. There may be a certain amount of bluster going on here. Cooper v. Aaron (1957) is the case in which the Court proclaims its power and your duty to obey. How much you want to believe of that is up to you, but it seems pretty much decided that we will continue along the Marbury path for the foreseeable future.
It was John Locke, I believe, who proclaimed the organizing principle of Britain, hence us, to be a social contract. If by contract one means that we agree to behave within certain constraints according to certain ideals, then I suppose we've got a de facto contract. I don't ever recall being asked whether I assented to it, or not, since it's not written and not even oral, but tacit, implied from behavior, and not necessarily my own behavior but others who came before me.
But I play along, not having any other choice. I just hope that as long as we say we're going to behave according to some ideals that we do so better than we have been doing.
If you want to call this a social contract, it's fine with me. Either way, it's an organizing principle that allows us to function as a society whether we love each other or not.
We've been conducting families this way for a long time, without any written constitution or other agreement. People simply pair off and function according to the dictates of their culture influenced of course by the dictates of nation and religion, which, I suppose are part of their culture. Some families are more enlightened and humanitarian than others.
One of the difficult challenges for a political leader, or a wannabe political leader, is to put into words a new statement of the organizing principle he, or she, wishes to use to get people behind his, or her, program for election, movement, reform, retrenchment, or whatever.
Effective political leaders produce one word slogans, such as Hitler's "Lebensraum," program, meaning to create room to live, or living-room, for the audience of Germans he was addressing. This accounted for the invasion of Austria and its annexation into Germany (the "anschluss"), his invasion of surrounding countries, and the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, gays, socialists, and anyone else who got in the way.
The doctrine promoted cleaning out the undesirables to make way for the desirables. Lebensraum. An organizing principle that worked.
John F. Kennedy needed to jump start the country after the Russians put up Sputnik in 1957 during the Cold War. Elected president in 1960, JFK set a challenge to the country, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. He established NASA and the plan of setting a goal succeeded with a man on the moon in 1069. The country was told this was a great idea and a lot of people aligned themselves in support. "A man on the moon by the end of the decade" was an organizing principle.
The organizing principle for Iraq has turned out to be hollow, so I hope that there was a deeper one that the president and the administration can't talk about, such as important geopolitical strategic considerations that justify the sacrifice.
Such as what for example?
How about clearing out a fundamentalist clog in the worlds sewer, make that geopolitical and strategic channel for the distribution of energy, as in oil, without which the developed world can not long survive. We feed six billion people, up from four, based on energy driven technology that has produced a green revolution that extracts nitrogen from air which is used to grow plants that we and our food animals eat.
That may be a little hard to work into a sound bite, but that's what we have repackagers and spinmeisters for, to make palatable in a few words, such as lebensraum and man-on-moon, complex ideas.
An organizing principle is a usable over-simplification. It may mean many things to many people, but that makes it more usable, not less. It makes some difference that we don't always act as we say we believe. We just have to try harder when we fall short.
And what happens when our organizing principle comes up short, or is attained, such as putting a man on the moon in 1969?
We simply come up with a new organizing principle.
That, is seems to me, is what Pres. Bush tries to do when he says, well, forget about WMD, we got rid of a bad guy and the Iraqis had their first election. I don't really care all that much about whether the Iraqis have free and fair elections, not when I wasn't too impressed with Bush v. Gore in Florida in 2000.
Our goal stands, not entirely reachable, but certainly worth discussing until we come up with a better goal.
In the meantime, we organize ourselves in the service of the organizing principle.
I suppose that if the result of a shipwreck was that a bunch of disparate people found themselves stranded on an uninhabited island, they'd have to agree on how to live on that island.
They'd have to organize themselves into some sort of mutual survival society, if they didn't fight and kill each other until the last man survived.
That's the position in which Iraq finds itself today, trying to obtain the cooperation of three disparate groups, Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias, to work together toward some common goal, such as surviving in a rough neighborhood. Women's rights take a back seat to this.
Organizing principle, that's what a constitution is, or more accurately, reflects or is based on, even if it is unstated, or remains to be worked out or articulated.
It's not always easy coming up with an organizing principle, which may be why there are so many kings and chiefs in history. We can understand kings and chiefs, and organize our hopes and emotions around them so easily.
Why do you think the Brits are so sensitive about their monarch? It's who they've agreed to organize themselves around, a replaceable king or queen who plays the role of organizing principle, dressing the part of leader, playing the role of leader, speaking the language of a leader, even though Parliament leads. This is quite a magic show, a slight of hand trick, in which a new reality is created because of the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the consumer, because the consumer, the public, needs to consume in the service of greater goals, functioning as a nation in the world. On the British island, they organize around a monarch but make law in Parliament.
It works, for them.
***
Well, now, the president, in Salt Lake City, Utah, has replied to his Iraq-war critics. We will stay the course, he says, because 1800+ servicepeople have died in Iraq and 280 more in Afghanistan and they have died in a noble cause to protect America and to bring democracy to millions abroad. To honor their legacy, the war must continue to be fought.
There's got to be a better reason than that, although it may not be politic to spell it out. When the president speaks to his base, however, he must feel confident that they will respond to this emotional appeal.
One does not continue to fight a losing proposition simply to honor those whose lives were lost in the service of a losing proposition. Wars would never end, that way. This is why we left Vietnam, and the Soviets Afghanistan. There comes a point when the population says, the price is too high for the organizating principle. We need a better organizing principle. This is why presidents lose elections, when they cannot come up with a better flag to rally around. It's why this president's father, George H.W. Bush, or Bush-41, failed of re-election; he was unable to state a better vision worth sacrificing for while the economy tumbled and he broke his promise not to raise taxes.