by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n [A shorter version of this essay appears in the current issue\u00a0of National Review<\/i>magazine.]<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cT<\/span>he end of cowboy diplomacy\u201d\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/i>Magazine recently announced of George Bush\u2019s supposed turn to softer talk and more multilateral policy-making. The growing beltway consensus is that the beleaguered President finally awoke to learn that he could no longer posture as the lone ranger on the frontier. Rather, in a interdependent, sophisticated global world, there is apparently no place for his easy \u201csmoke \u2018em out\u201d, \u201cdead or alive\u201d world view \u2014 or even those post-9\/11 photo-ops of Bush driving his pick-up around the \u201cranch\u201d to chain-saw brush while wearing a Stetson and shades.<\/p>\n So we are likely to hear no more \u201cGet out of Dodge\u201d threats in the manner that the President once gave Saddam and his sons \u201c48 hours\u201d to clear out of\u00a0Iraq\u00a0. And I doubt he will return to a meeting of the National Cattlemen\u2019s Beef Association for an encore performance of his February 2002 Wyatt Earp-like warning, \u201cEither you’re with us, or you’re against us.\u201d Perhaps George Bush is no longer the youthful and cocky John Wayne of Ringo Kid fame, who inStagecoach<\/i>\u00a0was turned loose to clean out the outlaw Plummer clan. Instead, after Iraq is he now to be an older, more circumspect Wayne in the actor\u2019s last role as the dying J.B. Brooks of the\u00a0Shootist<\/i>\u00a0who accepts that both he and his Wild West world don\u2019t belong in the new century?<\/p>\n Europeans, we are also told, sigh relief at the end of all this black\/white, good\/bad frontier justice. Their preferred American leader is a metrosexual John Kerry or Al Gore in tasteful earth tones, talking in effusive praise at Davos of the United Nations, coalition building,\u00a0Kyoto\u00a0, and consultation with the European Union. Indeed, Al Gore dismissed Bush\u2019s showdown in\u00a0Iraq\u00a0, as a \u201cDo-it-alone, cowboy-type reaction to foreign affairs.\u201d And then he tried to turn Bush\u2019s cowboyism on its head, \u201cThere’s ample basis for taking off after Saddam, but before you ride out after Jesse James, you ought to put the posse together.\u201d<\/p>\n Many Americans, however, remember their Old West lore that while the proverbial posse bickers and dithers, the outlaw gets away to do as he pleases \u2014 in the manner that Saddam for twelve years violated U.N. accords, weapons inspections, and his 1991 Gulf War surrender promises. At least some of the President\u2019s former appeal, then, was precisely this resonance with the nineteenth-century cowboy.<\/p>\n John Wayne, deep in the saddle, still has a far stronger emotional pull for Americans than contemporary yuppism \u2014 as we learned in 2004 when John Kerry was caught too often on film in spandex while windsurfing or biking. Unlike those in Europe or the Blue coastal states, most Americans\u2019 image of the America cowboy is mostly positive \u2014 neither that of a psychopathic killer like Billy the Kid nor even the murderous anti-heroes of director Sam Peckinpah\u2019s\u00a0Wild Bunch,\u00a0<\/i>over-the-hill outlaws who go down in a final blaze of glory in Mexico, taking almost everyone in their midst along with them.<\/p>\n Instead, the cowboy more often evokes marshal Will Kane of\u00a0High Noon<\/i>. When given the choice of riding out of Hadleyville for a much deserved retirement with his newlywed wife, the tired Gary Cooper instead turns back to face the Miller gang alone. Although his prospects of survival are slim, Kane won\u2019t run or abandon his town that, in fact, would rather appease such killers. In that sense, for some it is not such a bad thing for cowboy Bush to confront regional bullies like Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Kim Jong Il, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad \u2014 even if the Europeans, like the townspeople of Hadleyville, delude themselves that the Millers of our world would leave them alone if their stubborn self-appointed protector would just ride away. The recent unprovoked attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the verbiage from\u00a0Iran\u00a0and\u00a0Syria\u00a0should disabuse any of that naivet\u00e9.<\/p>\n G<\/span>eorge Bush also understands that, besides rugged individualism, tough language, and resolute action, there is another strain to the American myth of the selfless cowboy \u2014 that of the tragic hero. Although Will Kane eventually shoots the outlaws and saves Hadleyville, he throws down his star and rides out as planned. Neither he nor the relieved townspeople want the marshal to stay on after the carnage.<\/p>\n An even better reminder of the willingness of the American cowboy to clean up the town and then depart is George Stevens\u2019 1953 classic\u00a0Shane<\/i>. When the mysterious former gunslinger rides into a picturesque mountain valley, he finds the forces of civilization in the form of \u201csodbusters\u201d preyed on by a ruthless cattle magnate who doesn\u2019t want his survival of the fittest world tamed by fences and do-gooder homesteaders.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the farmers\u2019 very trust in a vision of a lawful and ordered society makes them almost helpless against range marauders when there is not yet any judge, sheriff, or jury to protect them. When the beleaguered homesteaders discuss the lawlessness of the range hands, they sound about as impotent as the U.N. Security Council. Enter Shane of a mysterious checkered past, who reluctantly shoots the cattle baron and his hired guns, and then trots off wounded into the sunset \u2014 resigned that the very methods he employs to save civilization make him tainted and unable to live within it when the threat is past.<\/p>\n That Greek tragic theme \u2014 Sophocles\u2019 dramas\u00a0Ajax<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Philoctetes\u00a0<\/i>center on the flawed hero that we both shun and need \u2014 is a Western constant. In theMagnificent Seven<\/i>, the outcast hired guns ride into save a Mexican village from bandits. Then after the bloodletting, the surviving Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen depart knowing that they are not to enjoy the tranquility and order that they have alone been able to impart to others only through their gunplay.<\/p>\n John Ford also captured that tragic sense brilliantly in\u00a0The Searchers<\/i>, in which only a near psychopathic John Wayne as Ethan Edwards could track down Chief Scar and his renegade Indian Comanche band who kidnapped his neice \u2014 precisely because Edwards was not altogether civilized himself. And in Ford\u2019s\u00a0The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance<\/i>, John Wayne played stoic Tom Doniphon who is willing to bushwack the no-good Liberty Valance \u2014 if it means saving the bumbling lawyer Ransom Stoddard, whose law books are the proper civilized future of the imperiled town of\u00a0Shinbone\u00a0. Both Edwards and Doniphon accept the paradox that there is no future for the brutal defender of society once he has vanquished the savagery that threatened civilization.<\/p>\n Perhaps George Bush understood this irony of the good cowboy in the American imagination. If so, he has accepted both that someone had to deal with Saddam Hussein after society\u2019s failure to corral him with United Nations\u2019 sanctions and international scolds, and that the self-appointed enforcer would find himself later alone and stigmatized as uncouth by the very ones who so often in the past called for Saddam\u2019s ouster.<\/p>\n J<\/span>ust as there is more to the cowboy myth than \u201cshoot \u2018em up\u201d justice and throw-away lines about stringing up bad guys, so too there may be more to George Bush\u2019s evocation of the frontier than his strut and twangy braggadocio. He surely is resigned that his past willingness to go it alone that we slur as \u201cpreemption\u201d and \u201cunilateralism\u201d \u2014 whether by introducing to the world the \u201cAxis of Evil,\u201d renouncing the ABM treaty, or promising to take down rogue regimes \u2014 is both sometimes necessary for the future security of a civilized West, and yet ensures that his audacity will not be appreciated until he is riding well off into the sunset. Only then can we quit condemning his methods that brought us our own security.<\/p>\n The truth is that we live in a global Hadleyville that has deluded itself that international communications, cell phones, or the Internet \u2014 like the onset of the 19th<\/sup>-century railroad and telegraph \u2014 equate to civilization. In fact, they are all only a thin flashy veneer atop a still wild and savage world in which outlaw regimes like\u00a0North Korea\u00a0, Saddam\u2019s\u00a0Iraq\u00a0, or\u00a0Iran\u00a0push until stopped. After all, the present-day United Nations can protect nations and dispense justice about as well as the territorial marshal a three-day-ride away or the corrupt bought sheriff of a cattle baron\u2019s town. And a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein listens to international warnings about as much as Liberty Valance paid heed to the bumbling coward of a sheriff, Link Appleyard.<\/p>\n So privately most appreciate an American Tom Doniphon, Shane or Will Kane who from time to time will appear out of nowhere to stand up to a Saddam, Taliban, or Kim Jung Il \u2014 or the recent crop of bullies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The latter all may think that an exasperated lame duck George Bush, suffering from international rebuke and low approval ratings, has dropped his flashy cowboy veneer. Perhaps and probably for the better \u2014 but they should still beware: if the now brooding Bush really is a cowboy, then he may deal with a few more rogues before he leaves \u2014 caring not at all for our present approval but only for his own code and our future safety when he is gone.<\/p>\n Even the dying J.B. Brooks took out the bad guys before he and his world were finally over.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Magazine [A shorter version of this essay appears in the current issue\u00a0of National Reviewmagazine.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[771],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-11m","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3673,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/memory-and-conflict-in-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":3928,"position":0},"title":"Memory and Conflict in Iraq","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 5, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Given all of this country's past wars involving intelligence failures, tactical and strategic blunders, congressional fights and popular anger at the president, Iraq and the rising furor over it are hardly unusual. 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