Jack Reed: “Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate, wrote lines that are destined for immortality: History says, Don't…”

“Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate, wrote lines that are destined for immortality: History says, Don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. We all long for that day when hope and history rhyme. But it is the special province of statecraft to try to make that rhyme. As such, one way to look at foreign policy is to determine if our policies do rhyme with history or whether they represent the triumph of hope over history. By history, I do not mean the strictly academic variety. I mean the accumulation of insight and experience that we all carry about. Perhaps it is better described as our rough sense of the way the world works. It is particularly interesting to pose these questions in light of the Bush foreign policy since so much of it seems to spring from ideological hope, from robust attempts to reshape the world along predetermined lines. Iraq, of course, is the crucial arena. It has been made so by the administration. Our immediate response to September 11 was to seek out and destroy the terrorist apparatus that struck us. Our attack in Afghanistan was aimed at the heart of al-Qaida and the rogue regime that provided it sanctuary. We understood very painfully that we could not grant these terrorists safe harbor. We had to act and we had to be prepared to act preemptively to destroy al-Qaida.…”