Wilson's 14 Points

I think of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as a mindset that represents democracy. The world after the Great War needed a new order. Wilson's points were a proposal, which involved universal values of the human spirit. He could have created a far more hierarchical order. But the human spirit includes that people's choice will always be the same if they are given the chance to choose: freedom, not tyranny. People do not want to be oppressed.

They want to be free in their own nation and be given the same right as any other nation. The people in Iraq did not have a choice during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Now they do. The political structure in Iraq needs to be ordered in a new way. Today's situation can in many ways be compared to the situation in 1918. It was the end of the war, the great emperors were gone, and the people had a strong feeling of nationalism. And they finally had a choice.

There is one important difference between the nations back in 1918 and Iraq today. Iraq lacks an existing democratic culture because they had not been able to develop shared memories, common strivings, and shared ideals. So now America is engaged in a great exercise in nation building. America invaded Iraq to disarm a villain regime thought to be accumulating weapons of mass destruction. After searching these weapons for several months without any result, the appropriate reaction would be disappointment, and maybe righteous anger, about intelligence failures.

But the government in Washington reacts according to Wilson's mindset. The reaction is: Never mind the weapons of mass destruction; a sufficient justification for the war was

Iraq's disobedience to various U.N. resolutions. So a conservative American administration says that war was justified by the need, the opportunity, to strengthen the U.N., known as the "international community," as the negotiator of international behavior. This community

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