Although the pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraq now turn out to be inadequate in many ways, its principal defect was that it attempted to measure the wrong thing. It ought to have focused on the extent to which Iraqi Ba'athists and regional terror groups would have mounted a Lebanon or West Bank type defense; identified the key hurdles in creating a replacement Iraqi state; and specified the requirements necessary to win this campaign in an impressive and overwhelming manner in order to demonstrate to the rogue state audience what the consequences of aggression against the United States were. But this subject was verboten, and so instead intelligence spoke to the strategically irrelevant minutiae of Yellowcake and centrifuges, casting a wavering light, like the drunk searching for a lost coin in the story, not in the area where it would be found but in the only place he could shine a beam.
It is said that foreign policy debates in the U.S. are always about the next election. In a democratic society, such must inevitably be true, but perhaps the biggest problem is not the incompetence of our intelligence service but the lack of consensus about our proper foreign policy goals. This problem is not just inter-party but intra-party; the Republicans are currently dominated by a liberationist (neo-con) approach, but only because President Bush is a subscriber. With another republican, the "realist" control-them approach would be just as dominant. Among Democrats, the few who genuinely want to protect American interests tread softly amid the vicious Utopian fantasies of the New Left.
This is unlikely to change. As P.J. O'Rourke recently wrote, Americans hate foreign policy, because Americans have little interest in the rest of the world. America was founded to be different from the rest of the world, a culture in itself, and it would be perfectly happy to not have a foreign policy of any kind. What Europeans and others don't seem to understand is how uncomfortable being the world's No. 1 is for us. We don't like it, and have accepted the role largely because it fell to us. If we believed that we could stand down our defense pacts, send our subs home, and cut the size of the military in half or more, without it leading to mass insanity abroad, we would.
But that's not going to happen. The world has intruded upon us, so we intrude upon the world. But we've managed everything on an ad hoc basis so far, organizing resistance to threats as they materialize, and according to whatever we think will work. Determining that a Soviet-American war would be too costly and not certain of victory, we came up with "containment". The necessities of containment, and our natural predelictions permitted us to ignore jihadism until we were presented with it one fine September morning. Concluding that containment had reached it's limits, the President embarked on a new strategy, without perhaps thinking everything through.
This last is a serious criticism, but the Right has been hesitant to entertain it, because the next election keeps figuring into thinking. The failure of the Democrats to even attempt an alternate strategy on counter-terrorism leads us to say of Bush what Lincoln said of Grant: "I can't spare this man. He fights." So the proper debate on our goals in the world is cast aside for a debate on the merits of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, Bush will be out of office on the 30th of January, 2009. What will we talk about then?
I have a few suggestions:
These are the questions of our age. We have one possible answer for them. Let's hear more.
No comments:
Post a Comment