May 30, 2007
Bush's Amazing Achievement
Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books:
One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:30 PM | Permalink
Comments
A calamity for the United States. The invasion itself has been a success entire, as an invasion. Iraq is thoroughly invaded, and will remain so for a long time. Calling the invasion a "war" makes it something it isn't and leads to the won-or-lost paradigm. It's at least possible that is only a battle, one aspect of a much larger war, that the proponents of the invasion never wanted to see a democratic and economically prosperous Iraq to begin with, but feared that and moved to prevent it. Given that possibility it would have been impossible to create a "successful" war in Iraq. It must be seen as failure even as it succeeds in its true purpose. As far as the standing of the US in the world, "its enemies" may be emboldened - that's still debatable though nothing substantial to prove it is occurring - but certainly not all "its friends" are alienated. It's still a public taboo to consider this as being one of the primary objectives of the invasion in the first place. The broken state, the dysfunctional military, the complete lack of threat Iraq now poses to Israel, where prior to 9.11 it had been a source of ever-increasing anxiety. This is upside down. The significant theme is in the last clause. The absence of a "consistent explanation" should lead first to the search for that explanation, then to a judgment of its accuracy and then the effectiveness of the action it explains; instead, while at the same time complaining of its absence public criticism of the Iraq problem in the US is unified by its acceptance of the given explanation. Get Saddam, free the Iraqi people,bring democracy, etc. So that the wreckage of Iraq is consistently described as failure, because it's forbidden to consider that it may have been the desired outcome all along. The invasion is judged by the stated goals of the public figures who are nominally in charge of it. At the same time those figures are generally considered to be a pack of lying and delusional opportunists. This is cognitive dissonance writ large, and requires a functioning pathology to maintain for any length of time. A more valiant enterprise would be to get to the real reasons for the invasion, establish the real motivating forces behind it, and weigh how well those forces have achieved what they hoped to, and how much they've benefited by what's happened in Iraq and in the world since March '03. Knowledge of what it's like there now for the average person makes the prospect of the US becoming like England is today disconcerting. And as others elsewhere have pointed out the nuclear arsenal the US will bring with it as it subsides into second-rate power status isn't going to just fade away. The one hope if any is that the great reservoir of power that's still in potential among the common people of the US can still be awakened. There's a lot of good will untapped in America even now, far more than the cynical manipulators who've created this debacle realize.Posted by: Roy Belmont | May 31, 2007 1:46:44 PM
Well, turns out he IS a uniter!
Posted by: doug l | Jun 1, 2007 11:47:02 AM
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