WASHINGTON — Person of the Year? Better to think of 2003 as the Year of the Person. Strong-willed individuals who chose to fight rather than duck out of confrontations provide a unifying theme for this disparate year. So does the elevation of the individual, as a concept, to justify war and coerced political transformation.
The year’s biggest story remains importantly unfinished as Father Time turns the last page on the 2003 calendar. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq sparked an unexpectedly bloody insurgency that continues, although with fluctuating ferocity.
Iraq was the fulcrum of world events, but its ultimate fate is undetermined. The same is true for the now-captive Saddam Hussein and for the re-election-seeking George W. Bush. The list of other men who made history rather than being made by it in 2003 is topped by Britain’s Tony Blair, Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar and France’s Jacques Chirac.
China’s Hu Jintao heads a mirror-image list of those who are important for representing history’s direction, rather than setting it. He became president in order to buy five to 10 years of external calm so China could become the manufacturing hub of the world.
In historical terms, 2003 lacks the finality and clarity of other dramatic years. It was a year in which change quickly raced out of the control of those who unleashed it. It was a year in which nations that had been happy for the past decade to focus on the short term abruptly realized that they are now caught up in a multiyear cycle of effort and commitment not unlike the Cold War years.
Americans went to war in Iraq and then engaged in a retroactive argument about the wisdom and justification of what they had done as the unexpected costs of occupation and the flaws in the administration’s original calculations about weapons of mass destruction became apparent. Iraqis held in a national dungeon stumbled into the blinding sunlight of liberation, blinked and began loudly complaining they were still victims, this time of clumsy American forces. Habits die hard.
But the retroactive arguments and reflexive complaints do not change the core reality of 2003: Freeing Iraqis from a horrible tyranny that was also a major force in destabilizing the Middle East was an appropriate use of American power, as protecting human life in Kosovo and Bosnia was earlier.
President Bush has begun to emphasize and expand the rationale of humanitarian intervention — pioneered by Prime Minister Blair — as he talks about every person’s right to freedom and the duty of others to protect and advance that right. Bush has made individual freedom the centerpiece of his "generational" commitment to transforming the greater Middle East.
"Bush seemed not to realize that he was accomplishing a humanitarian intervention in Iraq," which was justified on those grounds alone, Pascal Bruckner, a French writer and philosopher told a New York University audience recently.
Saddam — who had every opportunity to avoid the war — preferred to fight than to admit and permit, as Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi has just agreed to do. The reasons for provoking his own downfall lie more in the megalomania of Saddam’s personality than in any national strategy. His interrogators should include as many shrinks as spooks if they are to understand in depth this Arab gangster’s role in an epoch-shaping event.
The war in Iraq was a crucible not only of international relations but also of national leadership for years to come. France’s President Chirac countered Bush’s moralism with a determined campaign of opposition to the war. Chirac sought to become the voice of a "multipolar" community that would impose limits on the use of U.S. power.
Concern about the war also helped Chirac re-establish French political hegemony over Germany in the European Union. But the diktats that Paris and Berlin laid down on constitutional reform at year’s end were rejected, leaving the EU in political disarray and the patterns of leadership in that regional organization up for grabs.
Aznar, Spain’s self-assured prime minister, led the successful charge to block the French and Germans in the decisive EU summit in mid-December. He picked up crucial support from Poland — another "new Europe" nation that, as Spain did, committed troops to the U.S.-led coalition for Iraq over the outrage of the antiwar French and Germans.
More than most recent vintages in global affairs, 2003 was a year to endure. It brought large-scale war and military occupation back into a world that could reasonably hope to have heard the last of both. It was a year of living in uncertainty, which turns out not to have been banished from history.
Jim Hoagland is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to
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