When Andrew Bacevich, historian, foreign policy and military analyst speaks, we listen. Here's a sizeable chunk of the piece he wrote for the LA Times this past week, with some comments.
Because the United States "has always been, and will always be, not a status quo power but a revolutionary power," the Bush administration was going to engineer a democratic revolution, thereby creating what Rice called a "new Middle East."
Right there you have the cornerstone of a failed foreign policy. How insulting and unsympathetic can you be when you tell another entity to make themselves more like you?
This revolution has demonstrably failed.
No wonder.
In such places as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, it never got off the ground. In the West Bank and Gaza, free and fair elections delivered power into the hands of Hamas. In Lebanon, the people voted in droves for Hezbollah. In each case, the United States refused to accept the outcome, opening itself to charges of hypocrisy.
And willing blindness, too.
In Afghanistan, the promotion of democracy has yielded record opium crops and a resurgence of the Taliban. Then there is Iraq. The "liberation" that deposed a dictator gave rise to civil war, created a vacuum that Al Qaeda was quick to fill and has benefited no one apart from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course, it was handy in the moment to be able to say, "Didn't we tell you Al Qaeda is in Iraq?" Brief moment of self-justification and fakery at a large cost.
Policymakers such as Rice, who once disdained mere stability, are now frantically trying to prevent the greater Middle East from sliding into chaos. As the clock runs down on the Bush era, the administration preoccupies itself with damage control.
Given that Bush's version of global war has proved such a costly flop, what ought to replace it? Answering that question requires a new set of principles to guide U.S. policy. Here are five:
* Rather than squandering American power, husband it. As Iraq has shown, U.S. military strength is finite. The nation's economic reserves and diplomatic clout also are limited. They badly need replenishment.
And quit the adolescent habit of blaming diminishing military strength on your predecessor.
* Align ends with means. Although Bush's penchant for Wilsonian rhetoric may warm the cockles of neoconservative hearts, it raises expectations that cannot be met. Promise only the achievable.
* Let Islam be Islam. The United States possesses neither the capacity nor the wisdom required to liberate the world's 1.4 billion Muslims, who just might entertain their own ideas about what genuine freedom entails. Islam will eventually accommodate itself to the modern world, but Muslims will have to work out the terms.
Aw gee. And Americans like to think only Americans understand the meaning of freedom. Only recently have we begun to take seriously the narrowing of our own freedoms by the Bush administration, and the ballooning of the power of corporations at our expense.)
* Reinvent containment. The process of negotiating that accommodation will produce unwelcome fallout: anger, alienation, scapegoating and violence. In collaboration with its allies, the United States must insulate itself against Islamic radicalism. The imperative is not to wage global war, whether real or metaphorical, but to erect effective defenses, as the West did during the Cold War.
You have to wonder whether containment is sexy enough for the evening news, though.
* Exemplify the ideals we profess. Rather than telling others how to live, Americans should devote themselves to repairing their own institutions. Our enfeebled democracy just might offer the place to start.
Behave ourselves? Be true to our principles? Isn't that demanding an awful lot of 300,000,000 fantasists?
The essence of these principles can be expressed in a single word: realism, which implies seeing ourselves as we really are and the world as it actually is.
Realism. Dirty word. When's that writers' strike going to end?
